Illustration: Palesa Monareng
Because no two paths to parenthood look the same, “How I Got This Baby” is a series that invites parents to share their stories.
Kelly first took up running when she was in middle school and decided to join the cross-country and track teams. In the beginning, she didn’t take the sport too seriously. “I went to practice, but I usually ran whatever was the shortest option available,” she recalls. Back then, she says, running was a “good, healthy” part of her life. But after a difficult breakup in her senior year of high school, her approach changed. She started using exercise as a way to cope with emotional pain and soon became competitive about her race times. “I was probably doing a three- or four-mile run five days a week,” she says. Around the same time, a friend announced she was giving up processed sugar, and Kelly remembers saying, “Oh, cool, I’ll do that with you.”
That dietary change “flipped a switch,” says Kelly, who is now a brand-strategy consultant on the West Coast. “It triggered more restrictions.” Up until then, Kelly had eaten fairly intuitively. She had never felt critical of her body. But giving up sugar made her newly health-conscious. “I ate like somebody who needed to lose weight, but I should have been eating like somebody who was fueling for performance and energy,” she says.
Kelly had been having regular periods since she was 13, but when she was 18 and made these lifestyle changes, her period stopped. “I was told by coaches and doctors, ‘Oh, that is just something that happens to active women,’” she says. Years later, when she started thinking about starting a family, the severity of her condition became clear.
Below, Kelly recalls her journey to motherhood.
During my freshman year of college, my parents sat me down for a talk. They were worried that I was exercising too much and had grown too thin. They said, “Will you just go to a doctor and have them run some labs?”
So I went to a primary-care doctor and they ran a bunch of labs and they said that everything was normal. My BMI was right at the bottom of the healthy range. And so I said to my parents, “Look, see, I’m fine.” I got even deeper into running at that point — running half-marathons and marathons and doing well in them.
I ran in a recreational league in college, and though we didn’t compare notes, I definitely knew a handful of other women who also had lost their periods. That normalized it for me.
Plus, I was off and on birth-control pills, depending on if I was in a long-term relationship or not. When I was on the pill, it let me push the questions surrounding my period to the back of my mind, because when you’re on the pill, it masks your natural period. I bled no matter what, because of the synthetic hormones.
When I was a sophomore, I started getting a bit suspicious. I had this nagging feeling of, Maybe this isn’t healthy; maybe I should go off the pill and see if I get my period naturally. I went off the pill and, sure enough, I didn’t get my period. I made an appointment with my gynecologist and said, “I’m a runner. I’m not getting my period. It’s been like this for a long time. Is this bad? What should I do?”
And the doctor said, “Look at you! You’re healthy. You love running. You’re not trying to have a baby right now. It’s fine. And when you want to have a baby, you can always come back. We can talk about IVF! But you’re nowhere near there, so I wouldn’t worry about it.”
I trusted him. He was the doctor who delivered me — this old, lovely guy. I also didn’t question what he said because I was afraid of gaining weight. If he had told me, “Look, this is unhealthy. This is not good. You need to stop this,” I would’ve listened. It would’ve been hard for me, but I would’ve listened to him. But the opposite of that happened. I thought, Well, I was a little worried, but the doctor said it’s fine.
So I kept running. At my peak, I was running more than 70 miles a week and eating a little more than I had been in high school. After that doctor’s appointment, I didn’t think about my missing period for a long time. I went back on the pill and I graduated from college.
In my late 20s, I switched from the pill to a copper IUD without hormones, one that wouldn’t affect my menstrual cycle. I still didn’t get my period. At that point, I started to feel like I was in menopause. My hair was getting thin and falling out, and I had a huge crash in energy. I just felt weird and horrible and off. Without the pill, I began to feel in my body what it meant not to menstruate.
By then, I had also fallen in love, and though I wasn’t ready for kids, I could imagine having them fairly soon. That’s when I finally admitted to myself, “This is probably bad.”
The physician ordered an MRI to see if I had a pituitary tumor — that came back negative. They also conducted a Provera challenge, in which the patient is given a course of synthetic progesterone to see if it will induce menstruation. I failed it. But I still didn’t get any kind of diagnosis. Instead, they told me, “Oh, you have this thing that happens to active women,” and said, “It’s possible that eating a little more could help. You could try cutting back your running a bit and increasing your calories a bit.”
Right about then, a book came out called No Period, Now What? It was written by Nicola Sykes, who has a Ph.D. in computational biology. She went through this experience herself and realized that there should be better information about it available.
Reading the book, a lightbulb went off. I had a textbook case of hypothalamic amenorrhea (HA) — when the hypothalamus causes your period to stop. That can happen due to low energy availability, excessive exercise, or chronic stress. HA can cause short-term issues like fatigue and mood swings and lead to bigger problems down the road, like bone loss, heart risks, and infertility.
In the book, Sykes wrote that to recover from this, you need to stop all intense exercise — anything that gets your heart rate up — and consume at least 2,500 calories a day. If you do those things, then your period will come back.
I read the book and my first reaction was like, “I know this is me, but oh my God, you have to stop doing all intense exercise? I’m a runner! This gives me so much joy. I’m in all these groups of friends that are runners!” I couldn’t imagine doing that. So I decided, I’ll eat more and I’ll exercise less.
I switched to a high-calorie diet with no restrictions whatsoever — I ate lots of pizza, ice cream, pasta. I prioritized high-carb foods and frequent meals throughout the day. Eating more was easier for me to wrap my head around than not exercising. So for a few months, I didn’t change much about my running. But still, no period. So then I ran a little bit less, and a little less and less and less — and I still didn’t get my period. Finally, after about six months of this, another lightbulb went off and I realized, This gradual method is just going to prolong how long it takes me to recover. If I want to get back to running a lot, I have to stop completely for now.
So I stopped all exercise. I biked to work — an easy bike ride — and that was it. At first, not running was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It was excruciating. I just felt so antsy all the time, and I really, really wanted to run. If I saw somebody jogging in the street, I’d feel so jealous and sad and conflicted and bad.
But then I woke up a week or two into those six weeks and I was like, Oh, wow, I don’t care if I run today or not. I’ll do this as long as it takes. I soon noticed that life had a lot more ups and downs, and that was a surprise. Sometimes I felt good, and sometimes I felt bad. I realized that for the past decade, it was as if I had been putting a blanket over everything, because running was very effective at making me feel even-keeled. If I did ten miles in the morning, I’d have all these endorphins, and the rest of the day, nothing much bothered. But the thing is, things should bother you.
My period came back six weeks after I fully stopped running. I remember discovering that I had my period and thinking, Oh my God, this is amazing. This is beautiful. It had been ten years since I’d had one. I was so angry that none of the doctors said to me, “Hey, this is a thing that happens to people and we know how to recover from it. This is what you have to do.” Instead, I treated myself after reading a random book.
I gained weight during this time, about maybe 10 or 12 pounds — I’m four-foot-ten, so that’s a lot on me. I had to buy new clothes. It was a little difficult, mentally, because I was used to being extremely thin. I was about to get married and I remember when I went to my last dress fitting, they said, “Oh, actually, you’re not as skinny as you were when we first fit this, so we have to take it out a little.”
At first, that made me uncomfortable, but I was so sold on the idea that I was doing the right thing. I knew it was healthy, and I experienced a major shift in my mind-set. I just thought, Yeah, it’s working! They should take my dress out because I shouldn’t have been the size I was before.
After about a year, we decided to try for a baby. I was back to running, but not super competitively at all — I was interested in other things now. I was probably doing around 30 miles per week. I had already been tracking my cycle very closely, because when you have had HA, you’re more prone to losing your period again. So I knew exactly when I was ovulating.
It took me three cycles to get pregnant, and then I miscarried. But that miscarriage was not a heartbreaking experience for me. One day, I thought I got my period, and then my period just didn’t stop. Normally, my periods are maybe four or five days long, and I was on day nine and I was still bleeding, and I thought, What is going on? I went to my OB/GYN — a new one — and she asked me if I’d taken a pregnancy test. And I said, “No, you don’t understand, I am on day ten of my cycle. I haven’t even ovulated yet.” I was kind of frustrated with her. My experience over the past decade had destroyed my trust in doctors and made me feel like if I wanted good care, I needed to be the one to make sure it happened — I couldn’t blindly trust doctors to be doing the right thing for me.
She said, “Okay, that makes sense, that’s fine, but why don’t we just rule it out?” So I went to the bathroom, took the pregnancy test, and it was positive, and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m not on day ten of my cycle. I’m still on the previous cycle!”
We found out it was a nonviable pregnancy, and I had to have a D&C — I think because they were worried it might be ectopic. But because I had never gotten excited over a positive pregnancy test, I just thought, Wow, how cool I can get pregnant! I didn’t feel too sad at all.
Three cycles later, I was pregnant again. And this time, the pregnancy went great. I loved being pregnant.
The birth was complicated and bad. My baby was born with the cord wrapped around his neck and he was totally blue: low Apgar score. He had to be in the NICU for a week.
They discharged me, and then I came back to the hospital the very next day to be with him in the NICU. I had a friend who was an OB at the hospital. When she came to say hi and see how I was doing, I said, “I feel okay for having just given birth! But I do feel like I’m a little bit swollen.”
In fact, I had mentioned to the nurses before I was discharged that I felt like I looked very, very swollen. My hands, my face, my legs, my ankles. I felt uncomfortable, and I didn’t look like myself. But the nurse kind of laughed at me and said, “No, no, I’m more swollen than you! You’re not that swollen. This is what happens postpartum!”
I thought, Okay, that’s fine. But then my OB friend said, “Sure, that can be normal, but since you’re here at the hospital, why don’t you just get your blood pressure taken and make sure everything’s okay?”
So I walked around the corner to labor and delivery, and I said, “I feel kind of swollen. I just gave birth. Can you guys take my blood pressure?” They were a bit dismissive, and they said, “You don’t look that swollen, and we’re super busy right now. Can you come back in a few hours?”
When my friend came back to check on me and I told her what happened, she said, “You know what? I’m just going to take your blood pressure myself.” She took my blood pressure, and all these alarms went off. It was like 200 over 100 or something crazy. They checked me in immediately — I had postpartum preeclampsia, and I had to be inpatient for a week. That was horrible.
A lot of people don’t realize that you can get preeclampsia up to six weeks postpartum. It’s even more deadly postpartum because doctors are less likely to catch it. So I was very lucky that I was in the hospital visiting my son in the NICU and that my friend was there. As far as I know, this had nothing to do with my history of HA — preeclampsia is just a thing that can happen.
My son was actually discharged one day earlier than me, so my last night in the hospital was our first night with him in the room with us.
I feel so grateful that I found a way to recover from HA before I became a parent. I’ve heard stories of women with HA who, instead of recovering, do IVF to get pregnant. It’s scary to think that I could have gone through pregnancy in the compromised health state that HA puts you in. And it’s even more scary to think that I could have become a mother in the compromised emotional state that led me to develop HA in the first place.
I was very rigid about food and exercise. Becoming a parent, especially in the early days, forces you to put someone else’s needs before your own and give up control. This is a stressful shift even for people who are mentally fit. I can’t imagine doing it from the mind-set I was in when I had HA.
I have two sons now — they are 6 and 4. With both boys, when I was postpartum, I felt myself itching to fall back into my old eating and exercising patterns. I was burning tons and tons of calories through breastfeeding, and I think as a result, I just felt this intense desire to run a lot and not eat enough in a way that was weird and surprising to me.
But as soon as I would follow through on these urges a little bit — like, say, Oh, I’m going to go on a long run, and Oh, I’m not going to have a snack — suddenly I was like, Wow, that’s interesting. I notice that this behavior pattern in my brain is definitely not what I want, so I’ll stop that. I could feel it starting, but I knew there was no way, with everything that I’ve been through, that I’d let it progress to its end.
As I’ve gotten older, I see that when I was younger, I thought, Running is my thing! I still love running, and I can’t imagine life without it. But now that I have two kids and my career, there have been times when I’m running more and times when I’m running less. I’m grateful that I was forced to recover from HA because it made running just one thing among many that I enjoy, and sometimes it takes a backseat, and that’s good.
And I’m still thrilled every single time I get my period.
The names of the subjects have been changed to protect their identities.
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