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Shauna - Endometriosis and infertility - 25th March 2020 (LDN, low dose naltrexone) from LDN Research Trust on Vimeo.
Linda Elsegood: I'd like to introduce my guest today, who is Shauna from Canada, and Shauna, you use LDN for endometriosis and infertility. Thanks for joining us today, Shana.
Shauna: Thank you for having me.
Linda Elsegood: So, in your words, how about telling us your story?
Shauna: I first heard about LDN from my mom, who has been taking it for a few different reasons: fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue and pain and things like that. And she had kind of read up about it through the LDN Research Trust website. And she kept on trying to push me towards taking it to see if it could help with our infertility problems. I kind of pushed back against her because the drug is just not well researched. There's just not a lot of studies that have been done. I asked my fertility specialist, and I asked my GP, and they were firmly against that. So I kind of continued to say no to my mom over a year or so.
And then we kind of hit a roadblock for fertility treatments. I had tried other types of fertility drugs and treatments over the last three years, and nothing was working, and we couldn't afford IVF. We couldn't afford IUI. There was just no other option. So I went again to my fertility specialist, and I begged him to let me try LDN, just to see if maybe it could alleviate some of my endometriosis and then maybe potentially help with getting pregnant. He firmly said no again. So then I went to my GP, and it took quite a bit of arm twisting.
I came at it from the point of helping with my endometriosis. I didn't really touch too much on it helping me to get pregnant. I asked if he believes that LDN helps with inflammatory diseases, and he said, yes. And I said, well, endometriosis and PCOS, I also have PCOS, those diseases are inflammatory, so don't you think that this drug would potentially help me feel better? And he kind of crumbled: we can try it, he said, but I'm putting this all on you, and you're taking responsibility for anything that happens on this drug. So I said, okay, that's fine. And he wanted to prescribe me four and a half milligrams at first, and I tried to tell him that the pharmacy I go to is a compounding pharmacy, they can make lower doses. And he said this is as low as he’d go. The pharmacist said they can make it as low as wanted, so they called the doctor and he took it down to two and a half. I said we need to go down lower, to start like really low. But he ended up not going down any further than two and a half. My mom helped split the two and a half to even lower.
So I ended up starting at 0.5 and then working my way up to five milligrams. And the first thing I noticed back on the drug was that my immune system became like a hundred per cent better. I was getting colds every other week before starting the drug, and I haven't had one single cold since starting it in November. And the only side effect I felt was that when I increased my dose, I got migraines for a couple of days, and I got some nausea. But I was also on other fertility drugs, so really I have no idea whether it was the LDN or not.
But when I got to five milligrams I found that I wasn't quite adjusting to the dosage and I was feeling quite nauseous, so in December I went down to two and a half milligrams, and I've stayed at two and a half. And then a few weeks after Christmas, I found out I was pregnant. So I had only been on the drug.
Linda Elsegood: Oh, congratulations!
Shauna: Thank you. So I'm six weeks pregnant, and it was the combination of the fertility drugs that stimulate ovulation - that's a separate problem, endometriosis that I have. I don't know if maybe I stayed on LDN for longer without the fertility drugs, it would potentially help me ovulate naturally on my own. I don't know. But for me, I needed the fertility drugs to help me populate and then used the LDN to decrease the inflammation and calm my immune system. Cause I think those were the two things that were getting in the way of the fertility drugs actually working and pregnancy to actually stick, because I had been on them for nine months, and the ovulation was happening, just no pregnancy.
I did feel that there was a decrease in inflammation in my pelvic area, and I was able to do activities that used to completely wipe me out physically, where I would come home and just have to go lay down because I would be just exhausted and in so much pain. I'm a photographer, so sometimes my newborn photo sessions are three or four hours long, and after those sessions, typically, I come home, and I'm a wreck physically. But when I was on LDN or while I'm on LDN, I found that I could do new sessions and not come home completely in pain, which was really nice.
Linda Elsegood: Oh, wow. That's awesome. That's something. So are you still taking LDN?
Shauna: Yes, I'm still taking two and a half milligrams, and I'll stay on it until the end of my pregnancy, and then probably continue on it afterwards. It's the only drug that I've been able to find so far that successfully alleviates some of the endometriosis symptoms, without having a crazy list of side effects, which is really wonderful.
Linda Elsegood: Dr Phil Boydell uses LDN in his infertility clinic, and you can see on our Vimeo channel, some of the videos we have of him where he uses it to help ladies get pregnant, during pregnancy, after pregnancy, during breastfeeding; and I interviewed him the other day, and he was saying how the babies are a good weight, they are less likely to need antibiotics on follow-ups. The moms say they're very happy, contented babies. I mean, it just sounds too good to be true.
Shauna: There was an article I read about LDN, about they're looking into whether or not LDN can potentially help stop endometriosis happening when you're pregnant with a girl, because of the speculation about endometriosis and how it develops, right? Like, does it happen when your baby is growing in utero and you just always have it, like for some people endometriosis doesn't come out of the woodwork until their forties; or for me, it got way worse after I became sexually active.
You know, there's, there are lots of different theories about endometriosis and where does it begin, so I'm hoping that this pregnancy is a girl, and it would be wonderful if I stay on the LDN during pregnancy, if there's a potential of me not passing on endometriosis. There's just not very much good understanding of endometriosis and whether it's genetic or not. And why does it start? How does it start? And so anyway, I mean, that's all speculation. It's all theory, but it just kind of would be nice if I could spare my future baby girls if they did not have to deal with this disease because there's no cure for it. And there are not very many well-known treatments for them.
Linda Elsegood: With your polycystic ovaries, did you find it painful?
Shauna: Yes. My cycles naturally are 50 days apart. It's like my body just tries and tries and tries to ovulate, and then it just finally gives up, and I sporadically ovulate naturally. And so the months that I do are really, really painful. But then, even the months that I don't ovulate it's very painful because I think my body's just trying its hardest to ovulate and then it just doesn't happen. I've been on fertility drugs for the last two years, so, um, I haven't had those super long cycles as often because the drugs have been regulating my cycles.
Linda Elsegood: Well, it's just amazing that you got pregnant so quickly.
Shauna: I took the pregnancy test because some months I just wanted to get it over with the fact that I'm not pregnant that month, and just kind of. move on. So I ended up taking the pregnancy test at day 30 thinking it's just going to be negative. And I'm just going to be waiting for my period to start and then I can just be depressed and eat some ice cream and then move on. But it came out positive and I just started freaking out and hyperventilating. The first person I called was my midwife because the midwives’ schedules fill up very fast here. Trying to get under their care is pretty hard. And she's asking me to calm down, that we don't know if this is real, and we’ll recheck the pregnancy test, to be sure it's actually correct.
Linda Elsegood: How many times did you take it.
Shauna: I ended up taking two pregnancy tests, and then I went to the doctor the next day, who ordered blood work to check, and then they've been checking me every few days to make sure that my HCG level is going up. And it's more than doubling. So that's really good. Um. Yeah.
I was blessed with a son, he's three and a half. He'll be four in April. And when I was trying to conceive him, it took a year and eight months of trying to get pregnant with him. And I felt like I had endometriosis back then, but I hadn't been diagnosed yet. Doctors were still kind of just telling me I was crazy. I ended up going on hormone cream, a bioidentical hormone cream from my naturopath and got pregnant within two cycles. I tried those creams again two years ago trying to get pregnant. This time around and it didn't work the same way. So my problems changed after I had my son. My endometriosis I think got worse after pregnancy. I had until about ten months postpartum that my symptoms were pretty well controlled and my cycles were regular, which has never happened in my entire life. And then once I hit ten months postpartum, things just went crazy. Again. I think my uterus settled back into a very tilted position towards my sacrum. And then all the endometriosis came back, like way worse. And my cycles went back to 50-55 days apart. It was a lot worse. I definitely needed the LDN this time to calm all that inflammation down.
Linda Elsegood: So, what did your mom have to say?
Shauna: When I called my mom to tell her that I was pregnant, she was over the moon and I think she was trying to hold back the, “I told you so”.
Linda Elsegood: Yes, that's why I asked that question.
Shauna: The thing is, I could tell over the phone that she is holding it back. She wants to tell me I could have gotten pregnant way sooner. Thankfully my mom has learned a lot of grace. She has seven children, so she's used to asking kids pushing against her. You’d think by now after how many times that she's been right and we've been wrong, we would just trust her.
Linda Elsegood: You'll learn soon enough what that's all about,
Shauna: Yeah. It's a circle of life. Exactly.
Linda Elsegood: Exactly. Well, we wish you every success, and maybe you can come back and tell us how the pregnancy went and how the baby's doing and everything afterwards. Yeah. So it is your little boy looking forward to having a baby brother or sister.
Shauna: He likes the idea - he's been talking about wanting a sibling for the last couple of years, but I think he's actually forgotten and I haven't brought it up again with him. Mostly just 'cause I'm a little bit scared - there's still a chance of miscarriage - so I don't really want to bring it up again with him until I'm a little bit further along. But I think he's really hoping for a little sister because anytime he talks about wanting one, he talks about having a little sister. So we're hoping for a girl too.
Linda Elsegood: Okay. Thank you. Bye
Shauna: Bye.
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