One in six couples in America will experience reproductive problems. Julia Indichova and her husband were part of that statistic. According to several fertility specialists Julia's high FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) level was an indication that her body was no longer producing fertilizable eggs. Her only chance of conceiving, they said, was in-vitro-fertilization with a donor egg. After a futile quest for a more hopeful prognosis, Julia searched through a variety of holistic alternatives and finally decided upon a personal healing regimen. She followed it as single-mindedly , as one would follow a doctor's prescription of antibiotics. Her daughter Adira was conceived naturally, eight months later, and was born on April 29, 1994.
Julia Indichova was born in 1949 in Kosice, Czechoslovakia. Her parents were part of a small Hungarian Jewish community of Holocaust survivors. She started working as a professional actress at the age of eight and went on to study acting at the University of Performing Arts in Bratislava. She emigrated to the United States in June of l969 and enrolled in Montclair State College after a summer of studying English. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater Arts and Russian in 1972. For the next fifteen years she worked as an actress, dancer, director, producer, waitress and receptionist in and around New York City. In 1985 Julia received her MA in TESOL (teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Hunter College in New York. She has since taught English at Columbia University's American Language Program and the International English Language Institute at Hunter College. She has also taught Russian, German, French and Social Studies in the New York City public school system.
Ms Indichova lives with her husband and two daughters in New York City, leads a support group that explores holistic treatment options to encourage fertility and is at work on her next book. INSIDEFLAP: "I'm sorry. There is nothing you can do." The finality of their diagnoses, the certainty of their voices, the grave faces and the folded hands made me walk out of their offices numb and stripped of hope.
If you, or someone you love, have embarked on the fertility search, you may recognize Julia Indichova's experience: the endless round of tests, the emotionally and financially draining quest for the right specialist. You may soon be offered the help of cutting-edge science and adroit surgeons. Or, like Julia, you may be told that all intervention is futile.
Yet, here, in these pages, meet a woman who decided that there was something she could do.
Her story of how she defied the statistics may give you hope. Her practical steps may even give you the means to conceive the child that everyone is saying you can't have. But whether you follow Julia's specific path or choose your own steps, reading her story will inspire you to take control of your own body and the process.
Inconceivable - Winning the Fertility Game is one woman's hauntingly beautiful story of life, love, motherhood and hope. Follow her painful trail through the waiting rooms and procedures of the best and brightest that modern medicine has to offer, as well as through the maze of surprising alternatives.
Ultimately, what Julia discovers and what Inconceivable - Winning the Fertility Game teaches us, whether we are searching for a child or for larger truths, is that once we take over our own lives, rather than docilely placing ourselves in the hands of others, something shifts. Something changes. We become the authors of our own fates.
Read Julia's story. Perhaps you--or someone you love--is the person Julia knows is "out there, waiting to hear it." And perhaps these children who find a way to come into the world against all odds have a purpose for coming here as magical, mysterious and profoundly powerful as their mother's resolve to bring them.
