Kezia’s Natural Pregnancy at 41 After Not Having a Cycle

On episode 72, Kezia is from Edmonton Alberta, Canada. She was born and raised in Canada. She had her first daughter at 32 when she wasn’t actively trying. Kezia works for herself. She facilitates writing workshops for women who are in recovery. Kezia has been sober from drugs and alcohol for three years since November 2023. She helps women channel their emotions and experiences through writing. It is similar to the infertility journey—you feel alone. When women realize there are people out there that may speak your language and share stories that resonate for you, it can feel a lot less daunting, and you feel more of a sense of peace. This has a ripple effect for a lot of areas of Kezia’s life. Her sobriety really helped her through the things that she and her husband went through to get their baby today. Her baby was five months old during the recording of the show.

In 2018, Kezia was trying to moderate alcohol and fit that into her life. It just kept failing because she’s not a person that can have just one drink every now and then. It doesn’t work that way for her, so in her attempts to moderate, she was trying to find community. Kezia’s old Instagram account showed up on her future husband’s explore page. He sent her a message and she happened to find it in a folder. She messaged him back because he mentioned a quote she referenced in a book she loves. The conversation blossomed from there. They texted, FaceTimed and chatted for six months before he flew out to Toronto to visit her. She was struggling financially then. Her parents were paying her rent and just surviving. Her friends and family thought she was crazy because she didn’t really know this guy. He told her three weeks after talking he was going to marry her even though Kezia had decided she was never going to get married. In March of 2020, Kezia and her daughter had an immigration interview scheduled in Montreal and it was cancelled indefinitely. The rules of her visa didn’t allow them to get married until she moved to the states. She finally received the letter that their interview was scheduled for the end of October of 2020. After the interview, it went fast. Her stuff was all sent over the border and six weeks later she cleared immigration in Toronto. She, her daughter, and their cats landed with just the clothes on their back to start their new life in Pennsylvania when Kezia was thirty-eight. She had to get married to comply with her visa. It’s a very complicated process. She didn’t have an immigration lawyer. Her future husband, James did all the paperwork himself. She and James had a courthouse wedding in 2021. That spring she started trying to have a baby.

It’s never going to happen again.

She didn’t know what to expect. She had a family trip to Myrtle Beach that August. Her cycle was late, so she decided to take a test and it was positive. When she got back, she had some spotting, but she thought it was implantation bleeding. She had that with her daughter at 33, so she wasn’t worried about it. It wasn’t a lot nor bright red, but it was steady and it kept coming. She needed to find a doctor. The OB that delivered her daughter passed away, so Kezia had trouble getting her records. When she was pregnant with her daughter, she was on progesterone for the first 12 weeks. She found a women’s health clinic where she saw an OB but also midwives. She went frequently for ultrasounds after the vacation to look for the heartbeat. There was a start of growth, but there wasn’t a heartbeat. It was devastating. It was really difficult to tell the few close family members she needed space. She miscarried on her 40^th birthday in September. She didn’t know anyone that had a miscarriage before, and she didn’t have another woman to talk to. She miscarried at home, but there wasn’t a follow-up exam. She didn’t know she needed a D&C.

In November, her cycle hadn’t returned, so she went back to the same clinic to figure out what to do. She was ready to try again. She met with one of the two male doctors. He wanted to know all the supplements she was taking. She told him and he tore it apart and told her the herbal supplements weren’t backed by medicine. He wanted her to quit taking certain things which she was fine with. She was desperate to get pregnant. He wanted her to go on the pill for a few months to get her period back and suggested she might be perimenopause. He had no bedside manner. She was on the pill decades ago but quit because she had really bad mood swings. Going on the pill didn’t work, so he prescribed Medroxyprogesterone. Within three days of taking it, she had a huge panic attack at the grocery store. Her heart rate went up to 170, it was beating out of her chest, and she couldn’t breathe. She was by herself and didn’t know how to tell anyone. She went home that day, crawled in their front door and laid there. After talking to her husband, she called the OB that prescribed it to tell him what happened. He told her this has never happened in 25 years he’s been practicing, and she must have taken it wrong. She was beside herself. She just stopped taking it and was extremely upset about the way she was treated. She didn’t know who she could trust at the practice. Her husband was very compassionate, but she was at a loose end. She felt desperate. She went to her general practitioner’s office and was taken by ambulance to the ER at the beginning of February. They did a lot of testing to see if she had arrhythmia. What that doctor prescribed for her threw her whole system out of whack. Her hormones had never rebalanced because she still needed a D&C. Her body was very confused and mimicked symptoms of a women who was perimenopause. She stayed in the ER overnight and was left with a heart monitor for two weeks. They monitor her heart, but nothing is wrong. It was stress. She still didn’t have a cycle. The stress effected her relationship with her husband. They weren’t connecting in the same way anymore. They weren’t approaching making a baby with the same positivity and light that we were before.

She wanted to find a different doctor. She felt like they were at a crossroads because they were still living in an apartment but wanted to buy a house. They started later, got married later, started their lives together later, so they had a decision whether or not to buy a house or do fertility treatments. Kezia did some research and found a woman that looked amazing. She had been working in Baltimore, but she worked at the clinic Kezia was seeing a few days a week. She was going to do whatever it took to see her. At the appointment, she promised Kezia she was going to get her pregnant. Kezia liked her from the start. She wanted to hug her. When Kezia told her they didn’t do a D&C, she was shocked. That’s the first thing she wanted to do. Kezia finally had the D&C August 2022. Then the doctor prescribed Letrasol for ovulation for three months and then wanted to review the results. For Kezia, at 41 it was worth it because it wasn’t expensive. The first month, she didn’t ovulated. She was so discouraged. The second month she could tell that something was different. She knew she ovulated. From then on, she was obsessed with ovulation sticks, ovulation kits, basal temperature. She knew it had worked. Kezia was pregnant. The doctor wanted to monitor her HCG levels to make sure they were doubling every few days. She was worried her mental state would affect her physically, so she tried to stay positive and relax. It was hard. She couldn’t. The first time that she felt a little bit of a glimmer was when she saw the heartbeat at six. She still didn’t want to get her hopes up because it was till early. Because of her age, she was getting regular ultrasounds. She started spotting around 7 weeks which mimic her experience with the miscarriage. She thought it was happening again and didn’t want to accept there was nothing she could do. She began to research and found it could be subchorionic hematoma. It depends where it is, but it doesn’t have to affect the function of the placenta. It’s like a growing blood blister. The bleeding happens when it ruptures. Kezia had three major bleeds all in her kitchen at 10, 12 and 13 weeks. It feels like you’re getting your period, but it’s a gush of bright red blood. She didn’t experience any pain when it happened. She told the doctor she thought it was a hematoma. On an ultrasound, it shows up as a little shadow. The doctor wanted her to come in for an ultrasound to measure the circumference to see how much it has grown. The second time it happened, she called the doctor because she thought she was having a miscarriage. She was so upset. Her husband wasn’t home yet, but he called his mother to come over with her. She called the hospital again, and they asked if there was any tissue coming out and if she was having contractions. She wasn’t experiencing either of those. Kezia felt like the baby was okay, but this was still going to happen. The nurse said if she was having a miscarriage, there was nothing they could do. Kezia decided to stay home because she had a weird sense that everything was okay. A week later, she was in the kitchen making dinner and the same thing happened. She called the nurse and said the same thing. The pregnancy was progressing while the hematoma was growing, so was the placenta, the uterus and the baby. The hematoma got up to over nine centimeters. It was big, but the baby was always a little bigger. It can rupture at any point in time. She looked for success stories. She is looking for that story about the woman who had the nine centimeter one that went on to have the beautiful baby. She found stories of hope. Kezia continued to exercise at home throughout her whole pregnancy up until the day before she gave birth.

Kezia and her husband were sure they were having a girl. Her husband wanted a girl. This was going to be her husband’s first biological child, so she left it up to him to decide if they found out the gender. She thought knowing the gender would her help bond with the baby. She struggled with boy names, so she wanted time to think about it if it was a boy. She already had a girl’s name picked out. She had the NIPT test done at 12 weeks for abnormal chromosome testing that also includes finding out the gender. It’s fairly expensive, but no more expensive than anything else you go through to get here. She received an email with the gender results. Her husband was at work, so she FaceTimed him while she opened the email. She didn’t say anything when she opened it, but her husband said, “It’s a boy, isn’t it?” Kezia’s mother-in-law wanted to give a gender reveal party. The family didn’t know she already knew. She and her husband finally decided on a name but didn’t tell her in-laws until they came to the hospital the day he was born. It bothered her mother-in-law so much because she does crafting, and she wanted to make all this stuff with his name for him. It ended up working out.

Because her first birth was an emergency c-section, she thought it would be less stressful if she scheduled another c-section on July 25th. Kezia wasn’t sleeping well and had really bad insomnia at the end of the third trimester. The heartburn didn’t totally go away even after taking medication. She laid in the recliner but didn’t really sleep. At 38 weeks and 3 days, at 11:00 pm she woke up to use the bathroom, but everything was soaked. She didn’t really know because her water did not break with her daughter until she was at the hospital. She used the bathroom, and left her husband to sleep. She went back to sleep in the recliner. At 2:00 am, she woke up drenched again. She figured something was off. She went in the bathroom to see clear liquid. She woke her husband to let him know what was going on. She felt like this might be it, but she wasn’t sure. She called and was put through to the hospital midwife. She wasn’t having contractions, so the doctor suggest she wait until 6:00 am to come to labor and delivery. Her mother-in-law could come over and stay with her daughter. She already had her bags packed and knew she wasn’t coming back. Her husband wasn’t as prepared. It was a steady leak as she left for the hospital. As she waited for the on-call doctor to get there, she hoped it was the doctor that did her D&C. It was THAT doctor and as Kezia describes, she showed up like her angel at the door. Kezia was on this really uncomfortable stretcher waiting to be seen. The doctor checked her and said this was happening today. Kezia was confused what was happening today. The doctor told her it was her c-section that was happening that day. Kezia still hadn’t had any contractions. There was an emergency that delayed her c-section from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm. She waited in the post-delivery room. She started having contractions. She was not happy at this point because she wasn’t prepared to give birth naturally. She was freaking out.

They got her in the OR at 3:00 pm and he was born at 3:44 pm by C-section. Being in the operating room can be very lonely because your significant other, your mom, nobody is allowed to go in. They got her scrubbed up, then got her husband scrubbed up. She had on a gown but was disinfected and cleaned off. She was given something to drink, like a painkiller. She was wheeled in while her husband waited outside the room until he was called in. There was a lot of people, it’s sterile, bright and very cold room. The medication made her body shake. She had to sit up and lean over with a hunched back to give her the medication to make her numb from the waist down. Because she’s dead weight, it took four of them to lay her on the operating table. Her husband came in the room by her head, but the sheet prevented her from seeing what was going on. She was poked to confirm she couldn’t feel anything. Her body continued to shake through the whole time. Just as they pulled the baby out, it really hurt. It felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest as she described it. That’s the only time she screamed.

Kezia was only in the hospital for two days. She recovered pretty quickly even though the mental recovery is really hard: the mood swings…the rage. The whole breastfeeding journey was extremely difficult for her. It did not work. She had planned to breastfeed, but her milk took four to five days to come in. They wanted her to express colostrum which is very painful when nothing would come out. She felt inadequate. She had an almost nine-pound baby, and she didn’t think anything would be enough to feed him. They gave him formula at the hospital. Then she beat herself up because she didn’t want him to have formula. She was already an emotional wreck before the challenge of breastfeeding with the hormones. She stopped trying to get him to latch and went straight to pumping. She pumps 3-4 hours a day and takes about an hour from start to finish. She had to grieve the loss of not having that connection with her son while breastfeeding. She’s had an over-supply, so she’s been able to donate over 2,000 oz to Mother’s Milk Bank.

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