For the last couple years I had been having some odd little health issues randomly popping up sporadically, then becoming more frequent as time went on. I’d have random hormone imbalances, I had worsening PMDD with every cycle, random allergies and crazy immune flare ups and cellulitis infections (with no real cause/I wasn’t doing anything different or risky even). When we started ttc I had some preconception blood work done to make sure all looked well. I started taking a prenatal (with only 400iu of vit d in it) and omega 3s.
We conceived quickly, but my line progression was slow and my first positive which was super faint wasn’t until 16-18dpo… suggesting that my hcg wasn’t rising properly. I didn’t have many pregnancy symptoms, but I didn’t feel well. I ended up having a mmc at 9 weeks baby stopped growing at 6 weeks. Everyone just said oh don’t worry it’s very common to have a miscarriage, 1 in 4 pregnancies end in loss…. Which is true, they’re not wrong. But I really felt weird like that something else was wrong, before even getting pregnant I had this feeling sometimes like something wasn’t quite right, especially with the PMDD I was experiencing. But I just kept being reassured that everything looked good.
After my miscarriage my cycles never resumed properly, I had these insane looking charts, tons of positive lh tests with no ovulation, super long cycles and I felt awful, like I never really recovered from the pregnancy. I was also continuing to have these dramatic immune flare ups. 6 months post loss I got fed up with everyone telling me that it’s normal and that I’m fine, I did a whole bunch of research myself and walked into my drs office with a list of tests I wanted to do😝 He tried to reassure me again that I was fine and it was probably just stress (I was very confident this was not stress related lol), but he agreed to order the tests for me to ease my mind.
Everything came back normal except my vit D was very very low. I started supplementing right away and I kid you not I noticed a difference almost immediately, about 2 weeks later I saw my lh calm down and stabilize and then I finally ovulated again. After that I have not had a single immune flare up/infection, my cycles have been regular for a year now with no hormone imbalances, I’ve never experienced PMDD again since and I’ve never felt better!
I’ve had to go on a pretty high dosage to maintain my levels (I’ve been checking my levels often), I’m currently taking 4000iu now, and about to start 5000iu for the winter months. I moved to Canada from the Caribbean (where I was born), but I have fair skin, I’m guessing this may be why I might need a bit of a higher dosage. It’s been over a year now since our pregnancy loss last May, but my actual vit d levels were not in the healthy range until this January and then we had to skip a couple cycles due to other reasons. Now we’re on our 3rd optimized/healthy cycle of trying again, so 🤞🏻 we’ll get pregnant with our rainbow soon🌈
The reason I’m sharing this is because this is something that I don’t see very much information on at all and doesn’t really seem to be talked about. I’m searching to see if I can find anyone else out there like me who has experienced anything like this with a severe vitamin d deficiency and its effects on fertility and pregnancy?
I know there isn’t a way to know for sure, but I’m pretty convinced that my deficiency contributed to my pregnancy loss, from all the research I’ve done, I see all of the many ways this would have had an effect on my body’s ability to support a pregnancy. I’ve seen other stories and studies where this has been seen in some repeat pregnancy loss cases. Anyone else ever heard of anyone going through this?? I just want to feel less alone and hopefully shed some more light on this.
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