Jaime’s story:

Angela Le has been a gift and a blessing during the years of my quest to have a second child, which has been one of the most emotionally and physically challenging periods of my life.

She is a remarkable presence, and a superlative practitioner, and her wisdom and perspective helped me transform the way in which I was approaching the treatment process. 

When I met Angela, who had been highly recommended by the doctors at Columbia University’s Center for Women’s Reproductive Care, I was in the midst of what would become my third failed IVF cycle.

Like so many women, and couples, who are confronted with the unexpected loss of their fertility, I felt overwhelmed, disbelieving, and desperate. Physically, I was in the worst shape of my life—eating poorly, barely sleeping, and chronically overworking. In her gentle but perceptive and direct manner, Angela helped me to see that a state of stressful exhaustion would not be—could not be—conducive to the creation of a new life, and that if I wished to have another child, I would need to welcome this child on every level. She made abundantly clear what now seems fundamental, but at the time was obscured: that fertility is both a creative and a receptive process, which is much more encompassing and enduring than the simple union of sperm and egg. 

From this perspective, no matter how powerful and successful hormonal treatments might be, they will not work if we separate our body’s needs from the longings of our hearts, minds, and souls. With Angela’s help, I learned a new way of taking care of myself, which has been as wonderfully pragmatic as it has been holistic and spiritual.

At every step of the way, Angela has been engaged with and supportive of the various and often difficult aspects of my journey, including painful choices that my husband and I faced when it seemed that conventional treatments had failed us.

Knowing Angela is a bit like knowing a wise and wonderful advocate, who is as skilled at turning a breech baby (I am due to deliver my formerly breech baby any day now) as she is at divining one’s resistance to understanding fertility treatments as more than just a physical process. 

Much has been written about the sometimes dehumanizing aspects of enduring fertility treatments, and the tremendous emotional and financial expense of doing so. What Angela Le does is return “heartfulness”—a loving orientation to oneself and to the world—to the whole complicated business of using reproductive technologies. For me, this has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I will be forever grateful.