I had to share some of the wins from my perimenopausal patient - this is part of the case study. So if you didn’t catch the first one, check out episode 115. For the last 6 months, we have been working HARD to turn the ovaries back on - get the FSH down to a more reasonable level (so she can qualify for PRP) and essentially get her cycle back. This case is truly inspiring and I want to make sure I capture the details of what we are doing in hopes that it will help you reverse perimenopause symptoms and bring a baby into this world. We still have a long way to go, but seeing the progress in the last 2 months has been incredibly rewarding. Tune in to learn more.

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Key Takeways

06:07 Bladder and Infections

12:14 Cycle and Hormone Observations

18:21 Future Steps and Support

Memorable Quotes

"What we're doing is we're introducing some progesterone and we're going to try to see if we can get the cycle to just slowly come back. But the biggest thing for us right now to tackle is blood sugar and inflammation."

"If you truly feel this deep urge, deep connection inside of you that, like, “I want to make a baby, I know I can do this”, then that’s the start. Next is just having the right network of people to support you."

"If you are open to saying, “I will let this soul that's not even here yet change me and shape me to allow it to come into my life before it even comes in, I'm just going to allow it to do that”, that is where the change and shift begins."

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The change that we've noticed in the last couple of months. So she's been on high dose glutathione, we've done her methylation panel so we're supporting her methylation. There's some B vitamins, glutathione, magnesium, zinc. We're still doing binders and really heavy mitochondrial support. So she's on 1200 milligrams of ubiquinol and we're always working on sleep, we're always working on digestion to make sure that she's actually getting the most out of these nutrients. But she started to use her Inido again the last couple of months. So she was testing a little bit here and there but like they, the ranges were just. Her ranges were so out of range that the Anita wasn't even picking it up. It was just like we can't pick up this lh. We can't pick up. Pregnancy is a natural process. So if it's not happening or if it's not sticking, something is missing. After having a family member go through infertility and experiencing a miscarriage myself, I realized how little support and education women have around infertility. I want to change that. I'm a Dr. Jane Levesque. I'm a naturopathic doctor and a natural fertility expert. Tune in every Tuesday at 9am for insightful case studies, expert interviews and practical tips on how you can optimize fertility naturally. If you've been struggling with infertility, pregnancy loss, women's health issues, or you just want to be proactive and prepare yourself for the next big chapter in your life, this show is for you. All right ladies, today I want to update you on my patient case who came to me perimenopausal slash, basically going into menopause because of her breast cancer treatment. I recorded a part one where her FSH was really high, it was like 140. She came to me in kind of this last case, last hope that maybe I could do something to help and reverse this early perimenopause, that early menopause that she was basically went into because of her breast cancer treatment and the conventional system is just laughing at her cuz they think, you know, she's insane to think about having a baby. But to be honest, she just didn't meet her partner. So diagnosed with breast cancer in her like at 37, ended up going through IVF before going through the chemo and the radiation. And then when she was put on tamoxifen years later is the thing that kind of caused her periods to stop. Otherwise her mom had her period well into her 50s. So for her it was strange to lose her period in her early 40s. So we have some really good updates. I believe I called her Emily in the last one. I'm not sure, but that's kind of the overview picture. We've been working really, really hard on a lot of things and I wanted to give you an UPD date because we had some really big wins and I'm so excited. There's still lots of things that we need to work on, but to see wins and to see the body restore function and to have certain symptoms go away is just, it's tremendous. And basically what we're trying to do is get her to a place where she will qualify to do prp. So plasma rich therapy, where they're basically take your own blood, they, you know, centrifuge and then put it into the ovaries to help rejuvenate. And there's some really good studies and research showing how that improves and increases AMH levels. So the conventional system is laughing at her and they think she's all insane. And because her FSH is so high, even on the kind of natural, functional medicine, holistic sides for somebody who would be able to do prp, they're just like, sorry, lady, you missed your chance. You're way too old and that FSH is too high. So what we've been doing, we've been working really hard to understand why, first of all, she got the breast cancer diagnosis. And even though she did a lot of things to heal, there's something that caused that metabolic issue, if you will. And there's things that physically happen in terms of, you know, the nutrients that she didn't get and the lack of sleep and all that jazz. But there's also the mental and emotional states. We talked a lot about her work and how her work is this place that just leashed her energy. And really what I always try to do is give the power back to the person. It's that you let your work leach your energy. We didn't set boundaries and we. It's not to put blame, but to take the responsibility that maybe I could have changed the way the amount of hours that I worked or the things that I said yes to or ask for increase in pay to feel like I'm compensated more fairly instead of just being frustrated with the fact that your boss is treating you poorly and continue to build up that anger, bitterness inside, because I can almost like we're energetic beings. It's going to show up somewhere. So there's a lot of mental and emotional work that we have been doing to help her process and understand who she is and how she wants to be moving forward, because I think it's just a huge component of healing. Of course, she had the trauma of being in a war, in genocide, like just experiencing some really horrific things that she's also been working on, processing and giving her system some space to basically regulate her nervous system. We've done a couple of retests that we found a couple of things where we put a blood sugar monitor on her, and we found out that basically her blood sugar is out of control no matter what she's eating, which tells me it's not the fact what she's eating, but that there is inflammation that's being driven, and that inflammation is causing the blood sugar dysregulation. And basically it is coming down to the levels of cortisol, because sleep is still something that we've been working really hard on. But there is times where she just either woken up by her bladder, which has gotten tremendously better. She's only waking up once to pee in the middle of the night versus waking up three or four times and feeling extreme, extremely anxious, feeling depressed. So all those symptoms are gone. She feels way better. She feels, you know, there's. She's a stress ball still, but she's not as anxious, she's not as depressed, and her bladder is only waking her up once in the middle of the night, but she's not peeing as frequently as she was, which I believe there's a couple different reasons as to why that bladder started to react. Usually it's an infection or radiation or something that caused it. And for her, it was multiple components. So we kind of attacked the radiation first, because when she got the radiation for breast cancer, that's when the bladder started to misbehave, for the lack of a better term. But then we actually did a vaginal microbiome, and we found out that there is some not beneficial bacteria in there, some pathogenic bacteria, urea, plasma being one of them, which, to be honest, I was a little bit shocked or surprised is the right word to see it. So we're treating uroplasma right now, and she's about five days into her antibiotic treatment, and then we go into an antimicrobial treatment for another four to six weeks. And within the five days, she noticed a big decrease in the irritation in her bladder, even more so. So I know that that bladder was, you know, that Irritation of the bladder was, is being caused by an infection. So it'll be super cool to see what happens in the next little bit. She has been the blood sugar monitor, basically we are now she is doing some intermittent fasting where it's once a week she's doing a 24 hour fast and then the other days she's doing between 14 to 16 hour fasts and basically just two meals a day. Very high protein, high quality veggies and some starches. But like we cut out the fruit because the blood sugar was just going out of control. And the reason that it's important to get the blood sugar under control is your blood sugar is being triggered with every meal that you eat. It's inflammation and the term that I've been using a lot is inflammation. The more inflamed you are, the faster you're going to age. And that includes our sites. And for her we're trying to revers it, we're trying to basically get the mitochondria levels up and decrease that inflammation and reverse some aging to see if the cycle can restore and then potentially do some prp because there is such great research to improve the AMH and then go on and then we'll kind of decide and see if natural pregnancy is an option or if we have to go the IVF route. But like a mini ivf, whatever it is that we need to do so very much taking this step by step and just dealing with what's in front of us right now and keeping the bigger picture in mind. Okay, so what's in front of us right now is this blood sugar is dysregulated and it's causing an insane amount of inflammation. She's, you know, gained this weight around her midline that she's never had, which is a very common symptom of perimenopause slash menopause. And the blood sugar dysregulation is also a common symptom. And my belief system is anyways is this is being driven by infections and infections and right now we're dealing with bacterial infection and we'll see if there's something else once we clear that. But the body will present to us what we need to deal with. So there was parasites, we got rid of those and now there is this bacterial infection that's presenting itself. And so we're very much dealing with it and seeing what it does. The change that we've noticed in the last couple of months. So she's been on high dose glutathione. We've done her methylation panel, so we're supporting her methylation. There's some B vitamins, glutathione, magnesium, zinc. We're still doing binders and really heavy mitochondrial support. So she's on 1200 milligrams of ubiquinol. And we're always working on sleep, we're always working on digestion to make sure that she's actually getting the most out of these nutrients. But she started to use her Inido again the last couple of months, so she was testing a little bit here and there, but, like, they. The ranges were just. Her ranges were so out of range that the Anita wasn't even picking it up. It was just like, we can't pick up this lh, we can't pick up this fsh. And in the last couple of months, we started to see an increase in her progesterone. So UNITO is, if you're not familiar, right, we're testing. It's a urine analysis where you could see it through the cycle and you can see when the estrogen is speaking, and then potentially progesterone and FSH and lh. So in the last couple of months, she's had two days of this clear white cervical discharge, which was basically what she used to have when she was ovulating. And so that happened two months in a row. The last month that she just had it a couple, like a week ago was the most abundant she had. And of course, we're so excited to see it because it. She's just had so much vaginal dryness because of that estrogen being so low, so. And then we're seeing it on the Anita come up. The thing that we're not seeing is the progesterone come up yet. We're not seeing that yet. And honestly, for somebody who's probably had low progesterone all of her life, I'm not. We're going to need to supplement with it to make sure that we can basically give the body what it needs. So we just got some lab work back. The only thing I'm annoyed is I forgot to check off FSH and lh, because it's like a retest panel that's supposed to be done on day 21 of the cycle, but she doesn't have a cycle, and so I just forgot to check those things off. I forgot to tell my assistant to check it off. So the estrogen came back, though. Pregnenolone came back, testosterone came back. Her estrogen is 10 times the amount what it was when we first started working, so she had like a 12.9 estrogen level, which is like, basically menopausal. And right now she was sitting at 129. And pregnenolone is actually out of range. It's too high versus too low, which to me is a really great sign because we now have the precursors to make the hormones. We just need the liver function and the pathways to kind of clear up so then that pregnenolone can be used appropriately to make the hormones. So we were both, like, really thrilled to see those estrogen numbers. And what we're trying to do now is to kind of mimic the cycle based on what her body's trying to do. So originally I was going to try to do it with the moon, but we have to take into consideration where she was born versus where she's living. So if she's living in North America, but she was born in Europe, the moon cycle that she was born in might be different. And that's a whole other rabbit hole that I haven't even really, truly gone down on. But because we have this initial data and we could see what's happening with her estrogen, it looks like there's two cycles in a row that her body's now trying to ovulate. And then she had days of like, basically all the symptoms that she would have having a period, but she just didn't get a period. So there's probably not enough hormones to support the lining. But we can see that the body is trying to cycle, which is so exciting. You guys, at 45 years old, losing your period for a year. Now, she is one of those that could have probably had her cycle for a lot longer. And just based on her mom and when her mom went through menopause, like I said, the conventional system things, she's crazy. The holistic practitioners are just like, what's the point, lady? Just give up. And when I took this case, if you listened to part one, it's when I took this case, I just said, listen, we don't have anything to lose, so let's. If you're up for it, I'm up for it. Let's work with the body and let's see what it presents. But at the end of the day, I want you to be healthier. And that means decreasing inflammation. That means getting that blood sugar under control. That means having good mitochondrial function because mitochondria is so abundant in the US sites. And the more mitochondria new site has, the better quality it is. And she has been on some heavy duty things for now, almost six months. So to see this progress is really, really fascinating. And basically the goal is to get rid of these infections. We're going to retest and see if there's anything else that we've missed. As she keeps working on decreasing the inflammation, we retest the FSH and LH and see where she's at. Because if her FSH comes down from 140 to like, like 40 to 30, then we can, she's a perfect candidate for PRP. And so then we can do this plasma rich therapy to basically help revive the ovaries and see how her body responds when that inflammation is down, when her blood is so full of nutrients and there's no infections. Because if there is an infection, you're just going to spread it everywhere. And I think, I wish more people knew about that. Like you can't just do PRP because, okay, this is the best thing. You want to prepare yourself and make sure you get the most out of it. Because if that blood is really full of nutrients and it has lots of, whether it's ubiquinol or B vitamins or vitamin D and magnesium and all these electrolytes, all this stuff then we insert into the ovaries and we can see the ovaries come back to life. It's very different than just doing prp, just literally walking in and saying, oh, I heard that this was good. Because it's only as good as what we can get out of the blood, right? So, so very, very exciting. We have a lot of work to do. But like I said, what we're doing is we're introducing some progesterone and we're going to try to see if we can get the cycle to just slowly come back. But the biggest things for us right now to tackle is this blood sugar and inflammation. And you know, with that she will, she is already starting to lose weight, but we probably have like another 10, 15 pounds to lose. And we're being pretty aggressive with it with the intermittent fasting with a really clean diet. But what I told her is, hey, I want to make sure you're not coming from this place of I'm starving myself, like I'm nourishing my body and you are replenishing. If you're feeling depleted, you're replenishing things. So then we can continue to stay on track versus like I'm just going to lose weight as quickly as possible. We want to get the benefits of the caloric restriction with the DNA repair and the cell repair. And the telomere lengthening and the autophagy. But we don't want to deplete ourselves of nutrients because, let's face it, we need certain amount of protein, we need fiber, we need, you know, to eat the rainbow. So the blood glucose monitor was super helpful because we didn't realize how much her blood sugar was out of control. You could see it on the HB1C, so it was like, you know, 5.8 and now we got it to 5.6. But truthfully, we need to get it below 5 and in the next couple of months, she will for sure have it below 5 and continue to work on sleep and decreasing the stress, the nervous system regulation, and like getting the hormones that her body needs. Like, she's never had progesterone. So can we give her some progesterone and do that very mindfully and carefully to make sure that we're not triggering any. Because she did have her. One of her. The breast cancer that she had was PR positive and, er, positive. The dose of progesterone that we're using is very, very low in comparison to. So I feel very comfortable doing the testing and everything that I've done with. And we always are weighing out the pros and cons, but this, it was a big update. We had a lot of wins. We're treating infections. The bladder's getting better, the sleep is getting better, the mood is getting better. We're getting white cervical fluid. We're seeing that the body is actually like that LH and FSH is dropping because we can see it on the needle. But like I said, I'm so frustrated with myself because I didn't catch it. She did test FSH like 3 months ago. So about 3 months from when we started, and it dropped by like 20 points, but it was still over 100. So instead of being 150, it was like 120, which obviously is better, but it's still like, okay, that connection isn't back. And, you know, like I said, as we navigate this case, we're just kind of dealing with what is at hand. So then, like, this is what the body's presenting right now. We did the vaginal microbiome, we did the methylation, there's still inflammation. There is this infection that we need to deal with asap, and if we deal with it, then that's a level of stress that that's down on the body. And now all the nutrients can go towards rebuilding our cells and repairing DNA instead of dealing with the infection. And so that's the short term. And the long term is to get her to this place of the prp. And then the long term after that is to see, okay, what is possible. Is this a mini IVF that we do is this. We try to, you know, get pregnant naturally, depending on what happens with her cycle and how things go. If she actually gets her cycle and she gets windows of ovulation and all of that stuff, we're very much going to play by ear. But I have some things in mind, and I'm just thinking about what is it that we're going to do as next steps. But I wanted to share this with you guys because it's just sometimes it takes forever to get a whole case, and then I forget the little details of everything that we did. And so I just want to share the little details because the little details make up the whole picture. And so if you're feeling frustrated that. Or you're worried about going into menopause and you're shoving yourself into menopause because you've been detoxing or whatever, I mean, I hear that all the time. Just know that it is a reversible condition to a degree. But you have to do. We were meant to have children much earlier in life. In our 20s is the prime. But it doesn't mean that you can't have babies in your 40s. What you have to do is very different. And. And I think I'm calling her Emily. That's not her name, but I think I'm calling her Emily for the, you know, to protect her privacy. But the one thing that I absolutely love about her is that relentlessness to just say I'll. Obviously, she has an immense amount of trust in me, which helps. And I don't take that trust lightly. I work really hard on developing good trust with my patients because I think that's just critical for their healing journey. But she is just, whatever we're going to do, we're going to do it. And there are things that are very difficult for her to do, like let go of some of the past traumas or change certain behaviors, and she's still just keeping the eye on the prize, and we're taking it step by step. And I think if you truly feel this deep urge, deep connection inside of you that, like, I want to make a baby, I know I can do this. It's just having the right network of people to support you. And I'm like, not the only provider that we're trying to reach out to. Like, I'm not going to be the one that's doing prp. But we're bouncing around and we're trying to find people to support her even more because her conventional system, like I said, is laughing at her. And even a lot of the natural, functional medical doctors are like, you're insane. That's crazy. So it's finding that support and just being willing to do whatever it takes, because what you think it should take versus what it will actually take is very, very different. And if you are open to saying, I will let this soul that's not even here yet change me and shape me to allow it to come into my life before it even comes in, I'm just going to allow it to do that. That. And it's been an honor watching this patient just change and shift within every appointment. Like every two weeks, we're making changes and shifts and they're not right. Like, it's been six months. I'm updating you now. Three months ago, the changes were there. Digestion was moving, sleep was better, depression wasn't there, bladder was better. But now we're seeing the more profound changes in the hormones. And like I said, I think there's more to come. And I wanted to share it because I didn't want to forget these little details because sometimes I just meet certain people and I'm like, I know you could do this. And it's just a matter of getting out of the way and finding the right team and being willing to invest into yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, more than you're comfortable with. Because the deep voice inside of you knows if I don't do this, the regret of this is something that I cannot live with. But knowing that I've tried everything is going to be 100% worth it. So I admire this patient for doing that and I wanted to give you an update, some encouragement, some hope to know that things are possible and find the right team, find the right support. You can absolutely. You can absolutely achieve your goals. It just might not look like what you thought it would look like. And so be open to that. And you might have to work a lot harder than you thought you had to work and spend way more money than you thought you had to spend. But if you are up for it, I think it's absolutely possible. So thanks so much for tuning in, you guys. I'll keep you updating on this case and and stay tuned for next week. Thank you so much for listening. To read the full show notes of this episode, including summary timestamps, guest quotes, and any resources that were mentioned on the episode, visit drjanelevec.com podcast and if you're getting value from these episodes, I'd love it if you took 2 minutes to share it with a friend. Rate and leave me a review@ratethispodcast.com Dr. Jane the reviews will help with the discoverability of the show, and who knows, I might share your review on my next episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. And let's make your fertility journey your healing journey.