26

CAN’T CONTROL EVERYTHING

You and Nathan get a recommendation for a fertility specialist and make your first appointment. After a series of tests, some of them redundant to what your doctor has already done, you are advised to start with some hormone therapy medications and an intrauterine insemination (IUI).¹ You go ahead with this plan. The process isn’t horrible, although the hormones do make you feel moodier than you already did. But it also doesn’t work . . . four cycles in a row.

Your fertility doctor tells you that your next option is in vitro fertilization (IVF).²

You set out to prepare yourself for this final spin around the mentally and physically exhausting roulette wheel. You read a book about IVF, comb through online forums, and start a series of acupuncture treatments to prepare your body for what lies ahead.

Finally, you start your first IVF cycle. Nathan gets trained in mixing and administering your stem injections, and you sit on the couch watching old Sex in the City episodes to take your mind off the pain. This process lasts for two weeks, during which time you become increasingly bloated, tired, and irritable. Or, more accurately, you’re unable to wear normal pants, unable to stay awake, and unable to keep from crying about everything. Your outside feels like a swollen battleground from all of your injections, and your inside feels like an over-worked egg factory.

On the day of your egg retrieval, you are the most nervous you can ever remember being. But the surgery goes well, and you go home to rest, with eighteen fewer eggs in your ovaries than you woke up with that morning. Now you recover and wait. You’ve taken the past week and a half off of work and will need to go back in a few days.

One afternoon at work, you get the call from your doctor that you’ve been waiting for. Four of the embryos were successfully fertilized. You take the rest of the day off, because you’re unable to concentrate due to nervousness and excitement. After doing some research, you learn that your odds of getting pregnant are actually worse if you plant two embryos versus one, so you plan to implant one and freeze the other three.³

The egg implanting is fairly painless compared to all the other turmoil your body has been through lately. But the wait is excruciating. You start peeing on sticks only three days later, which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t produce any results. But a few days after that, you start to see a faint line. And it keeps getting darker every day that you check. You are ecstatic.

But when you go in for your first ultrasound two weeks later, there is no heartbeat and only an empty placenta. You have miscarried, as is the case for 22 percent of IVF pregnancies.⁴ You cry the whole way home and well into the following day. After that, you just feel numb.

But you pick yourself up again, and three months later, you try again to implant one of the frozen embryos. This time you don’t even get a positive pregnancy test.

Later in the year, right after your thirty-first birthday, you try one final attempt. Your body is worn out, you are twenty pounds over your usual weight from all of the medications and the lack of mobility you’ve been experiencing. You know this is your final attempt. Not only will this use up what is left of your lifetime fertility insurance coverage and your savings, but you just don’t have it in you to keep going beyond this.

Emotionally, perhaps you had already given up. Or perhaps your body was too unstable after so much struggle. Whatever the case, you finish your long, taxing journey through infertility treatments with no baby in your uterus and no more hope in your heart.

• • •

The next year is hard. A distance has grown between you and Nathan that feels palpable as you both mourn in your own unique ways. It seems that friends are announcing pregnancies with comical frequency. And it takes almost that full year to get your body back to normal and get your mind back to work, friends, hobbies, and anything other than conception.

But you do slowly start to emerge from the mourning period. At first a good day is just getting out of bed the first time your alarm goes off and making it through the morning without crying. Then you start saying yes to dinners out with your friends. Finally, you’re even able to show up to a close friend’s baby shower without feeling miserable. You and Nathan get a dog: a pug named Maurice. And you start taking trips together, which reminds you of the joys that you used to experience in life, before what will become known to you as “the dark years.”

You even start to find joy and appreciation at times for the freedom and flexibility that your life without children affords you. And as you do, you go to Chapter 21.