I ask you to imagine you could go back in time, what would you tell yourself at the point you decided to try to start or extend your family.  What would have been useful and what do you wish you had been told. I also go into detail about what  you should have been told and how my dream is that anyone who is thinking of starting or extending a family should be informed abut.  In ancient times the elder women of the village would share key information, would have cultures in place including foods believed to support fertility.  All of which has been lost to a medical model that provides no support until you are 6 months to a year down the line.  Even at that point there is no real support or advice just interventions.   Transcript Welcome to this episode of the fertility rewire podcast. And in this episode, I'm going talk about, well ask you really, what did you need to know really before you even started trying to conceive? When you first thought about starting a family, what did you really need to know then? And if you could travel back in time to when you first decided you wanted to start a family or to get pregnant this time, if you're looking at extending your family, what would you say to your former self, from what you've learned so far on this journey, what would that be? Are there certain actions you would've taken sooner? Would you have stood up to the medical staff sooner than perhaps you have, or, or perhaps you haven't? My dream is that anyone who is thinking about getting pregnant, whether their first or the next time, that they would get access to this information straight away, that you don't have to wait the six months, or one year before anything is even looked at, and then you get no answers. That you would be given access to testing and that you would have a pre trying checkup. A preconception checkup, a preconception MOT, if you like now, you can't have access to that, unless that is something that potentially you are paying for. And even then it doesn't necessarily fit into the medical health models, but you can do home testing. You can seek therapists or consultants in different areas that do testing. If you're going to do home testing and I talked last week about the stress of ovulation. So I do want to bear in mind about this potential stress that can be caused by the home testing too, because you do need someone to interpret it potentially because even with the home tests, the normal is not what we consider optimal actually for fertility. So you've heard me talk about the MIRA home testing, and to use their Max ones, where you're looking at the progesterone as well. You can use the code FERTILITYREWIRE at checkout to access a discount on the MIRA Website You can do basal body temperature yourself. So you've got an idea of what's happening in your cycle and you can use something like Ovusense, which can take the stress away from having to wake up and, and take that. If you are looking at male fertility factors and I do urge you to, from the very, very start, because all too often, I see clients where, you know, as a female you are looking at what it is wrong with you, you and generally the medical profession seems to go down that line a little bit as well. But even though you'll only get basic sperm test results from a home test, I do think it's worthwhile still looking at that. And you can use a company called ExSeed and there are others available, of course, but this is one that, that I've come across recently. You can use code FERTILITYREWIRE to get a 15% discount. And I'm hoping to do an interview actually with somebody from ExSeed soon so we can explain a little bit more about that. So you're looking at basic information for sure and what I would say in any home tests, if it's coming up as suboptimal or even outside of normal ranges, I would still urge you to take advice from elsewhere and get this looked at in more detail. Definitely. So when we're looking at home testing, you