This is Infertility is a bi-weekly podcast where we fuse narrative storytelling with experience and science to give you a new perspective on what it’s really like to go through a family building journey. Each episode dives into the emotional, physical, and financial burdens carried by those who experience infertility on their path to parenthood. Be it IVF, IUI, egg freezing, surrogacy, adoption, etc., the path is never the same and it can be long, painful, and lonely. It’s our mission to give those struggling a platform to be heard, a community connection, and an opportunity to raise awareness of the 1 in 6 who, for many reasons, struggle with infertility.
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This is Infertility

Episode 202: AMH, IVF, OMG: How an At-Home Fertility Test Fast-Tracked Erin’s Path to Motherhood

Newly engaged and nearing her thirties, today’s guest knew she wanted children in the future, so she opted for an at-home fertility test. The results shocked her, revealing something that changed everything – her biological clock was ticking faster than she had expected. What started as curiosity quickly became a call to action.

In this episode, Erin Antoniak takes us along her journey of preserving her fertility as a back-up plan, which then evolved into a complex path to parenthood.

She explains how Progyny’s family building coverage through her husband’s employer, Salesforce, gave her the freedom to pursue treatment without financial barriers. She also shares how documenting the journey, from the hardest days to the happiest moments, connected her with a growing Instagram audience and impacted her community.

Watch Erin’s story through her own eyes on Instagram.

Guest: Erin Antoniak, Salesforce Progyny Member
Host: Dan Bulger, Progyny

For more information, visit Progyny’s Podcast page and Progyny’s Education page for more resources. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, @ThisisInfertilityPodcast and use the #ThisisInfertility. Have a question, comment, or want to share your story? Email us at thisisinfertility@progyny.com.

Watch this episode on YouTube:

Here are some highlights from this episode: 

The Contingency Plan
02:17 – 08:27

Erin Antoniak: I had been in recovery from an eating disorder when I was in my early 20s, and I had lost my cycle for a long time. When I was around 28, I was just kind of curious, like, am I going to be able to have kids? One day, I took the at-home fertility test, and the results came back that some of my numbers were in a really low range. I ended up going to RMA in Philadelphia and they basically confirmed exactly what the at-home tests had said. With that being said, I had a really low egg quantity for my age, and a really low AMH. So, it doesn’t mean necessarily that I can’t get pregnant. It just means that I am probably going to fast track into menopause a little bit earlier.

So, when we found out that we had coverage through Progyny, we were really excited because it felt like it opened a whole new door for us. I always said at the end of the day we would do whatever it could to figure it out, right? But fertility treatment is wildly expensive, and there is such limited coverage. If we were to do one, it could be anywhere upwards of, like, $20,000 and that’s just one part of it, right? Because we also wanted to test our embryos, and there’s so many different steps.

We came up with a plan with our doctor that we would try to freeze embryos. Our goal would be to have these embryos frozen like an insurance bank, essentially. So, we would, then, after we got married, try to have a child, whether that would just be through regular, like monthly testing or doing, like some sort of medicated intervention. I did four egg retrievals before even feeling confident enough to move forward because at each egg retrieval, I was only getting two to three eggs, which is very low for someone my age.

Documenting the Highs and the Lows
09:07 – 14:14

Erin Antoniak: The minute that I walked into the fertility clinic in January of 2022 I knew I was going to document it. I don’t think a lot of people know about it because I didn’t until I was actually going through fertility treatment. So, I was documenting the whole process along the way, the highs, the lows, the times when we got calls that were exciting and we were celebrating that we got an embryo, to the times when we got calls that we had to cancel this cycle, or this one didn’t work out. When you’re in that moment and you get the bad news, you don’t want to flip the camera on. But I was like, I think I will appreciate this, and I think people will appreciate that I’m not just sharing all the times that we got good news. So, we documented the entire thing.

We did some time cycling that ultimately, after month, just failed and then we moved on to IUI and that failed. And after like, several months of having some failed journeys, we were just kind of like, maybe it’s time that we use one of the embryos.

That transfer did not work, so that was a little upsetting, because we had kind of like, my issue was actually getting the embryos right? And I had done all the tests before to make sure everything was okay. Sometimes things just don’t work out, we don’t know exactly why it didn’t stick, but it didn’t. So, then we decided to change up our protocol a little bit, and we did a transfer six weeks later. So, we transferred in March of 2024, and I am 25 weeks pregnant now, so yes, the second transfer worked, and we’re very excited. So, we don’t know what we’re having. We’re doing a surprise.

Cue the Confetti!
14:16 – 15:36

Dan Bulger: At the time of this recording, Erin was pregnant, and the even better news is that we record these interviews very far out in advance sometimes. And since this conversation, Erin and Tom have welcomed home their beautiful baby.

Erin Antoniak: I am so incredibly thankful to Salesforce for investing in its employees and for taking care of us, because this is not this is something that many people aren’t able to do because they don’t have coverage and they don’t have the funds to do it, and I don’t blame them, because it’s really, really expensive, and I just it absolutely took one thing off of our plates when in an already stressful environment.

Dan Bulger

Host

Dan Bulger
Producer at Progyny

Dan has been in the healthcare industry for the past ten plus years as a multimedia content producer. Better known as ‘Video Dan’ he has interviewed numerous doctors, patients and other experts in the world of fertility. He’s also the producer for this podcast, This is Infertility and the producer behind the Progyny YouTube Channel which features interviews with dozens of the nation’s leading fertility specialists. On a personal note Dan’s parents started fostering kids when he was four years old, and he considers himself a proud older brother to over 100 foster children.

Erin Antoniak

Guest

Erin Antoniak
Salesforce Progyny Member

Erin is the food blogger and Instagrammer behind @erinliveswhole, an online resource for easy, wholesome, and nutritious recipes and approachable lifestyle shares. She was diagnosed with Diminished Ovarian Reserve in January 2022 after taking an at-home fertility marker test (which was then confirmed by fertility doctors) and spent the next 18 months doing several egg retrievals in hopes of creating and banking a few embryos for future children. After two long years of fertility treatment, 4 egg retrievals, several rounds of medicated cycles, and two transfers, Erin became pregnant with her first child. She uses her Instagram as a platform to advocate for being proactive when it comes to women’s fertility journey and to show that even through the difficult times, a beautiful outcome is still possible!