Over 30 years ago, I had a slight scare when some of the cells on my cervix came back suspicious in a routine pap test. So I had cryotherapy, in which my abnormal cervical cells were destroyed by freezing with liquid carbon dioxide. The timing of that procedure was a tad inconvenient, though, because a few days later, I [...]
When I was 25 years old, I spent an incredible year volunteering on a kibbutz in Israel. You can imagine that back then fertility was the furthest thing from my mind. Instead, I would wake up before dawn, drag myself out of bed and walk in the freezing cold across the kibbutz to the cafeteria, where the only people [...]
You would think that this would be a fairly straightforward question, right? In reality, it’s not that simple. And to add more intrigue, the answer depends on whether you are trying to get pregnant or avoid pregnancy. What? While it’s true that the basic answer is that most women are fertile for only a few days per cycle, there [...]
Can a woman get pregnant if she isn’t menstruating? Or another way of putting it is: Can a woman assume she doesn’t need to use birth control because she isn’t having periods? Actually, the answer is not as intuitive as you’d think. On the surface, any self-respecting educated person might think “Of course she can’t get pregnant if [...]
When my book was first released in 1995, email was barely a blip on the horizon, so the only feedback I initially got came in the form of handwritten letters overflowing my stuffed PO Box at the local post office. One of the letters I received had a Russian return address. It was from one of my readers [...]
It would be fabulous if there were an easy way to count the remaining eggs in your ovary, in much the same way that you could open a carton of eggs from the refrigerator and count how many good ones remain. Alas, there isn’t, but there are several tests that, along with your age, offer the best tools [...]
OK, to be geographically correct, the ovaries containing a woman’s eggs are outside of her uterus, but for purposes of the title, are we kumbaya with me taking some slight artistic liberties? At any rate, one of the first questions a fertility doctor inevitably asks is your age. This is because it’s still one of the best indicators [...]
It’s only natural that once people pass over the 50-year milestone, they start the requisite soul-searching that accompanies such a birthday. I must be a little delayed in that department, because here I am, in my late 50’s — OK, 61 to be exact — and it’s only now that I’ve started the process. Do I regret all [...]
For women who don’t chart, they may have no clue that occasionally they don’t release an egg, assuming that if they are bleeding, they must have periods, right? Wrong. Not all bleeding is created equally. Of course, most of the time, it is due to a true period, but it can also be a symptom of [...]
When my niece got her first period 10 years ago, I decided that this date was worthy of celebrating every year moving forward. So every single August 28th , I take her to lunch at an ethnic restaurant, figuring that this way, not only do we commemorate that life- changing day, but I share with her a love [...]
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