In honor of Endometriosis Awareness Month, we bring you a story from one of Dr. Blotner’s endometriosis patients and her quest to preserve her future fertility.
Sherika remembers vividly the day she got her first period. She was jumping rope, a day after her 13th birthday, when it happened. At first her periods were uneventful. It wasn’t until she was 15 that things started changing.
A couple of years after her first period, Sherika noticed she was experiencing many new horrible symptoms every month: terrible cramps, vomiting, hot flashes and chills. She felt so sick that she would have to come home from school. Sherika’s mom, concerned, brought her to the doctor who told them both that this was all normal.
By the time Sherika was 18, her symptoms worsened. A close friend at her church suggested that maybe the symptoms were due to endometriosis, but Sherika brushed it off because her periods were light, not heavy, like many other women’s experience. Sherika then went to a homeopathic practitioner, who told her that a change in diet and herbal medicine would help her symptoms. Although it helped a little, it did not fix the problem. She ended up in the emergency room feeling week.
Sherika began marking her body to indicate pain and kept logs of her symptoms. She ended up in the emergency room again, this time with extreme pain in her lower left side. Was it a ruptured cyst on her ovary? Was it ovarian torsion? She didn’t know and neither did her doctor. Her doctor told her that she had to take a look on the inside to see what was causing all of the pain and booked her for an emergency exploratory surgery. Upon finding endometriosis, the doctor said to Sherika, “I am not sure how you have been living in this much pain.” Sherika was finally diagnosed with endometriosis in 2008.
After her first surgery, Sherika’s symptoms continued. The operating physician could not understand how she could still be in so much pain after having surgery for endometriosis and while on medical therapy. One of her colleagues questioned her mental stability. Sherika knew this was not the case and after much research found Dr. Michael Blotner.
Sherika immediately liked Dr. Blotner. He believed she was in pain and was committed to helping her. He performed another laparoscopy in 2009 and freed her left ovary from her pelvic wall. She eventually needed a third laparoscopy in 2011 to treat endometriosis again.
Research shows endometriosis is notorious for effecting the quality and quantity of a patient’s ovarian reserve. In 2012, Dr. Blotner discovered that Sherika had a low ovarian reserve. After each test, the ovarian reserve continued to decrease. Dr. Blotner expressed his concern and asked her to think about freezing her eggs as soon as possible. Shortly after that conversation, Sherika was relocated to D.C.. Due to the relocation, Sherika went to talk to a reproductive endocrinologist about freezing her eggs locally, knowing that egg freezing is an arduous process and commuting to NY would make it harder. The reproductive endocrinologist looked at her hormone levels and told her that her reserve is so low; there is no hope in freezing any egg. He refused to take her money for a procedure that he felt would ultimately fail.
Sherika was devastated and called Dr. Blotner to let him know what the other doctor said. Dr. Blotner assured her and said, “I can do this. You just have to trust me.”
Sherika did trust him, and they were able to retrieve and freeze 6 eggs. Although going through the process of an egg retrieval was difficult, emotional and overwhelming for Sherika, especially as a young single person, she is so grateful that she did it. When things were especially difficult she kept reminding herself that she was doing this for her future family. Sherika feels you cannot put a price tag on the security of having frozen eggs. Even though it strained her bank account and she is still paying it off, she feels she always would have regretted not doing it. Knowing that she has this safety net gives her a peace of mind that is priceless.
Many experts in the endometriosis field agree that a young girl diagnosed with endometriosis should seriously consider freezing her eggs to preserve her fertility. Westchester Fertility has been freezing eggs for patients for some time. One of their first patients to freeze her eggs is currently pregnant!
To learn more about Sherika’s story and her endometriosis advocacy work, check out her website: http://voicesofendo.com/