My IVF life: six months in, we have an answer but it isnt over yet | Fertility problems
My IVF lifeFertility problems This article is more than 5 years oldMy IVF life: six months in, we have an answer – but it isn’t over yet
This article is more than 5 years oldFollowing the estrogen patches, the progesterone shots, the transfer, and an anxious wait, I finally find out if I’m pregnant
A month before the transfer – which is to say, the procedure in which my doctor will place an embryo in my uterus in the hopes that it will implant and grow into a baby – E and I go away for an early-March weekend in western Massachusetts. I call it our IVF-moon: we know that the regime we’re embarking on will keep us fairly homebound. I’m already on two medications to start preparing my body for potential pregnancy, and soon we’ll add more.
We’re visiting an art gallery in a high-ceilinged former factory building and I can’t believe the temperature. I start removing my layers.
How on earth can they afford to heat the building like this? I ask E, peeling off my coat and sweater and flannel shirt until I’m down to a clammy T-shirt, and why is everyone else in this gallery still wearing coats indoors?
He looks at me like I’m talking nonsense. He’s also wearing his coat.
Oh my God, I say, I’m having a hot flash.
Thanks to the drugs, I am in (temporary) menopause. The cause of the menopause is Lupron, which is injected into my stomach every night for two weeks with a skinny needle. I’m also wearing estrogen patches, to build up my uterine lining. Once the Lupron stops I move on to the dreaded progesterone in oil: dreaded because it’s viscous and requires a giant needle and nightly shots in the buttocks that cause huge welts and sometimes bleeding. Progesterone in oil is also hard to come by: there’s a nationwide shortage, so even though I have the tremendous privilege of health insurance that covers much of the cost, we’re sent scrambling for more when the mail-order pharmacy can’t fulfill the full order when we need it, which means E has to go pick up extra to fill in the gaps at a cost of $100 per vial.
E has to pick the progesterone up because I am somewhat inert. Progesterone side-effects mimic the symptoms of early pregnancy, so I am tired and achy and hungry and lying on the couch whenever possible. I nearly pass out in the midst of a workout, and that’s the end of my attendance at the gym. We’ve now been in the IVF process for nearly six months, and I miss feeling like myself.
E comes with me on the day of the transfer, but they don’t let him come in the operating room – he’s not sterile. I change into a hospital gown; everyone else in the room is wearing hazmat suits.
You don’t want to know the sex, right? says my doctor.
No, I say. E and I have discussed this: though the information is there in the file – they identify the sex when sequencing the chromosomes for the other genetic tests – we know that imagining the embryo as a boy or a girl will make us feel a little bit more attached. I’m trying not to feel attached. Someone puts a photo of the embryo on a screen that I can see while I’m lying back on the procedure table: a grey blob of cells. I remember not to get attached.
The transfer feels anticlimatic: a quick pinch and it’s done. I’m rolled back into a recovery area and told to lie still for 20 minutes or so, but there’s not much to recover from. They give me a print of the blob photo and I show it to E. We discuss whether it resembles us. I take a picture with my phone and send it to my mother.
Isn’t is amazing, she says, that your dad and I are partly in there?
It is, I say. It is amazing.
And now: we wait. In IVF-parlance it’s known as the two-week wait, though in my case it will be more like 10 days until I return to the clinic for a blood test that will look for HCG – pregnancy hormone – in my blood. If it’s there, I’ll be four weeks pregnant.
I go into drugstores to look at pregnancy tests on the shelves, to scratch the itchThe only thing you can do during the two-week wait besides, well, waiting, is to take home pregnancy tests. E and I discuss it and I agree not to take one, because of the risk of false results. And then I think about taking one every day. Would it be so bad for me take one? I go into drugstores to look at pregnancy tests on the shelves, to scratch the itch, and then two nights before my blood test I go to a Duane Reade and buy a three-pack and take it home and leave it on the bathroom counter. This makes me feel a little bit more in control.
What’s this? says E when he sees it.
I didn’t take it, I say, but I wanted to.
The blood test is scheduled early on a Saturday morning. I make E come with me, because I’m so anxious, but it’s an anticlimax, too: a quick stick, and then over. We’d planned to go out for breakfast afterwards, but we’re anxious, not hungry. We take the hour-long train back to Brooklyn, take the dog for a walk, go back to sleep for a bit. I stare at my phone. The minutes drag. E makes us some lunch out of random leftovers and we are sitting eating it on the front stoop when my phone lights up with the number of the hospital.
Congratulations, says the nurse at the other end of the line. You’re pregnant.
My HCG number is not huge, but it’s enough. The nurse tells me to come back in a couple of days for another test to see if it’s rising; it needs to double each day.
Thank you, I say.
E and I put down our food and clutch each other. We blink in the sunlight. We look at the picture of the blob on my phone. There’s so much that could still go wrong, but it could be the first photo of our baby. I allow myself to take the print that the doctor gave me and hang it, with a magnet, on the fridge.
This week I learned: HCG is the hormone that home pregnancy tests detect, but a blood test can determine exactly what your level of HCG is, which can be one indicator of the likelihood that a pregnancy is viable.
Jean Hannah Edelstein is the author of the forthcoming This Really Isn’t About You
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