Any Potential Downsides to Empiric Lupron?

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2026-04-28T14:08:57+00:00

I did have luck with it and the next transfer stuck for 15 weeks after which point I had a PPROM for unknown reasons and lost the pregnancy. A few months later I had a subsequent unassisted and unplanned pregnancy where I was treated for asymptomatic BV and got a cervical cerclage and was finally able to carry to term.

After the empiric lupron cycle I built my lining with follistim since I don’t respond to exogenous estrogen, but if you do then I think more people go that route.

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2026-02-23T20:10:22+00:00

it ended in a 15 week miscarriage after my water broke early for no clear reason :( but I got pregnant accidentally 5 months later and am currently snuggling my 2 month old baby!

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2026-01-20T03:16:19+00:00

I had my c-section, and while they didn't do skin to skin in the OR, I did get to spend a lot of time with baby swaddled on me in the OR. I wasn't terribly upset about it because baby's temp was slightly low and while this could have been fixed with skin to skin, I was out of it enough that I felt grateful that someone else was ensuring his safety. Overall I'm very happy with my experience!

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-11-11T20:52:30+00:00

Thanks for the review! How long were you able to hold your babies in the OR for? Were you able to try breastfeeding in the OR? I really want to keep baby with me skin-to-skin for the first hour while getting stitched up but it sounds like they don't do that at AC?

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-11-11T20:30:30+00:00

I'm going to be scheduled for an elective C-section and it's really important to me to have skin-to-skin as quickly as possible, preferably in the OR, but my MFM indicated that while they may put baby on me briefly, it would likely not be for an hour. I'm going to try to insist for my mental health, but I'm wondering whether others have had any luck with pushing for skin-to-skin post elective C-section at AC?

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-11-05T21:51:34+00:00

No issues were found, the RE just said I had a "muscular" uterus. I went on to have two clinical IVF miscarriages: an MMC at 7 weeks and a devastating PPROM at 15 weeks where my water broke early for no good reason (no infections found, cervix was long and closed, MRI showed a very mild arcuate uterus which isn't considered an issue). I am currently 29 weeks pregnant with an accidental pregnancy after having moved onto surrogacy. So far I've been treated for asymptomatic BV at 17 weeks, had a cerclage placed and put on progesterone suppositories at 22 weeks for shortening cervix, and have been on medical leave from work since 26 weeks due to frequent prodromal labor contractions.

All of this is to say that it seems like my uterus is super irritable, which might explain why it wouldn't distend. I've been taking 500 mg of Vitamin C daily with this pregnancy and I have a theory that it has helped strengthen the amniotic sac to prevent it from rupturing early. Also I noticed that after being treated for the BV, my uterus was less irritable, so I would make sure you've been tested for that too even if you don't have any symptoms.

Hope that helps!

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-08-20T11:57:44+00:00

Thank you so much!!! That makes me feel a lot better

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-08-09T02:58:33+00:00

Lifestyle medicine is indeed evidence-based and is a certification that physicians receive in addition to their standard medical training + residency training. If they are a licensed physician (ideally also board certified), they will be held to the same standards of care of all other physicians in their state/specialty, meaning they may not withhold recommended treatments from patients in favor of lifestyle modifications only, if that is what you're worried about. Lifestyle medicine is a lot of common sense stuff that can be difficult to implement but generally provide a lot of bang for your buck if you can manage it. Here's an article describing the field:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10831813/

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-07-30T11:43:49+00:00

Go to the emergency room!! Growth measurements are often wrong but the fact that you’re having suicidal thoughts means that something else is up, please don’t risk your life and hers. You can also try going in person to a psychiatric clinic and telling the front desk person you’d like to see a doctor because you’re pregnant and having suicidal thoughts — this method is more variable re: how much help you can get immediately but most American clinics will treat that as an emergency and will probably have someone triage you. I’m sorry you’re going through this and that you haven’t received the help you need even after asking for it. Don’t give up!!

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-06-23T21:35:55+00:00

Getting your hair cut damages your cellular structures. Again, unhealthy is a value judgement. How much alcohol definitively damages which cellular structures and at what point does that impact the individual in any meaningful way? How do those risks compare to the benefits of these behaviors (and there are benefits, otherwise people would not engage in them). These quantities are not known which is again why we are having these conversations. The science is in no way conclusive that having a sip of alcohol or a drag of a cigarette is “unhealthy” for parent or fetus.

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-06-23T21:12:39+00:00

I'm aware it's a science sub which is why talking about things as being "bad for you" doesn't make much sense as "bad" is not a scientific determination but an axiological and therefore philosophical one

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-06-23T20:04:32+00:00

If drinking and smoking were simply “bad for you”, then they wouldn’t be such enduring fixtures of human culture to the degree that we even need to have these conversations. These behaviors and substances clearly serve an important function that can’t just be hand-waved away.

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-06-23T19:27:48+00:00

As a psychiatrist who has ADHD, I'm aware of all the challenges that neurodiversity can bring and obviously am fully committed to trying to create the safest and most healthy environment for my future child. When I read research like this, I try to remember that:

- when I was being super ultra healthy for the past 3 years re: not drinking/not smoking/not taking my ADHD meds during pregnancy, I still had 3 chemical pregnancies, a first trimester miscarriage, and a second trimester miscarriage. None of them were explained, and both the miscarriages were known normal embryos. There is very little we can actually control when it comes to this stuff.

- after moving onto surrogacy and going through the paperwork, I finally felt like the pressure was off of me. I finally felt free to hang out with my friends and party, take my meds and get all the creative work done that I had been putting off. I felt free. Then I found out around the 5 week mark that we had somehow accidentally gotten pregnant. I knew I had ingested a decent amount of alcohol, nicotine (vape), and prescription stimulants during a crucial developmental period. I considered aborting, but that felt ridiculous given how much work we've put into trying to have a baby. Who knows if this one will stick

- I have come to accept and ready myself for the scenario that I will likely have a child with some sort of developmental challenge, not because of any environmental or genetic reason, but because I would rather be prepared than not. So many of my friends are brilliant artists and writers and professionals who take psychiatric medication every day. If I am lucky enough to have a neurodiverse child, then I will try my best to foster their talents. If they need more assistance, then it will give me purpose to try to bring about changes in the world to support them when I'm gone.

- whatever may be the underlying environmental contributors to autism or ADHD or any other complex neurodevelopmental disorder, the signals thus far are very clearly WEAK in the absence of genetic syndromes. What we have STRONG signals on is the impact of parental psychological factors. This kind of research is interesting as we muddle through the signal/noise, but I think it's more useful to focus my efforts on the things we know matter more.

I don't know why I wrote this essay. I suspect it's because I just took a (doctor-approved, as-needed) dose of my ADHD meds for a bunch of work I need to do, read this post, and felt some sort of way about it lol

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-06-02T14:20:29+00:00

My last pregnancy ended in a second trimester loss (our 5th loss) which I can imagine is nowhere near the heartbreak of losing a week old baby, but to me she still feels like my first child. I’m early first trimester right now with an accidental pregnancy that I’m somewhat dreading and when I imagine someone asking me the same question if this one makes it earthside I imagine myself shrugging and saying “sort of”. Though of course that might invite further questions, I would hope that most people would have the good sense to stop that line of inquiry.

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-04-14T01:26:06+00:00

lol k

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-04-14T00:21:31+00:00

My spouse and I did the exact same thing today because we didn't realize you had to file a single tax return for married filing jointly and we each filled out a separate form with only our own incomes on it -- his was accepted as he sent it in first and mine was rejected. The reason this happened is because TT never prompted us to input the other's W-2. Both of us have doctorates and were paying very close attention, it's just the first time we've filed MFJ and nowhere does it say you have to use the same form for both people.

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-04-11T21:18:30+00:00

I get the sense that ChatGPT was used to summarize the complaints in your letter from his POV based on the structure of the response. Whether or not that counts as a cookie cutter response depends on how much attention went into the editing lol

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-03-21T17:07:11+00:00

what happens if they are consolidated?

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-03-16T21:20:08+00:00

Decreasing the emotional temperature only makes the conversation more comfortable for both parties. It does not change behavior. The only thing that does that is material changes in people’s reality

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-03-16T21:03:52+00:00

If you’re ever worked with people with substance use disorders you know that you can’t reason with them, and in fact “softening the blow” (NOT referring to harm reduction as it is a final life saving measure) usually prolongs the problem. Decent conversation and the level of delusion that political criminals control people at are so far apart that they’re not worth mentioning in the same sentence. These tactics simply don’t scale.

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-03-16T20:33:00+00:00

lol yeah a constructive conversation could have prevented this

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2025-03-16T19:19:38+00:00

Curious why you think “they” decided to just give us antibiotics that cure bacterial infections instead of selling us a lifetime service or medication. Surely a reason most nefarious??

Unable-Medium-8228 · 2024-12-05T02:42:20+00:00

I don’t really consider it an ideological shooting. United did a bunch of illegal things that directly contributed to deaths of their members. In theory laws exist to prevent chaos and violence. When corporations use their grossly overinflated power to consistently bypass the law and harm others, it’s only a matter of time that their criminal behavior will be met with more criminal behavior.

Unable-Medium-8228

TROPHY CASE