I spoke to Brad Ash after he had responded to a tweet I'd put out asking for Men to share their stories. If you've been following my podcast you'll probably know that I'm always keen to tell Men's stories as we had to have ICSI to have our little boy and at the time my husband wasn't keen to talk about it. He's better at it now, but that's mainly due to him telling people about the work I do, making this podcast.

I am seeing more guys on Instagram and Twitter and recently I was at Fertility Fest which I've spoken about a lot and will be sharing my episode from the event shortly I watched an exert of Tom Webb's upcoming documentary called 'The Easy Bit'. I spoke to Tom about it here has spoken to six men about their experiences of going to the Gentlemen's Room. Hearing those men speak about how they feel it was so impactful and I'll make sure I share links to the finished film as I think it's going to be a key piece of support for men dealing with infertility - to hear other men probably echo what they are feeling.

Brad got in touch with me to talk about his story and also about the work he and wife Elyse are doing to help people find others they can relate to and rely on whilst getting their fertility journey and I was really keen to share what they are doing as I think it's a great idea.

Fruitful Fertility is a free mentoring website, where the whole concept of the groups created is that people are at different stages of their life and at different stages of treatment. Brad explained how in a subconscious way there is a competition going and things can trigger others and so they tried to set up a mentoring process where you are talking to one person. 

'A mentor is someone who is in a good place with their fertility journey, so anyone on that side can give advice or understands.' explained Brad. 'It's someone who really gets it. We really noticed it was lacking' so Brad and Elyse wanted to fill the void.

'The most common thing we hear when talking to people is  them saying ‘I wish this had been available  and as Brad quite rightly says  'Things aren’t gonna change in the shadows'

Brad spoke about the male fixer archetype that he hears a lot of guys having to deal with when faced with infertility. How you can’t advance the solution and if you are that person that takes care of problems and makes them go away how that doesn't work in this situation and that can really get you down.

Whilst having their first round of treatment Brad and Elyse chose to have pre genetic testing done on their embryos and discovered they all had genetic abnormalities in their first round of treatment, meaning none were viable for transfer. Brad described how vital this was for them to have discovered, and spoke about how he didn't know how the pair of them would have recovered if they had used the abnormal embryos and probably then found themselves dealing with a miscarriage. The couple had success after their second round of treatment and at the time of recording, this episode was expecting their first child. At the time of publishing, I can reveal they are now proud parents of a little girl called Abigail.

We spoke about the unfairness of such tests being a costly add on for many both in the US and UK and how the ability to afford such investigations shouldn't be an added stress for people in their #TTC

Sadly it is, however in light of the recent action taken on Capitol Hill for the first Infertility Advocacy day hopefully things will change. It was a poignant discussion with Brad talking about how "it’s terrible that your financial standing and the economics comes down to your success of having a family"

Brad referred to some studies that had been done on the impact of infertility on women's mental health. You can read more on this in the following articles:

Infertility treatment and fertility specific distress

Matsubayashi et al 2001  this study was also cited in a Huffington Post article talking about infertility being one of the 4th most traumatic events a woman can experience

To find out more about Fruitful fertility visit their website

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I also mentioned how you can support this podcast by becoming a patreon and you can join my closed Facebook group talk fertility