Paying thousands of dollars for a chance at pregnancy is a little like playing Russian roulette. Either you’re going to be relieved when you find yourself still breathing at the end or your whole life will seemingly be over.
This is how I found myself flat on my back, feet in stirrups, as the doctor squirted two microscopic embryos into my uterus. I had been here before — four other times, actually — but I swore to myself that this was going to be the last time. I owed people a lot of money and was sick of injecting myself with hormones on a daily basis.
“Do you see them?” The nurse pointed as a little blip moved slowly across the monitor.
My husband squeezed my hand, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. This was it. This was the last chance for us, and all I could do was pray one or both of these babies stuck around.
IVF was never the plan. Pregnancy scares while I was still in nursing school, sure. Maybe a few months of wondering why it hadn’t happened yet when I finally did want it, complete with some ovulation kits — that I could see as a worst-case scenario. But not IVF. Not Follistim and Gonal-F, which both sound vaguely kinky but really are just hellishly expensive fertility medications. Not years of waiting, crying, and screaming into my pillow.
I was 24 when my husband and I thought seriously about my going off birth control. We hadn’t even been married for a year; it’s been so long now that I can no longer remember why we decided to toss the pills and try for a baby much earlier than we’d ever discussed. Perhaps it’s just that I’d always wanted to be a mom, and the time seemed right for us to get pregnant.
I figured if we started right after graduation, I could be established in my first nursing job by the time the baby was born. I’ve always been a planner, and I thought pregnancy would be no different because I was young and healthy. I thought I could practically schedule my due date on the calendar.
As much as I assumed it was just going to happen because it happened for everyone else around me, it didn’t go that way. After 18 stressful months of my husband and me trying, we realized we were officially in uncharted territory. Regular, old-fashioned baby-making wasn’t getting us anywhere, so I spoke with my doctor and she recommended timing sex according to my cycle and using ovulation predictor tests to up our chances.
News flash: Having sex dictated by a smiling face on a pee stick or on a doctor’s schedule gets to be a chore quickly. Soon after, I found myself swallowing fertility drugs like candy — small white pills meant to help me ovulate, spread out over two years. When that wasn’t working, we threw in a fertility clinic a year later and three cycles of IUI (intrauterine insemination) to increase the odds of conceiving. IUI was meant to take the best sperm and shoot them right up where they were supposed to go.
I didn’t get pregnant. Instead, I started feeling like I was on some nightmare merry-go-round of endless fertility treatments. I think on some level, I knew the tame procedures we had been doing weren’t working. It was time to bring in the big guns.
Read the rest of this article over at Vox.
