EP145: Narrative medicine, Infertility & the Power of telling your story — with Guest Kayla Branstetter

🎓 FREE TRAINING: The Recurrent Pregnancy Loss Care Gap 

Recurrent pregnancy loss is not simply a series of isolated losses.

A woman may be carrying cumulative grief, fear, trauma, changes in identity, altered trust in her body and healthcare experiences from one pregnancy into the next — yet care can still focus primarily on the loss immediately in front of us.

In my next FREE Gap Series training, we’re going deeper into the Recurrent Pregnancy Loss Care Gap and exploring what practitioners across fertility, birth, mental health, grief and women’s health may need to understand about the whole reproductive experience.

Because better care doesn't require one practitioner to hold everything.

It requires more of us to ask better questions, recognise what may be sitting beneath the surface, understand where our scope fits — and know when another practitioner needs to enter her story.

📅 17 September
🎓 FREE practitioner training
🤍 For existing and aspiring practitioners supporting women through reproductive loss

Join the training here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thereproductivelossleadershipnetwork 

Let’s stop looking at each loss as an isolated event — and start asking what she may be carrying through the whole reproductive journey.

In this episode

I sit down with Kayla Branstetter — English instructor, TEDx speaker, and doctoral candidate in narrative medicine — to talk about the stories we're not told about infertility, miscarriage, and medical gaslighting.

Kayla shares her deeply personal journey: growing up as the daughter of a teen mom who overcame poverty and an unsupportive medical system, and how that legacy shaped her own path through three years of unexplained infertility, a devastating miscarriage, and pregnancies marked by anxiety rather than joy.

We talk about the coldness of clinical language in moments of profound loss, the grief that comes with infertility and miscarriage that so few people know how to hold space for, and the judgment women face for decisions made in impossible circumstances. Kayla also introduces us to narrative medicine — the practice of centering patients' stories as part of their care — and shares how this work led to her forthcoming book, Don't Be An Athena, which reimagines the myth of Athena and Medusa to explore what happens when women are empowered instead of blamed.

This conversation is a powerful reminder that behind every diagnosis, every lab result, and every "it was just a miscarriage" is a story — and that story matters.

In this episode, we cover:

• How narrative medicine found Kayla through her own family history and lived experience
• The impact of medical gaslighting during her mother's teen pregnancy — and her own
• Three years of unexplained infertility and what it does to your sense of identity
• The cold, clinical way pregnancy loss is often delivered — and why language matters
• Grief after miscarriage: why it's real, why it's valid, and why so few people understand it
• The hormonal and physical "postpartum" experience after early loss that no one talks about
• Judgment, stigma, and why understanding someone's story matters more than casting blame
• The Athena and Medusa myth reimagined — and how it inspired her forthcoming book
• Why healthcare needs more humanities, not less
• Her upcoming book, Don't Be An Athena, releasing July 20th

Connect with Kayla:

• Website: kaylabranstetter.wordpress.com 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayla-branstetter/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kayla.branstetter.758
• Don't Be An Athena — releasing July 20th