72. After being told her missing cycle was a sign of perimenopause and that her window for another child had closed, Kezia refused to accept “no” for an answer. This episode follows her incredible turnaround as she advocated for her health, restored her natural rhythm, and conceived a miracle baby naturally at 41.
On episode 72, Kezia shares her remarkable journey of overcoming a discouraging fertility diagnosis to conceive naturally at 41. After experiencing a heartbreaking loss on her 40th birthday and seeing her menstrual cycle vanish entirely, Kezia was told she was likely entering perimenopause. Refusing to accept that her journey was over, she sought out the right medical support to restore her body’s natural rhythms, proving that a “final” diagnosis isn’t always the end of the road.
Listeners will follow Kezia’s transition from moving her life from Canada to a small town in Pennsylvania to navigating the complexities of late-in-life motherhood. She dives deep into the steps she took to bring her cycle back and the resilience required to manage a pregnancy that came with its own set of unique challenges. Kezia’s story is an essential listen for anyone who has been told their “biological clock” has run out, offering a powerful perspective on advocate-driven healthcare and the possibility of natural miracles in your 40s.
About the Guest
Originally from Canada, Kezia Haynes is a resilient mother who moved her life, her first daughter, born when Kezia was 32 to a small town in Pennsylvania in 2021 after meeting her husband, James, on Instagram. After facing a heartbreaking loss on her 40th birthday and the subsequent disappearance of her menstrual cycle, she was faced with the daunting suggestion that she was entering perimenopause. Refusing to give up on her dream of having a child with James, Kezia worked closely with a supportive doctor to revitalize her health and successfully conceived naturally at 41. Her story serves as an inspiring example of how self-advocacy and the right medical partnership can overcome even the most discouraging fertility labels.
Connect with Kezia:
- Instagram: @thekeziahaynes
- Website: Note her website mentioned in the show is not active.
Key Topics
- The Perimenopause Misdiagnosis: Navigating the medical system when your symptoms are dismissed due to age.
- Restoring the Natural Cycle: The specific steps and medical support Kezia used to regain her period after months of absence.
- Motherhood Across Decades: Comparing the experience of having a daughter at 32 versus a pregnancy at 41.
- Moving for Love: Kezia’s personal story of relocating from Canada to rural Pennsylvania to start a new life and family.
- The Power of Advocacy: How finding the right doctor and trusting your intuition can change your fertility outcome.
Resources & Links:
Note: Some of the links below are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you if you make a purchase. I only recommend products our guests truly love!
Instagram: Follow Over 40 Fabulous and Pregnant
YouTube: Watch Episodes HERE
Recommended Products: CoQ10 supplement & Usana Prenatal Vitamin & Silicone Scar tape & The Egg Quality Diet by Aimee Raupp
Shop More: See ALL products recommended by our guests!
Support the Podcast: Donate to the Podcast
Community: Join the Over 40 Fabulous Facebook Grou
Mother’s Milk Bank: https://mothersmilk.org
Transcript
Note: This transcript is from the YouTube video.
Jamie: Kezia, welcome to the show.
Kezia: Thank you for having me.
Jamie: she is on the show today to share her pregnancy journey at 41. But before we get started, will you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Kezia: Sure. I am currently 42 years old. I am Canadian. I help women channel their emotions and their experiences through writing. I work for myself. I started a creative business. I facilitate writing workshops mostly for women. A lot of them are in recovery. I’ve been sober from drugs and alcohol for three years. My sobriety really helped me through the things that we went through to get to our baby today. In 2018, I met my husband. We met on Instagram and did the long distance thing in the middle of the pandemic.
Jamie: Do you wanna start there? I think we should start when you met your husband in 2018.
Kezia: Sure. We met on a different Instagram account. I don’t know exactly what it was that I posted. I wasn’t sober then, but I think it was something to do with like sobriety. So he sent me a DM, and I messaged him back because he referenced a quote from a book I love. We started talking. He told me early on, he said, “I’m going to marry you, so just be prepared for that.” I was like, “Whatever.” “Who is this guy?” I had it in my head that I was never gonna get married. Him and I texted and FaceTimed and chatted for six months back and forth through that whole summer, through the fall, and then he finally flew out to Toronto at like American Thanksgiving.
We wanted to start the immigration process even though we weren’t technically engaged till the following spring. We knew it was gonna take a long time, and we didn’t know exactly what to expect. We started the process in 2019, but then had our interview scheduled seven months from when we’d started. From there it went pretty fast. We got rid of a bunch of stuff, and we packed the rest of it into this trailer. We landed with just the clothes on our back basically.
Jamie: Wow
Kezia: I was 30- eight at the time. We had to get married for me to stay, and We had a courthouse wedding. Then we got married in Vegas.
Jamie: Oh, fun.
Kezia: Just seven guests. I was six months sober at that time, so that was interesting to do Vegas sober.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: I had not tried to actively get pregnant with my daughter. I was 32 at the time, so I was much younger. Once we were married that spring, we could start trying to have a baby. We didn’t know what to expect.
So we just started trying, and I did end up getting pregnant really quickly. We had a trip to Myrtle Beach a family trip that summer in August, and I had a… I had… my period was late, and I was like, “Oh, I’ll just test.” I was pregnant beginning of August. And we got back, and pretty quickly after we got back from that trip, I had some spotting and stuff like that.
But I thought it was implantation bleeding, because I had that with my daughter, and I was like, “Okay, nothing to be worried about.” It wasn’t gushing. It wasn’t bright red or anything like that. But it was steady, and it kept coming. We were new here. I didn’t have my whole history with an OB here. The OB who had delivered my daughter had passed away in between that pregnancy and this one. So I was having trouble getting some of my records and things like that.
With my daughter, I had been on progesterone for those first 12 weeks because I would have probably had a miscarriage with her, too. What ended up happening was the bleeding got worse. I found a women’s health clinic, so they have multiple nurses. When you’re pregnant there, you see all of them. You have your OB, but you see a bunch of midwives and stuff like that. We were going for very frequent ultrasounds during that period of five weeks or whatever after that vacation. There was no heartbeat.
Jamie: Ugh.
Kezia: There was a little start of a growth whatever the very beginning part, but there was no heartbeat to it, and that was just devastating.
We were trying to stay hopeful. It’s really difficult to tell people to give you space to do whatever is gonna happen. And we didn’t tell a lot of people that we were pregnant. My mother-in-law knew, my father-in-law, and we just held out hope that whole time, and there was never a heartbeat. I was having a miscarriage at the beginning of September on my 40th birthday.
Jamie: Ugh, how tough.
Kezia: You feel like it’s your only chance. You’re just like, It’s never gonna happen again. It’s literally never gonna happen.
I didn’t have… I didn’t know anyone here or anywhere, but let alone here. I didn’t really have any friends yet. I didn’t know another woman who’d been through a miscarriage. Didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. I work for myself at home, and my husband works outside of the home, and he works a lot. There was no follow-up support after the miscarriage.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: I was telling you this before we started recording, but they should have done a D&C . I ended up miscarrying at home. They prescribed them to help my body miscarry, but I came home that day and I ended up miscarrying at home in the toilet. But they should have done a D&C after that.
Jamie: Now, did they do a sonogram afterwards to make sure everything was done?
Kezia: No.
Jamie: Okay.
Kezia: That’s the part that really got me, I understand my job as the patient is to follow up, but I feel like you’ve just been through something so traumatic, and they could have had someone call me and be like, Hey, you need to schedule this appointment to have your D&C.
I didn’t even know what a D&C was then. If there’s tissue left in your uterus, it’s a less than optimal environment if you’re trying to get pregnant again.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: So I was left with a less than optimal environment, but I didn’t know that. So I stayed with the same place, and I hadn’t got my period back. The miscarriage happened in September. In like November, I went back to the clinic and I was like, Hey, we wanna start trying again, but I haven’t got my period. What can I do?
There’s two male doctors there, and I met with one and he wanted me to run down all of the supplements and vitamins I was taking. He wanted to understand what I was doing. I was taking something called Vitex and he just tore it apart and was like if you’re taking herbal stuff, it’s not backed by medicine.
I understood that, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to tell a woman who’s just been through a miscarriage, and he had no bedside manner I guess they call it. So anyway, he wanted me to quit taking certain things that I was taking, and that was fine.
I was desperate to get pregnant, right?
Jamie: Sure.
Kezia: He prescribed some-
Jamie: You’ll do anything.
Kezia: Yeah. In a lot of these cases is they put you back on the pill. I was not on the pill before this. I was on the birth control pill, and I came off of it ’cause I was getting really bad mood swings and things like this. He says, “We’re gonna put you on the pill. We’re gonna try it for a couple months.” It’s supposed to induce your period, right?
That didn’t work, and so he gave me something called, I don’t know what the other name for it is, but it’s called medroxyprogesterone.
Jamie: Okay.
Kezia: When he prescribed that, within three days of taking it I had a huge panic attack. I was at the grocery store, and my heart rate went up to 170. My heart was beating out of my chest for several minutes. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what was going on, and I was having this attack.
I was by myself. I didn’t know how to tell anyone. I came home that day, and I crawled in our front door of our apartment. I was laying on the ground, and I called my husband. I said, “I don’t know what’s happening to my body.” I was hot and cold.
I was like, I can’t take this. I had taken it that day, and I called back, and that doctor was like, I’ve never had this happen in 25 years, 30 years of practicing. I don’t know what’s going on. You must have taken it wrong.”
Jamie: Not the words you wanna hear from a doctor.
Kezia: No. I was like, “I literally did exactly what you asked me.” I was beside myself. I stopped taking it, and I was extremely upset with the way I’d been treated. I felt lost. I felt like I’d been let down. I didn’t know who I could trust at that practice. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. My husband was very compassionate obviously, but we were at a loose end.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: We were desperate, and we reached out to Shady Grove.
Jamie: Okay.
Kezia: I think they’re called Shady Grove Big fertility clinic, and we reached out to them ’cause my period still had not come back, and this is January of that fall of 2022.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: And we thought, “Okay maybe something else is going on.” That doctor planted the idea in my head that maybe I was starting perimenopause too.
Jamie: Ugh.
Kezia: Again, not what I wanted to hear. Yeah.
Jamie: Were you feeling a sense of urgency, like you’re 40, you’re kind of-
Kezia: Yeah
Jamie: … in a hurry at this point, too?
Kezia: I was. That panic attack was the first of multiple panic attacks that January. I had back to back panic attacks at home. I’d be sitting and my heart rate would start cycling really high. It culminated that I ended up from my doctor’s office, not my OB, but my general practitioner, I ended up being taken by ambulance to the ER in the beginning of February. And they were testing me to see if I had an an arrhythmia or, like, all this kind of stuff.
Jamie: Whoa.
Kezia: From my vantage point now, I can tell you that 100% think it had to do with the stress of what I was going through, and also what he had prescribed me. It threw my whole system out of whack. It was not necessary to do that. My hormones had never rebalanced because we hadn’t done the D&C, so my body was very confused, and it mimicked some of the symptoms that women in perimenopause get.
I end up in the ER. I stay there overnight. I leave with a little heart monitor thing that’s, I get for two weeks, and they monitor my heart. Nothing’s wrong, right? That age-old story of anxiety. Turns out it’s just stress, right? Nothing’s wrong. I… But I am distraught because I still haven’t got my period back. And the stress of that affects you as a couple, so we’re really not connecting in the same way. We’re not approaching making a baby with the same positivity and light that we were before.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: I was desperate. I love researching things. I love reading. I love books, and I’m very good at finding information. So I’m on the internet trying to find a different doctor. I’m like, “Screw this place.”
For people listening who are going through fertility will know that it’s very expensive.
Jamie: Yes.
Kezia: And we were at a crossroads because we are still living in an apartment and we want to buy a house. We got married later. So we had this horrible decision of do we buy a house or do we try IVF?
Because IUI at that point, my husband and I agreed was just gonna be pointless. We’re like, “It’s not gonna be worth it for us.” That was our decision. We were at that crossroads and I was like, “I need to find somewhere else.” Did some research, found a a woman who looked amazing.
We live in a smaller town outside of Baltimore, and she was starting to work at our clinic here I think one or two days a week. And I was like, “Ah, I gotta see if I can get in with…” Her name’s Dr. Nicholson, and I was like, “Let me see if I can get in with her.” I’m pretty persistent when it comes, as a lot of us are, women, when we’re trying to get pregnant. So I was like, “I’m gonna call. I’m gonna be friends with her secretary. I’m gonna show up with chocolates,” whatever. I didn’t do that stuff, but I was persistent. And when I set-
Jamie: You were willing to do it.
Kezia: Exactly. And so I go for the appointment. I take my daughter ’cause it’s school break. At this point it’s the end of June of that year, and I’m very discouraged, still don’t have my period back, don’t know what’s going on. Met Dr. Nicholson Come to find out that she had twins via IVF in her 40s, and she’s “We’re gonna get you pregnant.” And I was like… The first time I met her, and I was like, “Okay.” And that- “I would love that.”
Jamie: That feels so good just hearing those words, too.
Kezia: I just wanted to hug this woman. I was just like- … “Take me under your wing,” “We’re gonna do this.” I felt like a child. I was like, “This is it.”
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: She was shocked they hadn’t done the D&C, and she said, “The first thing we’re gonna do is…” We had, I had to do all these other things when I was with Shady Grove. They do a bunch of… And now my memory betrays me ’cause it’s been a, a couple years, but they, as people listening know, they do all sorts of tests to see-
Jamie: Yeah
Kezia: … what things are like inside and to see… I had no obstructions in my fallopian tubes. I had my they did my AMH and my levels. Things were fairly good. We couldn’t see what was, what the problem was, right? But we knew that the… I knew that the D&C had never been done. First thing Dr. Nicholson says is, “We’ll just do that, and we’ll just get that cleaned up.” She does the procedure. This is in Au- beginning of August of 2022. She says, and she’s not a fertility doctor, but she says, “I can prescribe you,” she d- she preferred Letrozole over Clomid.
And she said, “I’ll prescribe you cl- Letrozole for ovulation.” She goes, “I like to do it for three months. We try it and we assess and see if it works, obviously, but if it doesn’t, why is it not working? We try one more round of three months.” And then she goes, “That’s all I can do, right?” And I was like, “It’s worth a shot,” ’cause it’s not expensive.
You just take it before bed every night, whatever. Took it the first month, and then you go to get your levels tested, and I had not ovulated, and I knew I hadn’t either. I was, like, so discouraged.
Jamie: Yeah. Even though it’s just the first month.
Kezia: Wanted to even though it was the first month.
Jamie: Yeah. I get it.
Kezia: I was discouraged, and at this point I was turning 41. And so we did it the second month, and- I could tell that something was different. I knew I had ovulated. And at this point, okay, I was obsessed with ovulation sticks, with ovulation kits, with basal temperature, with tracking on my phone. I had every app. I’m sure everyone can relate to this.
I liter- Yeah … my husband, I was obsessed. I was obsessed. So I had been testing everything, but I just knew. We did what we had to do, and we go in, I go in, and I can tell you the, that I know that was the time that it worked, right? So we go in, and what they’re looking for is to see, is it the G something levels?
Jamie: HGC
Kezia: levels. They’re looking… HGC levels.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: They’re looking to see significant increases, especially in those early days, ’cause it eventually hits a plateau. Maybe that’s the 12 weeks it hits that plateau, and then once the placenta takes over from your body, then you’re not gonna see the increasing levels.
… But they’re looking for significant. So I’m going every couple days, and You have to go to the blood lab to do it. So this is in our hospital here. It’s a little blood lab. Yeah. I’m getting to know these ladies. I’m, like, showing up. I’m like, “Ugh,” and but you’re so nervous through it, too. And what happens is, what’s running through my head is I don’t want my mental state to affect what’s going on physically.
Jamie: Yes.
Kezia: So I’m trying to be all positive, and I’m trying to not think about it, and just relax, and all this crap that people tell you. And I’m like, “You can’t, though.” It’s easier said than done. It really is. And in the meantime, you’re dealing with people making pregnancy announcements on social media and family members’ wives getting pregnant and wanting to talk to you about it and whatever. And so it just all that stuff that I’m sure everyone is going through something like that.
My levels were going up. And the difference that, the first time that we started feeling a little bit of a glimmer was when we got the heartbeat at six weeks, and we never had that with a miscarriage. But even then, it was still too early. I was like, “This is six weeks.” I’m like, we can’t get our hopes up,” right?
Because of my age, they’re going… they were sending me for ultrasounds weekly. So a lot of people wouldn’t get ultrasounds till 10 or 12 weeks. For those listening, they’re in their 40s, so you are going to be getting fairly regular ultrasounds. But I was getting them more regular because I started having some spotting, and this is exactly what happened.
It mimicked what had happened with the miscarriage. The spotting started happening around seven weeks. Seven and a half weeks. I was like, “Oh.” I didn’t know what to do.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: My husband’s like, “There’s nothing we can do. If that’s what’s happening, there’s nothing you can do.” And I just didn’t wanna accept it. I was like, “I can’t accept that there’s nothing I can do.” I did research, like I said. I’m, I love doing this research, and I had come across something called a subchorionic hematoma in my research. And for anyone listening it is a, it’s bleeding. You’re basically bleeding. It’s a bruise inside of your uterus.
When your placenta starts growing and it’s attaching, sometimes it creates a pocket in between where the baby is and where the placenta is. Now, depending on the position of it, it doesn’t have to affect the function of the placenta, right? Luckily, where, as it turns out, where mine was, it’s okay.
But what happens is your subchorionic hematoma grows. It’s like a blood blister. And it’s growing, and it’s growing. And when it ruptures is when you get your bleeds. And some women get one bleed. Some women have multiple bleeds. I had three major bleeds all in my kitchen at 10, 12, and 13 weeks.
Jamie: Wow. That must have been- And- … just awful, scary
Kezia: What it fe- Yeah. And what it feels like you’re getting your period, but the gush. So I’m making dinner, and it’s just a gush. And it can be bright red. It can be… It’s not old blood. It’s usually general- It, there might be a little bit of old blood in there, but us- it’s usually new blood, and some of the old blood is sloughing off, right? But there was, for me, there was no pain with it. And so I was like- Just
Jamie: huge
Kezia: Right. So you think to yourself, “If you’re having a miscarriage, wouldn’t you think that there is pain, contractions?” Yeah.
Jamie: Yeah, definitely.
Kezia: So during this time, after the first one had happened, I said to the doctor, I said, “I think this is what it is.” And she… Or to the, maybe I said it to the midwife. I said, “I thi- I found something online called a subchorionic hematoma.” I joined this Facebook support group to just poke around in there and see what was going on. I had my ultrasound, and sometimes what it shows up as is just a little shadow on the ultrasound.
They measure the circumference of this to see how much it’s growing and to see if it’s affecting the pregnancy.
And so they did that, and I’m just trying to think what, what happened. So after the first bleed, I call… as that happens, I call the, my OB clinic. They have an after-hours nurse line. I think it goes to the hospital.
And I say to them, “I’m bleeding.” I’m, like, hyperventilating too. I’m like, “I’m having a miscarriage.” My husband is driving home from work, and he’s not even home yet, and I’m calling him and I’m like, “I’m having a miscarriage.”
And he sends his mom over, my mother-in-law. And so we call, and they’re like, “Okay.” She goes, “Are you having… Is there any tissue in what’s coming out?” I said, “No.” “Are you having contractions?” “No.” I couldn’t figure it out. Like I, there was this, this feeling in my head that everything was okay But not.
It was like there was, like, an angel being like, “Okay, the baby’s okay, but this thing is still gonna happen to you.” At this point, I don’t know what the lesson is in all of this, right? Sure. Because I’m not ready to receive that lesson. Yeah. I am just, I just want a healthy baby.
I… And it truly felt like I was losing him. So she said, “You can come to the ER, and they can do a scan.” She goes, “But I’ll tell you right now, because you’re still so early in your pregnancy, there’s nothing they can do if you are having a miscarriage, basically.”
Oh. They can’t stop it.
And I’m like, “Okay.” So I decided not to go ’cause I had that weird sense that everything was okay. A week later, I’m standing in my kitchen making dinner, and same thing happens. And when it happens, I had issues throughout my pregnancy where my, I suffer from anxiety anyway, and so I do get little not full-blown panic attacks like I was having, but little anxiety attacks.
When I was pregnant, it was worse, and a lot of women experience this, that your anxiety is worse, not just because you might have had the miscarriage, but also because your heart rate is generally higher because you got more blood pumping through you because you’re supporting a baby. So I was having these mini anxiety attacks.
So standing in the kitchen a week exactly a week later, same thing happens. I call the nurse. Same thing. She says, “You can come in.” Still no contractions, nothing happening. And the I should add, the, the pregnancy was progressing. So while the little, while the hematoma was growing, my placenta and the uterus and the baby were growing, and that’s what they look for.
They look for if there’s a failure to thrive because of that hematoma, then it’s more concern, but they also look at the position of it. Every ultrasound I would have, and I had probably about 15 throughout the pregnancy-
Jamie: Wow
Kezia: … they’re measuring, and it got up to over nine centimeters.
Jamie: Whoa.
Kezia: So it was big, but the baby was always a little bit bigger.
But what they say to you is it can rupture at any point. It can call, it can cause placental abruption, which is where the placental, placenta detaches from the uterus. Wow. It’s really scary.
Jamie: Very
Kezia: scary. So they’re telling
Jamie: me,
Kezia: telling me all of this, and I’m just like… And I’m doing my own research which I don’t recommend doing that, but I’m, I can’t help it. I’m that type of person. Sure. I’m like, “I need to know.” And so I’m looking f- you look for the success stories in it.
I’m looking for that woman who had the nine-centimeter one who went on to have the beautiful baby, right? Where is that story? And I did find some stories of hope, and I’m here to give hope to anyone who does have a subchorionic hematoma, that it doesn’t have to mean the end of your pregnancy.
But every situation is different. If your doctor tells you, “Go on bed rest, and don’t lift more than your toddler,” do it, because there’s a reason for it, and you can overexert yourself. My doctor never told me that. I continued to exercise, not at the gym. I continued to exercise at home throughout my whole pregnancy, up until the day before I gave birth.
And stretching and all that, all the stuff I had been doing, the supplements I had been taking, my prenatals, which I’m still taking now. I’d taken my CoQ10 before the pregnancy. Through the whole pregnancy I took it as well. I took wh- I took a supplement, NAD+ through my whole pregnancy as well.
I had three major bleeds, and we… It never… What happens is it can get reabsorbed by your body so it can start shrinking. And that’s what they want to happen, but mine was still there at the time I gave birth. And so it can still be just a little bit of extra blood, or it can be a full-blown thing.
Jamie: So did it ever shrink?
Kezia: It did shrink. Yeah, it did shrink. It never fully went away, but it shrank a little bit.
Jamie: Okay.
Kezia: But it was still there. If you were to look at my… I have an album with all my ultrasounds. Oh. Literally, like I said, about 15 of them. And maybe even more than that. I was on weekly… anyone over 40 is on weekly at a certain point, but I was on weekly for about 12 weeks of that.
Jamie: Wow. That’s just a lot of time also.
Kezia: Oh, because you’re… I was going to MFM appointments plus to my OB.
Jamie: Oh my gosh.
Kezia: And then at the end you’re doing your non-stress tests. Your stress test, your MFM, and your OB check for like- Yeah … dilation and stuff like that. So luckily what ended up happening, my MFM in the first half of my pregnancy was about a 35-minute drive away.
In the second half, they ended up moving right next door, so if I- Oh … were to try and get pregnant again, now they’re in the same building.
Jamie: Perfect.
Kezia: Yeah. So I was… Because I was, like… I was in my third trimester in the middle of summer the heat of summer, ’cause I gave birth July 19th. But yeah, it was, yeah,
Jamie: so I’m assuming with all those ultrasounds, you probably found out the sex some- somewhere in there.
Kezia: We decided… We were sure that we were having a girl, and my husband really wanted a girl, and we decided to do the NIPT test and all that for Downs and for trisomy and all that stuff.
We’re like, “We’re just gonna do it.” It’s fairly expensive, but no more expensive than anything else you go through to get here. So we did that, and we got… We found out at 12 weeks. And we didn’t tell our family till 20 weeks. Turns out we were having a boy. So my husband was wrong.
I was like it was really up to you, so I mean-
Jamie: That’s right
Kezia: I had nothing to do with this.”
We were doing a gender reveal. My mother-in-law wanted to do one. I was like, “Oh, whatever.” They didn’t know that we already knew, and they sent me an email that day, and my husband was at work, and we were gonna open it together on FaceTime. So he’s like, “Let’s find out together.” And I didn’t even have to say anything. As soon as I opened it, He was just like, “It’s a boy, isn’t it?” I was like turned out to be the best thing ever.
Our son is amazing, but it was, We thought for sure it was a girl, but we did find out, and we… I found out with my daughter as well. And my husband, this is his first biological child, and I left it up to him as to whether we wanted to find out. We wanted to be able to bond with our baby in that way as well.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: It was important to us. We struggled with boys’ names for a long time, so we knew that if it was gonna be a boy, we wanted some time to think about what his name was gonna be. ‘Cause we’d had this girl’s name picked out. And so we finally got to our boy’s name, and then we didn’t tell anyone the name until my in-laws came to the hospital the day that he was born.
It bugged my mother-in-law so much- … ’cause she does crafting and stuff, and she wanted to make all this stuff for him, and so we just put it on… You know the white board that they have at hospitals? We just put it on that little white board. “Oh, your nurse today is we’re like, “My name is Tristan James,” and she was like, “What?”
So it ended up being fine.
Jamie: That’s fun. Was there any products that helped you during pregnancy?
Kezia: Yeah, so definitely the CoQ10 I definitely think that helps. That helps with m- mitochondrial health and like the cell health overall cell health. It helps also with your blood pressure.
I should have said I was diagnosed early in the pregnancy with chronic hypertension. What I actually had was white coat hypertension.
Jamie: Okay.
Kezia: Every time I knew I had an appointment, I went into a spiral. So I would go in and my blood pressure would be, like, 140 over 90, right?
Every single time, or even higher because I’d be hyperventilating in my car. And I told them this, but they don’t really care when it c- not that they don’t care, but when it comes to pregnancy, they have to treat it as hypertension. So they wanted me to go on baby aspirin. I didn’t go on baby aspirin.
It’s your decision, right? Sure. And I didn’t do it because it was a blood thinner, and I was having the hematoma, so I was bleeding. These decisions that you have to make and that you don’t know, you could look back on later and beat yourself up for that decision and that happened to me with the miscarriage.
Before I realized I was pregnant, I was drinking energy drinks during that pregnancy that we had the miscarriage, and I told myself that was the reason that it happened. Long story short, with the baby aspirin, I just, I again did my research, and I was like, “It’s not for me. This is not… I don’t wanna take it.”
Apparently, they told me during this pregnancy that it’s going to become standard operating procedure for all women over 40 to have to take baby aspirin during their pregnancy. I don’t know that it’s fully rolled out yet, but I think that is the recommendation. They also recommend it in your preconception phase when you are trying to, and I did take it during that phase. I did take it when we were trying, and then I stopped taking it. I didn’t take Unisom. I could’ve, I had I had really, not bad morning sickness, but bad nausea and heartburn. So I did take some- I did take something for heartburn during most of the pregnancy because it was triggering my panic attacks.
I would get heartburn would start my panic attacks. So I took that pre… I took obviously a prenatal. Not just like one from the drugstore. Like I took a USANA one and I’m still taking that right now. Right now I’m exclusively pumping and I’ve continued to take the prenatal. I took Vitex.
Jamie: Okay.
Kezia: Yeah. There was- Would you- there was some natural stuff that I took. Okay. Some herbal stuff. A- … which again, m- most doctors will… They can’t really comment on it, unless you have a doctor who does herbal medicine.
They did recommend acupuncture, and I would also agree with that. I didn’t do that for this pregnancy, but I’ve heard so many people say that acupuncture really helped them.
Jamie: I love it.
Kezia: I believe that to be true. I think it can’t not help you with your stress levels and oxidative stress and stuff like that.
Jamie: It’s so good for me. I usually fall asleep on the table.
Kezia: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. For me, that was exercise during this pregnancy. I continued to exercise and stretching. I had really bad pubic pain, like the s- whatever it’s called, symphis, pubis, whatever. Through my hips and through the inside of my thighs and stuff like that.
He was almost nine pounds. That might have had something to do with it, too. I was pretty big during this. I gained about close to 40 pounds. Thir- 35. Oh, it felt like a lot in the summer.
Jamie: I’m sure it does, ’cause it’s so hot.
Kezia: Oh, it’s so hot. I ended up giving birth 38 and three. Now, my doctor this time was not the doctor I had for the first time. I was, in fact, in a different country, so she had no… She actually didn’t have any of my records from the first time around. First time around, it ended up an emergency C-section. It was very traumatic and quite scary.
And this time around, because of how big he was measuring and stuff, we decided to schedule my C-section. We assumed there’d be a lot less stress that way. That was scheduled for July 25th He was born on the 19th.
Jamie: What happened?
Kezia: That night I wasn’t sleeping. I had really bad insomnia for the third trimester. I was trying to sleep sitting up, and the heartburn. I took the heartburn stuff. It didn’t totally go away, right? So I’m sleeping laying in the recliner just like a zombie not really sleeping.
It woke me up out of my sleep to go to go pee, but it was like everything was soaked, and I was like, “Huh.” I was like, “Okay.” Didn’t really know, ’cause my water did not break with my daughter until I was at the hospital. I go pee, and my husband’s sleeping, and I’m like, “Eh, this is about 11:00 at night.” I go back to bed. 2:00 in the morning, I wake up, and it’s drenched again. I’m just drenched, and I’m like, “Okay, something’s a little weird.” Go to the bathroom, there’s no tissue or anything. There’s nothing. There’s no goopiness. It’s just ki- kind of clear liquid, and I was like, “Eh.” So I said to him, I’m like, “James, I think… I don’t know. I feel like this might be it.”
You just don’t know. There’s so many unknowns with pregnancy. You just really, it’s a crapshoot. And so I was like, “Eh, okay.” So we call, and they have that after-hours service, ’cause this was, like, 2:00 in the morning. Puts me through to the hospital to a midwife, and she goes, “Are you having contractions?” “No, nothing. No contractions, nothing like that.” She says, “Okay, why don’t we wait till about 6:00 in the morning?” She says, “Come to labor and delivery to…” It’s called ELA. It’s early labor assessment at the hospital. “We’ll check you out. We’ll put you on the monitor. We’ll see what’s going on.” I had my bag packed anyway, right? Of course.
Jamie: Sure.
Kezia: I said it to my husband. I’m like, “We’re not coming back, so this is it.” He’s like, “Wait, what?” I’m like, “I’m telling you, we’re not coming back.”
I get my bag. He has not packed his bag, of course. I’m like, “Okay. You’re gonna have nothing.” We get to the hospital. We go up to ELA, and it’s not gushing or anything, but it’s a steady leak, and I’m like, “Eh.” It’s a slow leak of fluid. Once you start leaking fluid, you have to get the baby out in a certain amount of time because otherwise it’s just the placenta’s not doing what it should be doing and whatever.
So we are waiting for my doctor to get there. Turns out my doctor, she happened to be on call. so Dr. Nicholson shows up like my angel, I’m on this really uncomfortable stretcher just waiting to be seen, trying to watch Friends, and she comes in, and she goes, “Okay, let’s just see what’s going on.” They check, and she’s “Oh yeah we’re doing this today.” And I was like, “Doing what?” She’s like, “We are having your C-section today.” Like- Oh, okay. Okay. Let’s do this today then. So take a deep breath.
So they were gonna get me in at 11:00 that morning, and a woman came in on an emergency. She obviously took precedence. It took a long time. My time keeps getting pushed back, and they say, “Okay, we’ll get you set up in your post-delivery room. You can wait there. We’ll call you to the operating room when we’re ready.”
They’re not ready till 3:00 PM that day.
Jamie: Oh my gosh.
Kezia: I started having contractions, so I start going into labor. Start going into labor, and I’m like, “Oh my God.” I am, like, not happy by this point, ’cause I’m just like, I didn’t prepare to have this naturally. I’m freaking out. And they got me in at 3:00, and he was born at 3:44.
Jamie: Will you tell us a little bit about going into the operating room? What was that like?
Kezia: So it can feel very lonely, because your significant other, your husband, your mom, nobody is allowed to go in with you. So they get you scrubbed up. They get your husband scrubbed up. He’s… they just… You’re not… You’re wearing your gown, but they get you c- disinfected and cleaned off and all this stuff. They give you something to drink before, some type of like painkiller or something. But then they wheel you back with the nurses, and your husband has to stay outside of the room till they call him in, because they have to administer the fentanyl, the painkiller, all that stuff, when it’s just you. It’s a very sterile environment. It’s very bright in there, a lot of people.
Jamie: Cold.
Kezia: It’s cold. It’s not fun. A lot of people don’t do well with the drugs. It does make your body kind of shaky, and it makes me just convulse. So they have you lean over, like lean hunched over to g- to make your back into an arch, like the epidural, but it’s apparently a really long needle.
I did not look at it, ’cause I don’t want to look at it, but it’s a very big needle. They stick you with that, and it just, it numbs you. It works, but you feel dead, because you’ve got pins and needles, and you’re dead weight. So they numb you, and really quickly they have to, they take you, and all four of them move you onto the operating table.
Jamie: Wow.
Kezia: Then your husband can come in. They put a curtain here. You can’t even see really what’s going on. You can ask if you wanna see some things. Every doctor’s different, but we didn’t see. He comes in, he’s up by my head, and your arms, they are strapped down. They’re out to your sides like that.
They poke you with things and say, “Can you feel this? Can you feel this?” Like below the waist. You say no, and then they’re ready to start operating.
It’s that beginning part of the process, but my teeth were chattering, and my body was shaking like that whole time. Then when they pull the baby out, that part at the end really hurts, but it’s not a lasting hurt. Because of all the painkiller, you’re not actually in pain. It’s more like, it’s like a big elephant sitting on your chest, and so I was like, “Ah.”
That’s the only time I visibly audibly screamed, and then it was… It’s not as loud as labor, and then they pulled him out.
I was so glad my doctor was in there, and there was a couple nurses that were like angels. There are some angels through all of this journey.
Jamie: Sure. I
Kezia: I was in the hospital for two days. I recovered- Pretty quickly. The mental recovery is really hard. The mood swings, the rage, really a lot of rage after.
And then the whole breastfeeding journey was extremely difficult. It did not work for us.
Jamie: Yeah, tell us about that …
Kezia: I had planned to breastfeed. Your milk takes four or five days to actually come in, but they want you to try and express colostrum, which is very painful when noth- for me, nothing had come in. Some women get leaking before they give birth.
I didn’t. And you feel inadequate ’cause you can’t produce. I had a almost nine-pound baby. I could not produce anything that was gonna feed him, so they have formula at the hospital. Then I’m beating myself up about this formula. “I don’t wanna give him this.”
You’re an emotional wreck at that point anyway. Yeah. They have lactation consultants. You really have to advocate for yourself, though. My advice i- in hindsight is go into it, even if you don’t do a birth plan, go into it with an idea about things like breastfeeding and communicate that with your husband or partner so th- they can have your back on it, so that at that time you can be like, “I wanna see someone from the lactation clinic, and I need to see them and this is why.” When you’re emotional and you’re tired and you haven’t slept and you’ve just given birth, and you’re not able to vocalize…
And our… I’m not saying the lactation clinic at our hospital was not good. It might be, but again, it felt like a loose end. It felt like a string that just was let go, like the D&C, where they were supposed to follow up, I felt, and we just never closed the loop. So we stopped trying to get him to latch properly, and we just went straight to me pumping.
Here we are five months later. Exclusively pumping is a full-time job. It’s extremely exhausting, and it’s very… there’s benefits to it, of course. Anyone can feed him. But I grieved that loss of not ever having the connection of nursing him.
Jamie: How often do you have to pump?
Kezia: Three to four hours. I do… I’m trying to get rid of my night ones right- my nighttime ones, ’cause I do it twice a night right now. It’s very tiring. Yeah. Takes me an hour from start to finish to pump, to clean the parts, to sterilize, put them in the sterilizer, to bottle, to bag. I’m donating breast milk ’cause I have an oversupply, so I’ve donated a couple thousand over a couple thousand ounces now
Jamie: That’s amazing.
Kezia: Yeah, it’s called Mother’s Milk Bank. And they donate to NICU families.
Jamie: Oh …
Kezia: that part’s been really fulfilling, Yeah … to just… They send a cooler to my house, and I fill that up with bags of milk.
Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. So you recovered really well. How are you feeling today?
Kezia: My doctor’s protocol for the scar recovery was really helpful. So she recommended things like, I don’t know if I have one sitting here, but like the scar tape, like the tape that I used that I just got off Amazon that really helped. It’s like a silicone tape, and I put that on. In the beginning, you put it on more often. You work up to it, but it goes over the scar.
I’ve got very minimal visible scar. Oh, just like the work on the scar, like the actual massage. I didn’t have any… I have pretty good skin. I don’t have very sensitive skin, and my, I don’t get infections or cuts or things like that very easily, so I think that did help a little bit just genetically.
But that silicone scar tape and that scar massage, and just working that area, because what I had after I had my daughter, was I had very, like loss of feeling. And there is still a little bit of that, a little bit of sensitivity around the scar on the one side. I have a little bit of a bulge there. But nothing like I did the first time, because you, the follow-up appointment 10 days later I was in, and she was checking, and she was making sure that everything was healing properly.
I got back to exercising fully after six weeks, and I’ve been exercising. My core feels stronger than it did before.
Jamie: That’s great. Yeah. Now, did it hurt to massage your scar? It sounds painful to me. Okay.
Kezia: Yeah. It did. What I did too, what I recommend is take pictures. If you do end up having a C-section, take pictures of the scar every day just to, like to make sure you’re seeing it properly. Sometimes you can think, “Oh, it was really bad,” but then you look back and actually it wasn’t, or vice versa.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: But your doctor might wanna see that also. But yeah, you have to work up, you have to follow a specific way. I also did postpartum physical therapy, pelvic floor. Oh. Oh, that’s great. I did a little bit of pelvic floor during my pregnancy, and I did some postpartum.
For me, the biggest pain in this phase has been my lower back. And that could be for breastfeeding too, like if you were actually nursing, because you’re like hunching over a lot. But for me, even pumping- … I find that. Yeah. So I would say something like physical therapy. If you have coverage for that, use it.
Definitely use it. I had coverage. You’re gonna, you’re gonna hit your max out-of-pocket if you give birth in a hospital anyway.
Jamie: Yes.
Kezia: You’re gonna max. So do all the acupuncture. Do everything that you wanna do that year that you give birth, because it’s not gonna cost you if you have that insurance, right?
Jamie: Sure.
Kezia: Yeah. So I’m now done with physical therapy, but i exercise every day at home. I, I would say there’s still times that I feel tweaks here and there, and like I said, my lower back is pretty sore. The scar does hurt. There is sensitivity there. For some women, it’s worse than others too.
Jamie: Sure. Is there anything else you wanna add to your birth or pregnancy?
Kezia: I just would really say that the mental health part of it is the biggest thing to just stay on top of. One thing I did that I didn’t mention yet, I got a a pregnancy journal.
I’m a writer, so it comes more natural to me. But if you can document… So we bought one of those little Polaroid cameras, and we took pictures of my bump every week, and then I had a journal where I documented. It asked you questions, but I also just rewrote some stuff, like how I was feeling. I wrote some letters to him, just thoughts that I was going through.
And documenting some of that is really affirming, and it also just helps get it out of your head, so a lot of the trauma, a lot of the guilt, the shame, everything that we carry when we have a miscarriage, it lives inside of you, and your body remembers that. And things would happen during this experience.
And so for as much as you might feel that it’s hard to open up to the experience, I think you will be surprised that there’s things that happen that will help you reaffirm your faith in humanity.
Jamie: When did you start journaling for pregnancy?
Kezia: The journal I happened to use was coming out brand new, and it wasn’t out till past my 12 weeks, but I started at 12 weeks.
Jamie: Okay.
Kezia: They ha- they have ones that you can start… there is parts in that book that start four weeks or something.
Jamie: Wow.
Kezia: For me, we found out pretty quickly that I was pregnant because we had taken the Letrozole so I could have started. We started our bump pictures at 12 or 13 weeks too. So that was kinda cool.
Jamie: Yeah, that’s fun to look back on.
Kezia: Yeah, meet with them on Zoom or have coffee with someone or just talk to someone. It can feel really lonely even once you are pregnant.
Jamie: What do you think has been your biggest challenge being pregnant in your 40s?
Kezia: It’s quite tiring. It is tiring. Yeah, I think just The aches and pains are a little bit more. And I had a very healthy pregnancy, but I felt like just some of the swelling and stuff like that I never noticed any of that when I was pregnant with my daughter, just the hi- excruciating hip pain. Just it feels like the symptoms maybe are a little more exaggerated. You’re also not sleeping. I guess I don’t sleep as well in my 40s than I did before, so maybe it just is exacerbated by being pregnant also.
But then that just floats right into having the baby but there are many things that I feel like are better, too.
Jamie: Ooh,
Kezia: like what? I feel I just feel like I’m more myself. I advocated for myself better this pregnancy than I did last time. So I learned to trust my body more. I learned to listen to her to just trust the process, and really going internally that whole time when people are like you’re in perimenopause.”
I just refused to accept that was true, because I felt in my body it was not true. And it wasn’t true. And I think that’s the gift of being a woman in your 40s, is you just don’t take people’s crap anymore. You’re just like, “Okay, thank you for your opinion.”
The hard part, too, people are always gonna comment on things. I really did not like all the comments about my body. Like just, “Oh, you’re really big for X number of weeks.” Or the lady at the grocery store sticks out in my mind, “You look ready to pop.” I was 21 weeks. I was like- At
Jamie: 21 … what?
Kezia: I was like thanks.” I also don’t like that a lot of doctors m- make, force you to be weighed throughout the whole thing. Yeah. Some doctors don’t do that now. I don’t like that. I don’t think it’s indicative of how healthy you are or not, or how healthy the baby is. I put on all that weight. I lost all that weight.
Jamie: Yeah. One-
Kezia: I think- …
Jamie: at the fertility clinic, she goes, “Do you mind getting on the scale?” And I was like, “Yeah.”
Kezia: You should-
Jamie: It,
Kezia: yeah … you should say, “Yeah, I do.”
Jamie: I did.
Kezia: You shouldn’t. I did. I did. You shouldn’t have to. Yeah. I don’t believe… If the, if… Okay. If you have if you’re diabetic or you have diabetes during your pregnancy, or you have reasons for, to get your blood sugar and all that checked, different story maybe.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: If you’re gaining weight significant, like rapidly, whatever, or not gaining weight, of course. But if things are just kinda ticking along, I don’t think there’s any reason. There was- parts of my pregnancy where I didn’t put on a pound for three weeks, and then there’d be parts where I was like, it was like I ate a half a pound that day, and it went straight on. And I was like, “How does this happen?” I don’t think that it’s necessary. If it’s gonna put you in a head space that I n- that isn’t good, then I wouldn’t do it. There’s a lot of things I said no to.
Jamie: Yeah. I think advocating for yourself is a big piece of having a great experience. Is there anything you’d recommend that would help prepare someone for pregnancy and birth over 40?
Kezia: There’s things that I’ve read, like egg quality diet, things like that Mediterranean diet. The way that I eat a lot of greens, I eat a lot of grains. I eat kind of a Mediterranean style diet with olive oils and stuff like that. I do think that really did help. I don’t eat red meat. I’m not vegan, but I do … I only eat, like chicken, turkey. I eat a lot of legumes and beans and stuff like that.
I think diet plays a huge … not a diet, but diet plays a huge part in it, and exercise. I was not doing hardcore exercise by any means, but I was intentionally moving my body every day.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: I would go on YouTube and find a little video and just do it. As long as you’re cleared to do that, obviously.
Jamie: And what advice would you give yourself when you were pregnant if you could go back?
Kezia: I would say to just to trust the process and to let some people help you. As much as I said I advocated for myself, I also could have let a little bit more in with help. There were people genuinely wanting to help me, and so I would say maybe be open to receiving the love that comes your way during that process. I isolated myself a little bit more than needed to, if that makes sense.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: It’s hard, though, when you’ve been through that to trust people.
Jamie: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And what advice would you give other women who are pregnant who are trying to conceive right now?
Kezia: I never looked at it as like I have X number of good eggs left. I never really wanted to know that because my mindset was it just takes one good one. And I just I needed to look at it like that instead of getting bogged down with all the numbers. I had them, and I had a file of all the stuff, right?
My husband’s very meticulous with stuff like that. But for me, I just needed to know that you still have a chance. You 100% nowadays have a chance. I lived in England for seven years. Women in Europe have preg- healthy pregnancies and babies well into their mid to late 40s. There’s some idea that you turn 40 and you turn into a pumpkin is not true.
It’s just not true, and I just refuse to believe that. In many ways, like I said, handling this pregnancy in my 40s, I’ve handled it better because I’m better equipped to handle it. And so therefore I feel like that has a knock-on effect into all areas of trying to conceive because I just, I knew myself better. I was less bothered by outside influences. I was more determined in my mission. It became more clear to me what I wanted to have happen and what I needed to do to get there, so I would just say just truly you don’t turn 40 and have a rapid decline overnight into this is it, just stop trying.
Don’t ever stop trying. If you want to keep trying, don’t stop trying. But that’s it. I just think there’s so much misinformation out there. There’s some people who profit off… there is. Yeah. Lots of people who profit off you not being able to and the vulnerability that comes along with it too.
Jamie: Sure.
Kezia: And that’s what we found in our experience with the fertility clinic, with Shady Grove.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: Yeah. Not saying they were bad people or anything, but we really were very discouraged. We… If I hadn’t sought out Dr. Nicholson on my own- I don’t know where we would be today.
Jamie: Yeah.
Kezia: I don’t know. It happened that way for a reason, but I wasn’t willing to just settle for this is the price of IVF, and if you can’t afford it, and a lot of women are in that situation, and it’s heartbreaking. So I changed a bit of the way that I was eating, and I just changed my laser focus to that mindset that it just takes that one egg and that one time, and that was it.
Jamie: Would you like to share how you help women?
Kezia: Sure. Yeah. I host women’s writing circles. I have one on Friday mornings, Eastern Time, and then Sundays morning. It’s just a space to gather. Not everyone in the group is in sobriety from drugs and alcohol.
I give writing prompts, but you don’t have to identify as a writer. We do a little meditation at the beginning. We take an hour and a half, and we just we do a couple writing prompts. Then they have an opportunity to share what they’ve written. And you might say nothing. You might keep your camera off. I don’t force you to do anything. Not a big group, small group like 10, under 10 people usually. It’s loosely based around a theme, So we did boundaries this month. We’re looking at procrastination in January.
Jamie: Yeah. Would you like to share your Instagram handle and your website?
Kezia: Yeah. My website is ketsiacalvertcreative.com, and on there you’ll find a link to my Substack where I share writing. It’s not every, every week, but I share writing on there. I talk about motherhood, postpartum, sobriety.
My Instagram is The Sober Elephant Chronicles, and I’ve had that since the beginning of my sobriety journey. It’s mostly sobriety based, but it actually is to do with motherhood and postpartum and stuff as well on there.
Jamie: Wonderful. Congratulations on your three years of sobriety.
Kezia: Thank you.
Jamie: And Ketsia, thank you so much for sharing your story.
Kezia: I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.