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Fertility Neighborhood
March 9, 2004
Author Uses Past Infertility Struggles
to Reach Out to Others
by John C. Martin
Wrestling with infertility struggles can leave some couples reeling, ready to give up or face life with a sense of hopelessness. And while the realization of infertility wasn't an easy struggle for one New England woman, it became the catalyst for a much broader purpose: her role as the keystone of support for other couples who had embarked down the same, traumatic path.
"My husband and I started trying to have a baby right away, and it just didn't happen," said Kristen Magnacca, a Boston-based business strategy consultant and self-proclaimed "Life Coach". "And we went through all the diagnostic evaluations, and we found out that there were both male and female issues."
A Bump in the Road
Kristen and her husband, Mark, had had many previous successes in their lives. Kristen founded a preschool and learning center at the age of 22, and later co-founded Insight Development Group–a sales training, coaching and consulting firm–with her husband in 1996. She had also served on the board of directors of her city's Chamber of Commerce.
As a result, the unexpected challenges with their parenthood plans weren't what Kristen and Mark had bargained for. "We started in '95 right when we got married, and it took us three years to have our son," Kristen told Priority Healthcare.
Today, son Cole is age 5, and his sister, Grace, was born in the summer of 2003. But before that all happened, Kristen says she strode a path of depression and confusion in reaching her motherhood goal.
When the couple first learned of their fertility challenges, doctors suggested that she and Mark both undergo surgery to clear her fallopian tubes and to increase his sperm count. This also necessitated the use of fertility drugs.
The couple went through intrauterine insemination (IUI), a procedure designed to increase the number of sperm that enter the uterus, boosting the odds of fertilization.
Another Setback
In 1997, after undergoing three cycles of IUI, Kristen suddenly found out she was pregnant, but it wasn't long before she was rushed to the hospital after learning it was ectopic. That launched a bout of depression.
But Kristen knew that staying depressed wasn't going to help her reach her goal. "I said to my husband, 'Either I'm going to stay upset with God and life and stay in my bedroom or do something about it,'" she recalled.
That eventually led to her first book, Girlfriend to Girlfriend: A Fertility Companion, a compilation of Kristen's perspectives while enduring her struggles, and a guide to other couples who may be following in her footsteps.
In the book, Kristen describes the uncertainty she felt in discovering that she and Mark could not conceive, and the envy she endured in learning that her friends had become pregnant. "I felt the instant need to run to our bathroom and become violently ill," she writes, after learning of her friends' pregnancy news.
Kristen also describes the emotional upheaval she encountered. "I never entertained the thought that my quest for our child would lead me to the darkest night of my soul," she writes. "I would lose faith in my body, my mind, my marriage and my God."
Clearing Confusion for Others
In fact, she is particularly forthright in the book about her feelings and her marriage during this time, a notion about which her husband had some reservations. But Kristen convinced him that it would be valuable to others.
"I decided that I would write our story in hopes of helping other couples going through this," she said.
In her book, she not only describes the pain she endured, but the medical evaluations that she and Mark both underwent, as well as their determination to have a child using ART. Kristen describes the emotional rollercoaster that she and her husband endured during this time. After learning of her ectopic pregnancy she writes: "How could I explain to someone else what I was feeling–physically or emotionally? I was pregnant yesterday, and today I'm not? How does that happen? How would a God allow this to happen? After all we had been through. This news was the shot across the bow that altered my entire being."
But eventually, after years of emotional pitfalls, she describes the exhilaration of a positive pregnancy test.
Adapting Their Message
Much of the message in the book is adapted from the lessons that Kristen and Mark teach to business executives in helping them achieve peak performance in their respective professions. In addition to private consultations, the couple hosts executive seminars around the country.
And Kristen has taken the approach one step further, designing her own seminar "Strategies for Survival: Balancing Infertility, Marriage and Life" for couples facing an infertility diagnosis.
The seminar is "focused on how you can overcome, cope and communicate, and deal with the changes of infertility using some of these business strategies that we had applied," she explained.
Some of those include goal-setting, creating a fertility game plan and understanding human communication in order to leverage that knowledge to better communicate with your partner.
If you think that sounds like a busy schedule, Kristen has also launched a division of Insight Development Group called Identify Your True Potential, in which she coaches women to gain more balance in their lives by focusing on the true sources of their strengths and their personal and professional talents.
Kristen has developed five strategies that she uses to help couples struggling with their own infertility challenges:
Create a Life Game Plan
"When we talk to couples, we talk about what we know now–what we wished we knew then," Kristen says. "You try to give the other person what you think they need without really asking them what they need. So, one of the strategies that we talk about is, really, sitting down and doing your personal goals."
When she and her husband were struggling to start a family, this became their premiere goal in life, and other activities and goals took a back seat. But by setting specific goals, couples have other objectives on which to focus–creating a sort of "distraction", so that having a baby doesn't become so all-encompassing that it evolves into being overwhelming.
3x5 Card Communication System
Kristen teaches that communicating with one's partner means understanding his or her needs from his or her perspective. "For us, our marriage came into crisis after we lost the baby because it was, really, a lot of finger-pointing," she explained. Kristen and Mark blamed each other because the other's reaction to the loss didn't meet expectations. "I was afraid to the point that we probably weren't going to stay married," she said.
But Kristen learned that Mark was a "visual" person; that he needed to see things in writing to be able to understand and relate. That turned into an exercise in which each of them wrote down three things on a 3x5 card that they needed from each other each day. And it was successful. "It sounds very simple, but it was profound for us," Kristen recalled. "It makes you feel that you're both on the same sheet of music, even though you're coping [with] and reacting to the situation very differently."
Visualization
This describes two techniques involving a mental "rehearsal" of a situation that's about to unfold. During a stressful treatment, for example, take a "mind vacation", as Kristen puts it. It involves closing your eyes, and visualizing a place that would take you out of the stressful situation. For Kristen, this was a quiet beach in the Virgin Islands.
A second technique is to create a vivid mental picture of an upcoming stressful event–visualizing each step of the process until its conclusion. The positive effect of this technique is that by the time the actual event occurs, you've already experienced it, and can likely cope with it better.
The Elevator Speech
This exercise involves a well-rehearsed response, short and to the point, to questions from unknowing relatives or friends about your plans to have children. Normally, these types of seemingly insensitive questions might rattle couples in the midst of infertility treatment.
Planning a response to such questions allows you and your partner to otherwise relax and enjoy the company of others. At a time before Kristen had rehearsed answers herself, she would leave social functions in tears when such questions were asked. "It would just send me right over the edge," she remembers.
This technique is called the "elevator speech" because if, for example, someone in an elevator asked you about your job–while you'd want to give a complete answer–you'd be forced to give the short version in those fleeting moments.
Associations
Must of us are familiar with this word game. One partner states a word, and both then express the 10 things that first come to mind. What's the purpose? To determine what words might be in common between each of you.
So, what's effective about that? It gives you a "mind map", as Kristen puts it, of your partner's way of thinking. Hopefully, the end result will be more effective communication during tough times.
Mind/Body Link
Kristen also subscribes to an approach known as the Mind/Body Connection, which had a profound effect on her approach to her infertility diagnosis. Using Mind/Body techniques developed by Alice Domar, Ph.D., at Boston IVF, couples learn how certain lifestyle behaviors can affect their reproductive health, either positively or negatively. Kristen testified before a Congressional panel in 2000 about the need to boost funding for research about this approach.
Future Plans
While her first book focuses primarily on the difficulties that she and husband, Mark, went through in trying to start a family, Kristen's next planned book, Positive Conception, is devoted to specific strategies that couples can use to move successful through the trials and tribulations of infertility. The book is due out in the fall of 2004. "I call it a buffet; there are 28 strategies, and some might resonate with you, and some might not, but they're there throughout the whole process to help you get through it," Kristen advised.
What's Kristen's advice for other couples? "I think it's really important for people experiencing this to know they're not alone. There are resources, and there are groups that you can go to if you feel like it," she said. "There are other ways of coping with it."
John Martin is a long-time health journalist and an editor for Priority Healthcare. His credits include coverage of health news for the website of Fox Television's The Health Network, and articles for the New York Post and other consumer and trade publications.
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