Deidre D. Gunn, MD, REACH Fertility, 1524 E. Morehead Street, Charlotte, NC (2026)

01/14/2025

Excited to announce that I've joined REACH Fertility in Charlotte, NC!

04/20/2022

Virtual support group tomorrow night with the JFF! Open to any infertility patient in Alabama; not faith-based. Register tonight to attend!

04/02/2022

Endometriosis often goes undiagnosed, so here’s the info you need to know. For the full 5-minute post, see link in bio. Here’s the rundown:

➡️ What's normal vs. abnormal for period cramping? If your periods are so painful that they cause you to miss work, school, or your usual activities, this is NOT normal.

➡️ If your mom or sister has endometriosis, you have a much higher risk of developing it.

➡️ Although surgery is technically the only way to diagnose endo, you may not need surgery. Birth control pills or other hormonal contraceptives are considered the first-line treatment.

➡️ Endo can cause infertility due to fallopian tube blockage or egg quality issues.

03/10/2022

Endometriosis occurs in ~10% of women, but that figure may be as high as 50% in women with infertility who have pelvic pain.

Endo classically causes painful periods and even pain with in*******se. It can only be diagnosed formally with a surgery called laparoscopy, although sometimes there are signs on physical exam or ultrasound. Birth control pills and other hormonal medications are used to treat the pain associated with endometriosis, and many times you can avoid surgery if your pain responds well to these medications.

As always, if you’re worried about your pelvic pain or other symptoms, talk to your doctor about your concerns.

We’ll do a deep dive on endometriosis the rest of the week — not just the facts you need to know about endo, but also how it can affect fertility.

To see past Fertility in 5 posts, go to link in bio!

03/05/2022

THE FERTILE WINDOW…..
HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

THE SCIENCE

1️⃣ S***m can survive for a few days inside the female reproductive tract.

2️⃣ The fertile window, your time of highest fertility, is the 5-6 days (particularly the 3 days) leading up to and including ovulation.

3️⃣ Waiting until ovulation happens before you have in*******se is a bad strategy…..this results in very few, if any, pregnancies (we know this from research studies of couples trying to conceive).

PRO TIPS:

So how do you know when you’re about to ovulate?

✅ Use ovulation predictor kits (OPKs), which measure the hormone surge in your urine that occurs approximately 24 hours before you ovulate. Digital OPKs are the easiest to read and interpret - you basically p*e on a stick like a pregnancy test, and the kit will tell you if it's one of your high fertility days or your peak fertility day.

🛑 What’s NOT the most effective strategy? Timing in*******se using BBT (basal body temperature) charts. These show you the temperature shift that occurs AFTER OVULATION due to increased progesterone levels. Charting your daily temperature is also a great way to ratchet up your stress and frustration levels, so feel free to toss out the thermometer and charts….I give you permission!

🛑 Another key point: apps that track your period CANNOT tell you for sure that you’re ovulating. Still, similar to BBT charts, they might be helpful in showing you which cycle days have been in your fertile window in the past (the app uses these to predict which days might be in your fertile window coming up).

✅ A final word about s*x - if you want to have in*******se every day during your fertile window, knock yourself out. In real life — with two people’s busy, exhausting schedules — this can be stressful and unrealistic. Every other day is sufficient!

(Note: This post is obviously about fertility for opposite-s*x couples; we’ll talk about fertility options for same-s*x couples in future posts.)

03/03/2022

Why are people so dismissive of the male side of the fertility equation? I haven’t figured that out yet. Guys — just because you feel healthy does NOT mean your s***m counts are normal.

In fact, 30-40% of the time the infertility is due to a male factor. It may be the only factor or it may be in addition to female factor(s) contributing to a couple’s infertility.

S***m counts and quality fluctuate over time. They’re affected by health problems (high blood pressure, diabetes, even recent illness), obesity (we see this more and more), and lifestyle factors like heavy alcohol use, smoking, ma*****na use, or use of testosterone. Finally, some men have underlying chromosome or genetic problems that cause s***m issues and infertility. Cycling or wearing tight underwear? Not so much….these are not considered risk factors for male infertility.

So, dudes, what can you do to optimize your reproductive health? Here you go:

✅ Stop smoking or using ma*****na, and keep your alcohol use to a moderate level (for men, this means no more than 14 drinks per week and no more than 4 drinks in a single day).

✅ Maintain a healthy weight.

✅ DO NOT USE TESTOSTERONE UNTIL YOU ARE DONE HAVING CHILDREN (I cannot stress this enough)!

✅ Get established with a primary care doctor. You may feel fine and healthy yet still have high blood pressure, diabetes, or other problems that can affect s***m counts and quality, not to mention your overall long-term health. (I find that very few of my male patients have a primary care doctor, in contrast to women, who at least see their GYN once a year).

✅ If your fertility doctor recommends a semen analysis, please get one! We really need all the pieces of the puzzle to make the right treatment plan.

✅ There are no supplements that have been conclusively shown to improve s***m counts or quality. However, I generally recommend a basic men’s multivitamin to cover your bases.

03/02/2022

This is why you need a reproductive life plan! This simply means thinking ahead about whether you want to have children, and if so, when (ideally) you’d like to have them. ACOG, the national society of OBGYN doctors, recommends that you have a reproductive life plan and talk about it with your OBGYN once a year.

Why? Because your peak fertility years are your teens and 20s, and many of us aren’t thinking about having kids until our 30s or later, when our fertility has declined and it’s much harder to get pregnant. Each of us may also have individual risk factors for infertility that we need to consider (like endometriosis, fibroids, a history of pelvic surgery or chemotherapy, or risk factors like smoking).

You actually lose most of your eggs before you’re even born - crazy, right? - and then every month your overall pool of eggs is decreasing, even though only one egg each month is being recruited (kind of like a star quarterback) to be the egg that ovulates that cycle. The others that were ready and waiting in the wings that month but weren’t selected to ovulate simply die off.

And it’s not just egg quantity….egg QUALITY declines as we age, again because we were born with this whole pool of eggs and we’re not making new ones, and the built-in machinery that helps the egg divide once it ovulates (and then again when it’s fertilized by a s***m) ages just like the rest of the cells in your body.

I see too many women who wish they’d known or had the opportunity to pursue fertility options when they were younger and had a better prognosis. So think ahead, make a reproductive life plan, and talk to your doctor about it early and often!

For the full post, follow link in bio or go to fertilityinfive.com.

02/28/2022

Welcome to week 1 of Fertility in 5! Whether you have 5 seconds or 5 minutes, here are the facts you need to know about your fertility. The graphic above is your 5-second fact, along with the full week’s infographic to preview the other topics we’ll cover throughout the week.

The blog post (link in bio) is your 5-minute read if you want more detail….in fact, today’s reading time is exactly 4 minutes 58 seconds. 😁

Excerpt from today’s post:

You need regular periods to get pregnant — a regular period usually means ovulation is happening every month. But even if you’re not trying to get pregnant, it’s important to your health to have regular periods (with some exceptions).

For fertility purposes, having regular periods is a pretty good indication that you’re ovulating, i.e. releasing an egg, every month. In case you missed the birds-and-the-bees talk when you were younger, spoiler alert: to get pregnant, you have to ovulate in order to get an egg into your fallopian tube where a s***m cell can swim up and fertilize it (make an embryo). That embryo then has to make its way back down into the uterus to implant and develop into a normal pregnancy.

As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts here, which is why human reproduction is so surprisingly inefficient. We’ll talk more about what can go wrong (and right) in future posts!

For today’s full post, click the link in bio, or go to fertilityinfive.com.

02/26/2022

Introducing Fertility in 5, my new social media initiative + blog to educate people about fertility.

Every week on Instagram, you’ll see a short infographic with a fertility topic — easy to digest in 5 seconds — and you can read more by checking out the full Instagram post or by visiting www.fertilityinfive.com

My goal is to empower people to better understand their bodies and their reproductive health. S*x Ed in high school was all about how to prevent pregnancy, but there’s no follow-up class to tell you how to actually get pregnant when you're trying or what to do if you're having trouble conceiving. Think of Fertility in 5 as your S*x Ed 102!

Deidre D. Gunn, MD

01/14/2025

04/20/2022

04/02/2022

03/10/2022

03/05/2022

03/03/2022

03/02/2022

02/28/2022

02/26/2022

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