Tea at Four - Ep 49: Fertility talks with Poppy Jamie: what's egg freezing really like and what do we need to know about sperm count?

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

This month, our episodes are all about GIRL LITERACY which is all about getting to know our bodies. For our final episode in the Girl Literacy campaign, Poppy Jamie, an author and entrepreneur who is currently going through an egg-freezing journey, joins the girls to chat all about our fertility. How has the sperm count been affected in recent years? And why it’s important for us to be more aware of fertility preservation. Lauren and Christie discuss with Poppy the idea of egg freezing - is this something we should think about even if you don’t know if you want children? They also chat about how wellness trends like intermittent fasting might negatively impact our fertility, and whether our generation are currently being priced out of having children at all. As part of our New Year’s Revolution campaign, Girl Literacy challenges our knowledge on our bodies and the effect it can have on our mental wellbeing and life choices. Through our content we aim to raise awareness of unspoken issues surrounding women’s health and bring them firmly into the group chat

Are we being priced out of the accessibility to fertility issues? Yes we are. This is ridiculous to me. I feel like a sentence that I've said quite a lot is that, oh I don't want kids till I'm 32 or 33 and the age has kept going up. Like is it a privileged sentence to be saying that kind of thing these days? Hi guys, welcome back to Tea at Four. I'm Lauren. And I'm Christy. As this month's episodes are all around body literacy and encouraging women to get to know their bodies, we only thought it

was right to tackle the conversation of fertility. Fertility may not be something we think about now but I do feel like it's important that we are educated so that we have more options in the long run. So for today's episode we were joined by Poppy Jamie who walks us through what it's like to go through fertility treatment. She also told us how to improve our overall egg health, but how we could be out of sperm by 2045. That is actually crazy. 2045. Mad. So yeah, it was a really interesting conversation and we hope you enjoy it.

So Poppy, you're here with us today for our fertility episode. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audiences, please? Hi, guys. Very excited to be here to talk about fertility my name is poppy jamie i'm an author i'm an entrepreneur and i have a podcast about all things mental health and mostly women's health too i'm quite excited um i do feel like the topic we're talking about today is one that's not spoken a lot on it doesn't surface the group chats very much like you talk about contraception sex self-pleasure but then we actually don't really dive deep into like the know about about fertility and i think this is the problem because we are all

educated about how not to get pregnant i have spent my entire life terrified of getting pregnant talking about contraceptive. I have taken the morning after pill so many times it feels like a smarty at this point. And I probably shouldn't have said that. I love it. But I have only recently started to realize how difficult it is to actually get pregnant.

And I think this is when the fertility conversation starts to be um actually quite shocking because I started to become interested in my fertility at 32 which is last year but I really wish someone had started to educate me about fertility a decade ago if not more because I've started to realize that the last 10 years have impacted where I am now which is with a diagnosis of low fertility premature ovarian decline and you start to realize there are so many factors that are influencing this general decline in fertility we're seeing globally um because our health is deteriorating and this is the thing we don't actually know how to make a baby we just know how to stop us from making a baby i think that's the big thing like there's not much awareness

i think we're we'll have a bit of a fear of the unknown when it comes to fertility the conversations I do have with my friends are around like oh well I probably should have maybe got pregnant in that occasion but I had a near miss does that mean I'm infertile and then the conversation just keeps kind of happening until I guess you think about going to conceive and then as you explain it's a bit too late was this a conversation you were having like with your friends people around you did you have to go seek medical help or did you go online what was your kind of process in finding this out it was quite strange because I remember waking up in the middle of the night having this thought oh I should get my fertility checked I'm 32 at the time I wasn't in a relationship and it was suddenly the age when you you know, we talk about the biological clock.

And I kind of tried for as long as I possibly could to deny that there was even such thing as a biological clock. Because, you know, I cared about my career. I wanted to accomplish X, Y, Z. I wanted to go visit these countries. I wanted to do all the things. And I didn't want to acknowledge that maybe my biology would prevent me from doing that. And, and so this idea of fertility started to kind of creep up in my subconscious. And then I spoke to a friend who was a year older than me, and was

telling me how she hasn't been able to get pregnant for three years and this was actually quite shocking I thought oh it it's it's it's a problem people struggle to get pregnant because if you're not in that age group it's just so unrelevant right I was just trying to still work out how I even found a date let alone you know anything else in this cycle um and I thought well you know what I'll just go and get my fertility checked and I just assumed the doctor was gonna go you're great and I would go along my way um and it's really difficult to get your fertility checked on the NHS so I had to go and find a private fertility check um and there's a couple of companies that do online that are you know it's a cost but it's doable um and um but i decided that um i wanted to actually go and

sit with someone in person and that was a bit more expensive because you can either do a test for example a company called fertility do these great at home tests and on the day three of your period you can you know takes a kind of swab of your blood and then you can send it back to the labs and then they will give you an indication of your fertility by checking your different hormonal levels okay and again this is also my introduction into hormones because I had no real idea about how different hormones can indicate how fertile you are. And so there's this hormone called AMH, your anti-malarian hormone.

Never had heard of this hormone prior. Yeah, exactly. And so the fertility test was a two-step process. The first step was a blood test where they wanted to check my FSH, your follicle-stimulating hormone, and your FSH, your follicle stimulating hormone and your AMH, your anti-malarian hormone. And those numbers give an indication, a snapshot in time of potentially how, you know, where your fertility lies. And then the second part of a fertility check, if you go in person is you have an ultrasound, which is essentially kind of an

ultrasound device that goes into your vagina and then checks to see how many follicles you have on your ovaries yeah i didn't even know what follicle was so i just thought our ovaries had an egg but actually that's not the case our inside our ovaries we have follicles and inside these follicles are where our immature eggs start to develop. And every single cycle, you have a number of follicles in each ovary, which then release those eggs or that dominant egg at the time of ovulation. And then if it isn't fertilized, it then is obviously released in your period. So you would hope, you know, kind of, you know, under 35, let let's say you would have a good amount of follicles um inside your ovaries but when i first got checked they couldn't find very

many at all and uh so the doctor started asking me loads of questions do you have heavy periods because if you are prone to endometriosis or if you have you know if you've got very heavy painful periods often you will have seen a gynecologist you'd have seen someone who would have spoken you spoken you through kind of ovarian health but I hadn't had any of these my periods have been totally fine they all had been quite regular throughout my life so that's why I just assumed I was really fertile and I could pretty much just delay the decision of needing to have a child to I know I was 40 because I knew a woman who had child at 42 I knew someone had a child at 43 so I thought I was totally fine yeah and obviously then it as as

the story unfolds the doctor sat down and said I have a fertility age of someone who's a decade older than me so actually she'd be looking at the levels that she was seeing in my body she would probably see in a woman who's about 42 oh my gosh and i was obviously so shocked yeah i find that quite like interesting and it's kind of scary that how um you see you can go to like a sexual health clinic you can get you can do home testing of stis and like you go to get your cervix screening why don't they just include those type of processes in those kind of appointments just so that people are aware earlier that's it just a general

awareness rather than waiting till in the middle of the night it hits you yeah you've only got a reference point i guess of like that 40 year old person you know that's had a baby later on in life right exactly and this is what i feel really passionate about that we need to educate our friends our cousins our family yeah all about kind of fertility and just getting checked earlier because you could be fine you could go you could have your amh checked and it's perfect numbers and you just go woohoo it's all good a bit like if for example std you get an std check all clear all good brilliant yeah on we go but for example if you do if you

are vulnerable to low fertility and there are so many reasons why this could be then at least you have choices yeah and if i had let it go any longer then I was told I could end up infertile without the choice to have children and even though I'm not ready to have children I'm not my life is not in a place where I'm ready to have a child right now but I want to have the choice because I want to be a mother at some point and I think that we are um doing such a disservice to women currently because there is such a lack of education there's such lack of awareness and to your brilliant point there is such a lack of services and accessibility to this information that we should know about our bodies 100 i know you're

kind of describing this as an individual case as well but i know as a woman that's kind of peeped into this whole subject there is a general fertility crisis that's happening isn't there and i know obviously men don't have that biological clock but are environmental factors affecting all of us absolutely and also there is a huge myth to bust here which is that men do have a biological clock right sperm health does decline with age and yes it is possible to have a child and father a child at the age of 70 years old but does that mean you're going to have a completely healthy child maybe not because as age and also if you're not looking after yourself for example i interviewed an amazing reproductive expert um's called Dr. Helen O'Neill

and she's the founder of a brilliant fertility company called Hertility and she was saying that she in in her PhD they looked at sperm under a microscope and they looked at sperm that hadn't been exposed to vaping and the sperm were swimming around and then they looked at sperm that hadn't been exposed to vaping and the sperm were swimming around. And then they looked at sperm having been exposed to vaping and the sperm were barely moving. And so sperm health is declining. There's an expert called Dr. Shana Swan who wrote the book Countdown. And she is a population epidemiologist and has been looking at the decline in sperm count since the 90s and she's found that sperm is declining nearly two percent every single year and even suggests that we are going to be out of sperm by 2045 and you and so i'm fascinated to ask the question but why why is men's sperm count dropping and also why are more women experiencing

more fertility struggles and you have to look into environmental factors diet and lifestyle yeah i would love to ask a bit more about your fertility treatment journey um but also the way you've decided to document that on social media um it obviously has helped get the conversation around here but how have you found have you found it hard to kind of show it all I guess because you don't you're not glamorizing it but you're also wanting to show the brutalities of what comes with it so when I first got diagnosed and then when I had my first round of egg freezing, I felt a tremendous amount of shame. And I think that's because firstly, I hadn't really heard that many people talk about it openly. And so it felt, well, if no one, and I knew people who had done it.

So I thought, well, if no one's talking about it openly, why are we not having a conversation? Should we feel that this is really private yeah and then I felt shame because I think that at some point on a really deep kind of subconscious level I think that women are very much seen as obviously because we create babies right and so I suddenly thought well who am I if I'm not going to be very good at creating babies I've just been told I have low fertility so am I just deeply unattractive and I was single at the time I remember thinking to myself oh my gosh maybe I'll never get in a relationship because who would want to date me if I'm if I can't produce and it was and and and it's it's it's crazy talk in some ways because

you know I've built two businesses I've written a book I'm you know why would I be um attaching my value on something which is feels kind of just so ancient right you know women we've had so much progress in our ability to be these humans that didn't just have to be these gendered humans. We could just be these humans that wanted to do different things and follow our desires and be able to have ambitions.

Not just be mothers. And thank God for all those women that helped us be in the positions we are now, right? But at the same time, I did have this kind of shame yeah and um and um so I grappled with it for a few months and really didn't share much about it um I filmed the whole um first treatment so I had all this content which again felt weird to me because usually if I filmed content I'll just put it out yeah um and for some reason I was holding it back um and at the moment i'm i'm working on a couple

of kind of more long-form projects around this topic um and so i thought you know i'll just wait i'll just wait and then i had to redo my egg freezing process i just did not really redo it but i did it for a second time and uh and i had kind of just really explored this shame. Why do I feel shame? And then was kind of able to break through the shame and realize just how ridiculous that is. And actually, if I can't have children, then there are many other options, you know?

And I had to really come to terms with that and actually feel happy with that. And so I decided to be very open with this next round of egg freezing and it's been incredible the conversations that's opened it's opened up and the amount of people that reached out and and again egg freezing is an expensive process and you know and had to really save up for it and all the things that I thought I was saving up for have now to take a way back seat and i had to use that those funds for this um for this

kind of for this egg freeze freezing procedures but i couldn't be more grateful to science and technology it's not a perfect treatment by any means but i couldn't be more grateful that science and technology have created a procedure that could help us preserve our fertility for longer and mean that we have more choices for longer yeah it's incredible so like through the process of your fertility test and going through the documenting as you were doing um how has the support been have people reached out more of the more is that more people talking about it is it more conversations you bring up with your friends um yes i've had so many people reach out and and and now i feel that this is the main topic between me and my friends i just was with some friends this weekend and i feel i must have spoken about it to every single

woman that was there because it is something that's affecting all of us and actually more men have come and spoke to me as well because you you know, I because I think men are looking into freezing their sperm now. And also a lot of men realize that this is something their girlfriend has to go going to have to go. Yeah. And so, yes, I think this is a topic that is affecting everyone. is a topic that is affecting everyone and you know even if you're a mother even if you're in your 40s or 50s you may have a child that is you know thinking about having a child um or you know i think the something that um scott galloway um who's a podcaster and an academic a professor what he talks about is we're in a mating crisis women can't find appropriate mating partners and men can't find appropriate mating partners and men can't find appropriate mating

partners and more people are single than ever and the statistics say that more people are having less sex than ever before so you know prior to all even the fertility it's even just you know finding a relationship you feel that you would want to bring another human being into and that's kind of having its own crisis yeah so i think this topic is very relevant to all different ages. Yeah. How long does the whole process take? I guess you've shown the, you'd have to show it all. You don't have to show it all, but you have the positive moments and then the harder moments.

What toll does that take on you physically and mentally? So egg freezing lasts for roughly two weeks and you're essentially stimulating your body with hormones for the first half of your of your cycle of your menstrual cycle and um and you have you start taking um a set of injections to essentially um allow your body to overstimulate the eggs um in your ovaries inside the follicles so because what happens usually on a cycle you have um a couple of dominant eggs or one dominant egg and the other follicles that are not going to be needed just you know kind of dissolve i'm sure a doctor can say that technically but this is very kind of general explanation but that what the drugs do is mean that every follicle develops an immature egg

so it means that when it cut when you come to your retrieval you can extract as many eggs as possible and freeze them and so on average, doctors would really hope to extract 15 eggs, if not more, per cycle. And that would mean that you would, I don't know, hopefully stimulate seven or eight follicles on each side, rather than just one. And so you're usually taking an injection in the morning and in the evening, and then after a certain few

days you're you go in every other day to get blood tests done and have a scan to see that your hormones are rising as they should right and you're and you're and essentially you are increasing your oestrogen a lot so depending on how your body reacts to a lot of oestrogen is really how this process will feel so some people are great on lots of oestrogen is really how this process will feel. So some people are great on lots of oestrogen. They feel re-energized and other people feel really emotional or other people feel really tired. So egg freezing very much, the effect of egg freezing very much changes depending on how your body responds to hormones. hormones yeah um and then at a certain point in the stimulation you will then have to take another injection which basically prevents your eggs from being released because the last thing you want is to grow these follicles and you know these immature eggs within the follicles and for them to be

released before your retrieval day yeah and then 36 hours before your retrieval you'll do your trigger injection which um which then completely prepares the body for uh operation that you go through a general anesthetic you get put to sleep totally painless is the easiest part of the whole thing totally painless and you wake up 45 minutes later and your eggs have been extracted um And then you are told how many are mature enough to be frozen. And this is where it can be quite emotionally challenging because you could think you had one number of eggs and then actually find out you have a different number able to be frozen because they can only froze mature eggs.

So if they've extracted slightly immature eggs, those there's not used and they have to be kind of thrown away and and the young you are the your chances of retrieving more eggs in a cycle goes higher so in a way this is in a way I hope that the cost of egg freezing comes down and so it means that women at younger ages can freeze their eggs. And then you don't have the biological clock pressure so much. Because you're not on this timescale of when you can or cannot get pregnant before.

Yeah, I think as well, it's interesting. I guess me thinking about that a couple years ago when I was single maybe people wait till they're in a relationship when they start thinking about these things like should it be even a greater thing for people that are on their own or I think so I first did it when I was single yeah and I just it just gave me quite a lot of reassurance knowing that i'm not on this crazy clock to find someone and actually i can take my time and choose a partner that feels right yeah i feel like a sentence that i've said quite a lot is that um you know oh i don't want kids till i'm 32 or 33 and the age has kept going up like is it a privileged sentence to be saying that kind

of thing these days like is our our bodies maybe aren't catching up with the modern times i know worry isn't the word but a care at what age do you think is like i should be worried about that thing or i should be thinking about my fertility i think the younger we can start having the conversation around fertility the better because when we are educated about something we then give ourselves choices and to me education is empowerment and that is what i hope for every man and woman and um person because we i want everyone to live the life they want to live um and we don't want to get to a point in our life when suddenly doors have shut just because we haven't been told something yeah i think but all these things that you're bringing up even you describing your process

of looking into your fertility and maybe going through private health care rather than what's available in the nhs are we being priced out of um the accessibility to fertility issues yes we are yeah and that is why we all need to use our vote and our voice to make sure this becomes more accessible because this is ridiculous to me right to me this is mental yeah because there should be an issue the government wants to help us with this is a collective problem we need children i was just told this morning that a hundred schools are closing this year because there's not enough children in the classroom yeah and a lot of schools like multi-faith schools are now not like single-faith schools or like girls schools are having to mix now because they ain't got the funding for the from the government and also there's not enough kids

in the classes for them to kind of like continue on into the years and i find that crazy because we we desperately need kids to be born because we have a crazy aging population yeah where who's going to look after us when we're old when we have no children being born and so i am all for women choosing not to have children because they don't want children it's their choice yeah but when it's involuntary childlessness and they want children they can't because of biological reasons or they can't have access to ivf to me that is so unjust yeah so when when should the conversation start like is it a school thing is it like I don't know teens is it when you're starting puberty because I can think about the conversations you have in school and

that's probably not the time where I'm like retaining all this information about oh in 20 years time when I'm thinking about having a child when am I going to be the most fertile and things like that so how do we incorporate this conversation into like everyday lives well it's interesting and I do think about this a lot and I I actually think that at school age you are aware enough to be able to differentiate between um fertility and also sex ed sex ed being this is this is how you do not get pregnant this is what sex is this is what happens during sex and also this is your fertility and what contributes to your fertility what is ovarian health we never taught about ovaries and actually how do we preserve our ovarian health because those ovaries at one point are going to create hopefully children if you want them and how do we make sure that we are looking after ourself to look after the

generation next yeah and i think again that i was never really educated about that about what i do to my body now is potentially gonna have an impact right on my kids yeah that's true it's like you say about the vaping thing as well and i've got an irk with vaping i'll just say it now um i i just wish that the younger generations have that general care yeah for just these kind of things and how it's gonna affect us in the long run i do feel like as you see how compulsory maths english and sciences i feel like general health yeah health and social care should be compulsory too right because if nobody tells you about these things you're not going to be you're not going to care and if let's say your favorite celebrity doesn't

speak on a certain topic who's going to influence you to at least touch on these type of subjects and stuff so i um i set up a mental health company nearly nine years ago before anybody wanted to talk about mental health and um and i feel like we are kind we're we are there in the where i was in mental health nine years ago is where i find myself now again with fertility with everyone going oh what was that nine years ago nobody spoke about mental health no one understood how different your mental health can be from a day-to-day basis or what impacts your mental health or the fact that we need to talk about it in order to help us manage it yeah um this was all very much conversation that's happened relatively recently and i feel that fertility is is hopefully going to be that next conversation where we start to understand it because even if you don't care about

children it's really just a biomarker of health because if your fertility is you know on the decline which mine was prematurely then that indicated quite a lot about my health so for example i started to realize that a lot of the wellness advice i'd seen online really wasn't working for me for example i and look i really respect everyone's decision if you don't want to eat meat but i went vegan now since i have included meat back into my diet i was able to double the amount of follicles i found on my ovaries and inside my ovaries and so i and and because i had to i had to i then went to freeze my eggs and we could talk about that and i've actually had to freeze my eggs twice because i couldn't get as many eggs as you need okay out the first time but yeah i had to truly change my

lifestyle and i was able to actually increase my amh level so i included meat again in my diet i also went on a crazy intermittent fasting um fasting is supposed to be amazing right supposed to be it's supposed to be it's scientifically oh it wasn't really it's not oh interesting now look there's different reasons why you might there's different reasons why you might fast yeah yeah but i again you know listen to some bros podcast that tells me that i should be intermittent fasting intermittent fasting is the savior of all things yeah i truly seen that title on a bunch of podcasts followed it and actually have had to megally stop intermittent fasting and force myself to have breakfast because i trained myself not to be hungry in the mornings i was intermittent fasting for four like four four

years or something yeah and um and that's when i started to realize women and again i'm i know that i'm not going to use these terms like correctly given there's so many different like gender terms these days but just to i'm just to not confuse things i'm going to just be quite literal in the sense that a woman's body is very different from a man's body in terms of what we need our hormones the way that we need to look after our bodies so for example women's bodies that we need to be in a state as much as we possibly can of safety because if and i and i asked i asked um a doctor whether this kind of analogy is correct um because it's quite general but if you think about it go back to kind of prehistoric times if we were running away from a lion why would our reproductive system feel that it needs to be active

if we were constantly stressed so intermittent fasting puts the body in stress because we are hungry yeah and we are potentially in the wilderness without any food yeah and and actually for our fertility our body needs to feel safe and it's to feel like our needs are being met we need to feel like we're an environment whereby if we had a child the child would survive we're not in a food scarce environment and so i had to really change my entire nervous system because i think i led a very high stress lifestyle. I was working like 14 hours a day. I was on an aeroplane every two weeks.

I was intermittent fasting, you know, cold showers, you know, you name the wellness trend, I was doing it. And actually now realizing, did wellness make me sick? I mean, we're all, I mean, I don't want to say victims. We're not victims but i've definitely been a part of all them fads and at the time i'm thinking this is helping my weight loss this is helping my hair growth this is helping um my energy for work but i'm never thinking oh is that going to affect my fertility yeah it's the last thing that you think about right oh yeah i'm

young i can have babies but then at the same time that privileged thought of me going i'm gonna be able to have babies whenever i think of it's that discrepancy is quite alarming i guess so we asked our audience members two questions online one which was what did you learn about pregnancy and fertility in school and the other was would you consider egg freezing and the results were quite interesting right lauren yeah i think a lot of it again stems back to like those conversations that we had like around like pregnancy and yeah reproducing what did you learn about fertility and pregnancy in school and someone put um basically nothing about contraceptives any impact that they have on fertility um it was always framed as a woman's issue so um another one said um i learned to avoid pregnancy with condoms and not much about

fertility at all yeah i always get scared about contraceptives we did an episode the other day with um the founder of the lowdown like a contraception contraceptive forum and i think that's another big conversation is that i don't really know how this works i know we're told that it doesn't affect our fertility but i am putting something into my body again that i don't know really how it works or the long-term effects maybe we need to be more educated on that as well um and someone also said um my school was really good at teaching us about sex in the female cycle although i feel we could learn more about what actually happens to you when pregnant but it's also saying don't get pregnant so it's like what we're saying yeah um another one says

men can have children at any time it's more difficult for women to get pregnant after 35 yeah uh someone said i learned that women can get pregnant after 35. Yeah. Someone said, I learnt that women can get pregnant from having sex with men. That's about it. Yeah. Crazy. Mind blowing.

Yeah. I think for me it was always, yeah, don't, don't, don't have sex. You don't have to have children. You have time. You're still young.

But then I've got an older sister and she's, she had, she has all boys so three boys they're triplets they're twins twins and one boy and then when it came to her having her female her female her girl literally it was absolutely a struggle for her she waited a good three four years until she had um joanna my niece and she didn't have to go through all the you know talking to doctors but it's something that okay yes i've had children before i can have children again so for her it was like she was taking her back yeah secondary infertility is is actually quite common yeah it was really easy to

have your first child and then they really struggle having the second yeah and and you're right people are shocked and they don't realize actually how common it is. And that's the thing. It's so easy then to feel alone and to feel like you've got the problem. And actually, this really is a universal problem. Birth rate is declining in pretty much every single country. And even the countries that still have a high birth rate, that is declining. So there is no country at the moment, as far as i know um who has a inclining birth rate wow i think yeah what i remember i've been talking about at school is that everyone can do it yeah like there was just never any skepticism

not even skepticism but like talk about this is what could be impacting your fertile health or yeah it's a very idealistic view of how when you want to have babies this is how you're going to do it and everything's going to be easy and it's quite greedy and like privileged yeah i'm privileged of us because it's like i'm like i've always said i want my twins i want two kids that's all i want twins but i'm thinking okay cool you do you want this what are you doing to enable that happens yeah i mean honestly could not have summed it up better that is truly like hopefully the nut of this conversation we just had which is great if you want them fantastic if you don't want them also fantastic but if you want them

what are you doing to help yourself for as long as possible to have them because the last thing i want women to be in is bad relationships um you know and and feeling compromised just because they haven't thought about this earlier so that's why i just love the topic of fertility preservation because to me this is true empowerment of women yeah and to sum that up um we asked our audience if they'd ever look into egg freezing and we had 67 say yes and 33 saying no which is a lot 60 is a lot of people and that's absolutely brilliant um and this is one thing i would love to say about egg freezing is that don't get me wrong it's a process and um but also i really hope people don't feel scared about it and i know a lot

of people are terrified of needles but i promise you you just get through it and um i wrote an article um about egg freezing and 10 things you should know. And the first one was really define your reasons for doing it. Because there are times you do feel a bit hormonal. You know, you're slightly crying for no reason. And I really had to just go back to that list of why am I doing this? And then in the moments that you're like, oh, am I really putting this injection in me? You're like, no, I'm doing injection in me you're like no i'm doing this for a reason i'm so lucky i'm so lucky i'm so lucky i'm so lucky i'm so lucky we live in

you know a world and a country that we can do this so um i if you if air guy freezing is accessible and also let's put political pressure on the government to make sure that this is more accessible for more people and we're gonna have a general election coming up. What are they doing to help us either have fertility preservation treatment or help us economically have a child? Because what are they doing for childcare? What are they doing to help us

be able to raise the next generation? And that's the thing is it's both, right? Because if you feel mentally ready to have a child younger, then we should be supporting the people that want to do that. That's true. So yeah, so I think we can help each other by the way that we vote

and the political pressure we put on. Richie Sunak, you heard it here first. Please and thank you. Thank you and please. So we're now going to test our very own general knowledge around fertility okay with the following questions so how much does ivf cost in the uk okay i was watching eastenders and they were actually going no i love you spend this guy sorry of all knowledge but they are actually doing a storyline on um fertility crisis and i think sonia is going through is it ivf i think it is um and it's around the grands right it should be grands which one like maybe like i'm gonna say like nine eight nine Seven. Poppy, do you know?

I do know. Well, I do know because I've gone through it, but different clinics cost different amounts, and medication also costs quite a lot. So that's a lot of hidden costs in egg freezing, which you should be aware of. On the whole, for example, my egg freezing, the actual egg freezing cost

3,800 and then the cost of the medication was about 1,200 and then I had a couple of extra blood tests that cost so all in all it was you know we're coming just under 5k but there are there are clinics that you can find which will try to keep it to my nose i don't think you can necessarily with medication i haven't yet to find a clinic that can necessarily do it under five that's the answer here yeah up to five grand so they were lying on these vendors i'm sure they weren't lying he paid around 10 grand so ivf is different so this is egg freezing ivf then gets the sperm and inseminates the egg outside of the body and then re-implants so that's why you are right um this was just the yeah egg freezing and ivf ivf is more expensive right but five is expensive yeah and that's not that

none of this is can be free on the NHS um yes it can be free on the NHS however the you have to some of the um requirements are quite tough for example which I think the NHS needs to be changed it's absolutely ridiculous in my opinion how the NHS is structured in regards to this you have to have been trying for a child with a partner so you can't do anything just for out of like preservation if you're single so you've got to be having try you have to be trying uh for a year you have to have your AMh over a certain level so for example my amh was lower than what the nhs um would would agree to yeah um so i would have been classed as infertile on the nhs oh my god um and there's a couple of other requirements that they that they look for in order to pay for ivf um and also age you can't get it over a certain age so um yeah the nhs needs to be reformed

when it comes to this interesting so how much does ivf cost in the usa oh i reckon it's gonna be way more wow so i just read the answer yeah they're just pumping that stuff of inflation over there aren't they maybe let's say 15 grand it's something like 35 to 50 you're joking it says 15 to 30 grand dollars yeah jesus yeah i would say it's probably for ivf yeah i would say it's more yeah wow wow wow wow to grow up in a country that is not free yeah interesting okay that's crazy yeah how second question how common is infertility I know the answer so I'll let you go okay okay I is it like a percentage or how out of how many couples like one in oh one in oh i don't know maybe four out of ten couples

are infertile no 40 50 50 way less one in six oh okay but yeah one in six will experience difficulty conceiving interesting yeah wow um okay should i do mine yeah let's hear it as a woman when does your fertility start to decline um is it like 27 no don't say that because i know no don't say that i know it can't be is it not like oh or something like your your eggs are the most ripe isn't the word but like is it 27 when they're the most like fruitful and then i want to say i'm 29 um i was gonna say 28 27 sounds it's very young well i think i think before i looked into this i thought it was going to be like 30 32 yeah. Yeah, I don't think it is. Or 35, is it?

I don't know. I don't know. Well, separately to the answer, your ovaries are the fastest aging organ in the body. Your fertility begins to decline in your late 20s. So you are right. And accelerates the decline after the age of 35. accelerate the decline after the age of 35 a healthy 30 year old is has a 20 chance compared to a 40 year old who has a five percent chance of getting pregnant yeah but you see that lady in uganda the other day that had seven children no no she had twins

at like 70 oh yeah 70 oh yeah yeah i did actually so i think we'll be alright. That's the wrong thinking, isn't it? Do women's eggs replenish? Okay, what does replenish? So for example, once, let's say, an egg has been released in a menstrual cycle, can you get it back? No, once it's gone, it's gone, isn't it? No, surely it does.

Once it's been released in a menstrual cycle oh oh where do they go it comes out your body no because that's the period in your period yeah correct women are born with their lifetime supply of eggs already in their ovaries so that's what what i actually think is quite sweet is that we have our grandmother's eggs we have our grandmother's eggs. We have our mother's eggs. Yeah. I love that. Maternal line is really strong. Wow. That is cute. So yeah, women are born with their lifetime supply of eggs already in their ovaries, which starts to release from their first menstrual cycle.

Wow. Which is actually, I don't think totally correct. I actually think you start, you release eggs basically since you're born. By the time puberty starts, you've already lost half your eggs. Right. Interesting. When should you consider freezing your eggs?

As soon as possible and when you're ready. Oh, yeah. Is there an age limit? No. No. And the answer says here is in your 20s or early 30s but you're right it's just when you're ready and um wow yeah okay all right i've got a couple here true or false hanging upside down for 20 minutes after sex helps sperm reach your egg i've seen j-lo do it in film

so obviously stupid mind would have assumed yes but definitely no false so false we'll say yeah you know what it's so funny because i have heard both answers yeah i've heard i've read oh that's such a myth and then i've had so many women say do it so i actually think that sometimes science isn't always right so i'm gonna go I'm going to go with like, you know, good old elderly advice that says it's true and say it's right. Yeah. Well, it says false here,

but I'm going to go with the same thing as you're saying. I've seen it in films so much. Also, it can't, it can't, you know, it's not going to damage you. No,

no. Okay. True or false? Masturbating lowers a man's fertility. Absolutely false. Increases it. Really? Yeah. no um okay true or false masturbating lowers a man's fertility absolutely false increases it really yeah men need to masturbate oh so do women that's really yeah help women's as well yeah get busy later okay yeah it's really healthy to masturbate that's really interesting what's the science behind that you're just stimulating the hormones right yeah i think i mean i i was thinking that

i mean imagine that again we'd probably have to ask a doctor but from like kind of a general common sense point of view uh masturbating reduces cortisol and it's relaxing and so anything that we can do to kind of reduce cortisol is going to be good um and i think i don't i you know what we're gonna have to look into the exact reason but uh we just need to get it all active down there don't we make sense make sense um when was the first ivf baby born? Oh, I reckon the 90s. Oh, this is, you know what? I actually read an article about the, because she just recently gave an interview.

I think you're right. I would like to say something like 98, but. I can see it on the front of OK Magazine. Hello. Just like a photo shoot. Well, guys, the first baby born with IVF was July 1978. Oh, what? In Oldham,

North West England. 78? 1978. God, we were way off. Yeah. Wowza. I don't think OK Magazine existed back then.

Yeah, I was going to say because the woman looked old in the interview. Like, I'm born in the 90s. So my step-brother wasn't younger than me. OK. Interesting.

True or false? Adoption was thought to be a cure for infertility. That doesn't even make sense. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. That's false. It's not a cure. It says here, in the mid 20th century,

some doctors thought that adoption was a cure for infertility. They believed it to be psychosomatic. So having a child to mother would relax and cure them. Oh. Oh. it to be psychosomatic so having a child to mother would relax and cure them oh oh so i guess the same thought around having a stress-free stress-free lifestyle stress-free reproductive or do you think they were like activating their maternal instincts or some sort of yeah that's very interesting very strange wow i'm just i'm quiet because i'm thinking and i'm thinking about the steps of i've got to take for myself so i really appreciate the conversation that we've had today and for those that are listening please take the responsibility yeah to look after your reproductive system

yeah do you have any leaving words anything i think you summed that up really well which is yeah let's take responsibility to understand our reproductive health understand our ovary health and um and also know that we're all different so don't panic because you could be listening to this and be absolutely fine and you could be the most fertile person in the world so um don't assume that my story may have any relevance to your story but it's one of those things that it's great to know and then you can relax yourself um and uh and also know that you know i spoke about fasting but again all bodies are different so people could really respond well to fasting i guess my main message is just know that we are

so individual so don't listen to a tiktok video or don't listen to a podcast or don't read something online and just assume that that wellness advice should be applied to yourself yeah um just take the initiative to know that your body is very different to everybody else's knowledge is power yeah and could you also just like drop where's the best place to search for like more information like is there any like websites or like sites you would recommend for anybody listening there is i believe a national kind of egg freezing uh organization that will validate clinics so really research if you are interested make sure you do your due diligence on the clinic you go to not all clinics are the same so look at success rates look at doctors really do your homework as to where you would go for this there are um um there are a more cost-effective tests on the market now and and also know that those tests are a snapshot in time

and so like i've experienced i have changed my lifestyle i've changed the way i exercise and i've now seen my amh increase um which look i don't know if this is going to affect my fertility because i'm not trying for a child but i'm happy to clearly be living a more reproductive kind of healthy lifestyle now that i know this information um but yes fertility um is a great company and there are there are kind of various others so look at the reviews and just just just do your homework don't take anything at face value yeah thank you so much for sharing your story with us today poppy it's been amazing loved it and sorry and we will see you guys next week for another episode of two four thanks for joining us