For this season, I'm going to migrate over to a new show called Making Sense of Pregnancy What Experts Want you to Know about Your Body:


This show is meant to be a new pregnancy reference that should fill you with both information that's useful to your pregnancy and awe about the project of growing another human in your body and what science does and does not understand about this amazing process.

I'm finding and talking with experts, doing cutting edge work to better understand pregnancy and what you can do to better understand your own experience.

I was pregnant three times and each time I experienced things that I never saw in any book about pregnancy, which led me to dig deeper and try to find answers to some of these mysteries or talk about where we are in the hunt to better understand how pregnancy works.

Each week, the research we highlight is focused on creating healthier pregnancies, Giving you the most current evidence-based way to approach this enormous transition in your life. I hope it will become your go-to source for how to make your pregnancy better.

This is a teaser episode of Making Sense of Pregnancy.

In this episode we'll talk about the distinct and important difference between childbirth related PTSD and postpartum depression. The two are often confused, and Its particularly important to figure out which path you may be on because although the symptoms can overlap, the treatment is entirely different.

You can find Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you to Know about your Body
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-sense-of-pregnancy-what-experts-want-you-to/id1779600854

https://open.spotify.com/show/75WWhQawTcxSSn9xtXW5Bt

This week, we hear the rest of Julia's story. More endo, a bit older, a shorter menstrual cycle, a medical community that was suggesting the pregnancy was unlikely again.

But Julia story should remind us to never bet against mother nature.

I'm also including the insights of a functional nutrition and integrative women's health expert who focuses on endometriosis.

Endometriosis is one of those topics that highlight how some areas of women's health have been historically. Let's say under researched. And if you go digging for those topics in the broad category of pregnancy, you will find more questions than answers. Because of that, I've started a new show called Making Sense of Pregnancy and which I interview scientists doing cutting edge work right now on a variety of topics to do with pregnancy. That may well change the way we manage and understand pregnancy both now and in the future.

We pick up where we left off last time, Julia and her husband are trying to get pregnant with their second child and have run into endometriosis as an obstacle again. And the idea of IVF surfaces...

To find Making Sense of Pregnancy--What Experts Want you to Know About Your Body: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/making-sense-of-pregnancy-what-experts-want-you-to/id1779600854

Pregnancy involves massive changes, and for some of us, one of the first hurdles is overcoming issues that have developed in our bodies that make getting pregnant and being pregnant difficult.

On the road to becoming pregnant, today's guest learned that she had endometriosis, an issue that she'd painfully lived with for years without a diagnosis, and which required surgery before a pregnancy could develop.

She also shares how the pregnancy and birth fulfills an earlier premonition.

Women's health, especially around fertility and pregnancy has not historically gotten the attention. It deserves. I've started a new podcast called Making Sense of Pregnancy in which I'm tracking the impressive progress. That's been made more recently in these areas. You can catch my new show. Making Sense of Pregnancy here: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/making-sense-of-pregnancy-what-experts-want-you-to/id1779600854

This is the second half of my rebroadcast conversation with Gill, a mother from England who experienced lots of physical challenges with her premature birth, which changed her life. The birth gave her a beloved son, but it also dramatically shifted her life: away from the job she'd had and the life she'd imagined into something entirely different and ultimately completely inspiring. Now: she's an advocate for women who encounter birth trauma and a full time source of inspiration. Today we pick up where we left off last week. Gill has finally met with a consultant who accurately diagnoses the tear she sustained in birth.

Chameleon Buddies: https://chameleonbuddies.org.uk/
Beyond Fistula: https://beyondfistula.org/

Today's guest overcame all the challenges that met her in birth, including a premature birth, a fourth degree tear and a misdiagnosis and a fistula and a stoma. Despite that list, this is an amazing story of resilience. Having had so many elements of her life overturned by her experience of birth, she was reborn in a way she could never have predicted.

She's challenging all the ideas that had created limits on her life and in the process, raising awareness and money for others who've experienced birth trauma and are living with a stoma.

Today I finish my conversation with Sascha. We hear about her triumphant home birth with her fourth pregnancy and the challenging outcomes of the two pregnancies that followed: what her experience was with the screening and diagnostic testing, and how she's moved on to her current pregnancy. We pick up where we left off last week: Sascha is being ushered to the hospital by her husband, so as to avoid a home birth with their third child.

Today we hear the really really from a woman whose experiences dramatically changed her approach to birth, from having the first one at a hospital, assuming that was the norm, to having her husband catch the fourth baby at her home birth, with a midwife looking on from the sidelines. She shares how she managed the challenges of extreme nausea, scary test results, and more.

diastasis recti:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22346-diastasis-recti

In today's episode we hear about the rest of Atara's experience. She talks about managing GBS and its consequences with her newborns, and the importance of nutrition before pregnancy.

We pick up today where we left off last week. Atara is pregnant with her second child and is experiencing a numbness on the left side of her body. She has figured out that she should be in the emergency room and what follows is what she encountered there...