You'll Grow Out of It (20 page)

Dr. Bander has also told me to buy an over-the-counter supplement called DHEA, which is supposed to boost ovarian function. I go to the pharmacy and buy the bottle. When I get home I read the label and discover that the side effects are acne and hair loss. I stand in the bathroom and ponder whether I'm ready for acne and hair loss. I decide I'm not and throw the bottle, unopened, under the sink. To make up for it, I pop the baby aspirin that Dr. Bander also told me to take every day. That seems easier.

Four weeks later, I get severe tinnitus in my left ear, which apparently can happen with consistent aspirin use. Or so the ear specialist informed me as he let me know that tinnitus is almost impossible to cure and usually stays with you for life. My tinnitus is like the sound of static on a bad phone line connection, a dull tone that goes up and down.

This is trying.

One of the things that happens when you find out you might be infertile is you suddenly have an intense drive to use the Internet as a Magic 8 Ball. You shake it over and over, entering your exact hormone numbers into your Google toolbar to see if any other trying person with the same numbers has had any luck having a baby. It's a truly stupid thing to do, and yet you do it anyway. I started Googling “amh less than .16” and immediately found myself sliding down a rabbit hole of infertility websites, chat rooms, and forums. All of them are haunted by a dreary sadness. And that's saying something, considering the sad horror that is most of the Internet. “Trying” always feels acutely sad on these forums because if you're on one of those sites it means you're currently “Failing.”

Still (and this is going to be controversial), I can't help but think the other ladies on these sites could stand to lighten up just the tiniest smidge. I feel guilty for feeling this way but also I can't help it. While I sometimes plumb the depths of this animal, irrational sadness at not being able to get pregnant, I also want to be able to laugh, just occasionally, at the absurdity of what we are putting ourselves through.

The other thing about these sites is they are written in their own special language, one made up almost entirely of acronyms and numbers. The very few words that aren't acronyms are emojis. It looks like some kind of code that might be used in a war, and actually, it is. All of these women are at war with their own bodies, these bodies that are stubbornly not giving them what they want.

Entering these forums can feel like you've accidentally walked through a door at the back of your closet leading into a very bleak Narnia. As soon as I began exploring them, I had a strong, visceral instinct to quickly and quietly exit while closing the door forever. That is what I should have done. And ultimately, it's what I did. However: In the mania that is trying, I wanted to decode the code, because perhaps somewhere, in someone else's story, I might find a happy ending to my story. Unfortunately, infertility forums are not chockablock with happy endings. There are a million long Russian novels about ovaries and IVFs and miscarriages, oh my. Many posters' online signatures read like histories of their entire genome. For instance, someone named Lisa might sign off with:

After Googling, I found out those letters meant:

At first I found the reliance on acronyms annoying—was it necessary for these women to abbreviate every single little thing? And eventually I realized it was, because they are spending so much of their time on trying to get pregnant, with the doctors and the shots and the acupuncture and the yoga, that there is literally not enough time to spell words out in their entirety.

Here are some infertility acronyms I came up with:

It is finally time for my hysterosnuffleupagusgram. I'm nervous but I've taken my Motrin and I've arranged to meet a girlfriend after the test just to celebrate that it's over. I keep telling myself that I'm a grown-up and grown-ups have to take tests and just be grown-up about it. But I still have that nervous shaky feeling that dogs get when they hop in the car to go to the vet. They
know
they ain't going to the park.

I'm meeting Dr. Bander at a hospital, where she will perform the test. I sit in the waiting room of the gynecological ultrasound room. I watch the women walking out and try to gauge how much pain they seem to be in. All of them seem fine. No limping. No one is bleeding out. Then my name is called and a nurse leads me to one of those sad little changing rooms where you take everything off and put on a paper gown and inevitably get a little lost wandering to where you're supposed to go and have to cover your exposed butt with your hands.

I make it to the room and try not to look at the tubing and tools that will soon be going into my cervix. Ew, my cervix! Dr. Bander shows me the screen we will watch to see if my fallopian tubes (ew again) are open enough to fill with the dye. The part that can cause cramping, Dr. Bander explains as she clamps open my vagina with the ice cream scoopy thingy,
1
is when she uses a catheter to push the fluid dye into the cervix. The pressure of the dye itself is technically supposed to be the problem. However, as soon as she starts to insert the catheter, I feel an intense pain and let out a yelp.

“I'm barely even touching you,” Dr. Bander says tersely. I'm not sure why she is telling me this. She makes another attempt with the catheter and again I let out a yelp.

“You have a very sensitive cervix,” she informs me. She seems annoyed with me, which is a bit of a mystery since I am the one who is stuck with the crappy cervix. “I'm going to try to use a different instrument.”

She uses the different tool that hurts slightly less, which begs the question of why she wouldn't have used the less painful tool in the first place. Then she begins to fill my insides with the dye fluid
2
and I experience a whole other level of pain. It feels like someone is punching me in the stomach over and over. I flinch and Bander tells me not to move as I start profusely sweating.

A few minutes later we are done. She presses
PLAYBACK
on the monitor to show me as one fallopian tube, thin as a hair, goes dark with the fluid. On the other side, there is nothing. “Well,” she says matter-of-factly, “your left tube is totally open and clear. The right tube did not fill. So either it's blocked, or else your cramping was just so severe that it temporarily blocked the tube.”

Can I get pregnant with one blocked tube?

Technically yes, she says. But it's harder.

I ask her what the upshot is.

“It's inconclusive,” she says. “But really, your reaction to the test was unusually difficult. When you have a baby, you'll definitely need to get an epidural.”

When you have a baby.

If we are so sure it is “when” and not “if,” why did we just inflate my innards like a water balloon?

And no doy! Of course I'm getting an epidural, you monster.

She leaves. I am led back to the sad little changing room where I am given a plump hot dog bun of a maxi pad to contain my post-test bleeding. My stomach is still cramping. I limp the three blocks to Magnolia Bakery, where my friend Zubeida is meeting me for a pint of banana pudding. Banana pudding has been my go-to feel-sorry-for-myself treat for many years. Usually I eat it after breakups and Mets losses. Now I'm eating it because one of my fallopian tubes is apparently garbage and also my cervix is a disaster. I finish an entire pudding pint, only to realize my feelings are still stubbornly feelable, thus necessitating an extra red velvet cupcake to try to stuff them back into the sand. I definitely do not enjoy the cupcake and 100 percent feel worse when it has been deposited on top of the feeling pile. Now I'm barren AND fat, I whine to myself.

On the subway ride home, I luxuriate in a hot tub of self-pity. I think of a new acronym:

A few weeks after the test, Dr. Bander tells me that if I'm not pregnant by August, I should definitely plan on doing IVF because I am running out of time. She wants me to start doing shots. I hate needles, and the idea of having to learn to administer them at home myself necessitates more pudding, cupcakes, and ice cream. As someone who primarily writes sex jokes for a living, this task seems beyond my ken. My husband supposedly could learn to do it, but he has sausage fingers and by his own admission is terrible at small, detailed tasks requiring dexterity. If he cannot help me zip up a dress, I do not feel great about him plunging a syringe into my body. I ask her about trying an IUI
3
before moving on to IVF (acronyms!) and she tells me it's a waste of time.

I fire Dr. Bander.

My beloved primary care doctor, Dr. Rahman, recommends Dr. Mukherjee as my new fertility Sherpa. We show up to his office on a warm afternoon in May, and I like him immediately. He grew up in the Bronx and has the build and bearing of John Madden, if John Madden were Indian and fiddled with ladies' baby junk for a living.

Even his office has a different vibe. He is a part of a very large practice, and it's constantly packed with the women who make up our strange club—Hasidic women, black women, white women, young women, older women, and very rich women bedecked in very fancy jewelry, which for all its fanciness still has not bought them a baby. The sound system is always playing upbeat contemporary pop, which I suppose is better than depressing music—I mean, who wants to contemplate their barrenness to Portishead or Pink Floyd?—but on the other hand it's no less surreal to wait for your estrogen levels to be measured for the umpteenth time to Whitney Houston's “Million Dollar Bill.”

Unlike Dr. Bander, who treated the fertility process with the cold exacting manner of a scientist herding lab rats, Dr. Mukherjee's attitude resembles more closely that of a high school football coach who truly believes the game isn't about winning or losing but should really be about Fun! I like this attitude.

I ask him if he thinks I need to be rushing into IVF.

“Nah, you just started trying,” he says with a wave of the hand. “Let's give you a chance, see how it goes.”

I pepper him with more questions, making up a few to hide the one that is most important, which is obviously how much I can drink while the Trying process is happening.

“Don't get blackout drunk,” he says. “But beyond that you're fine.”

This is tremendous news. I consider leaving Mike to marry Dr. Mukherjee.

We agree that for the next three months I will take a pill that will help me sprout extra follicles (ew, follicles!) in the middle of my cycle (ew, cycle!). I will come to the office for an ultrasound wherein we will count follicles, and if there are enough (but also not too many), I will receive an injection of Ovidrel into my stomach, which will induce my eggs (barf, eggs!) to slide down my tubes (no words). At which point Mike and I will know it is time to bang it out for a few days. “Doesn't have to be every day, every other day is fine,” Mukherjee says. I decide to quit while we're all ahead and not to do my vaginal/anal joke even though I feel like Mukherjee would totally get it.

As we are wrapping up, he says there is one other thing we should do before we begin this phase of Trying. “Have you done your HSG yet?” he asks.

“You should have the results,” I say with the eager smugness of a teacher's pet who did all the homework before being asked.

He shuffles through my incredibly thick file.

“Hm.”

?

“You should redo the test,” he says. “You wanna know what's up with that other tube.”

I ask if it's really necessary because, not to be all dramatic, but the last test was the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
4

“Yeah, well,” he says as he eats half a meatball sandwich (he wasn't really eating a meatball sandwich, but that is always his vibe). “You don't want to waste your time trying to get pregnant with just one tube if you could have both tubes. If you only have one tube open we should try to do something about it.”

Do something about it?

“Yeah, the doctor I'm gonna send you to could blow it open if it's blocked.”

Blow it open?

He explains that a blocked tube can literally have air blown into it to try to clear it out. This brings the plumbing analogy to new heights. Or rather, depths.

I show up for my second hysterosnuffleupagus. I have been told that for this test I will be sedated, which is heartening, but then I inquire further and discover that I will not be completely unconscious, as I'd been hoping. Anything short of complete blackness feels like not enough.

Dr. Brady's practice is one of those Upper East Side shmancy offices where there is a doorman who lets you in and dark wood everywhere and nice carpeting that you would maybe even choose to have in your house. However, these amenities fade into the background as my appointment, for which I have been instructed not to eat or drink eight hours prior, gets pushed farther and farther into the day. I arrive at nine a.m.; by noon I am starving and my nerves are frayed. I've instructed Mike to pick me up with banana pudding in hand.