I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  I was shocked when I walked into the fertility clinic waiting room. I expected it to look like the set of Designing Women: overweight ladies who couldn’t find a husband having a midlife crisis, sitting in wicker rocking chairs with giant palm trees on the cushions, leafing through self-help books. Imagine my surprise when I walked into a room that looked like a sexy spaceship decorated by Christian Grey’s interior designer filled with gorgeous women on the latest iPhones. Modern walls, modern art, modern tables, modern women. It made me realize this problem is, well, modern. Women postponing motherhood is a new thing, so there’s no blueprint on how to deal with it, which made me feel slightly better about my immature behavior and the passive-aggressive pajama pants I was wearing.

  So, as you’ve already concluded, I had been a sexist punk. These were not lonely, pathetic, unlovable women. One of the women was on her knees behind the mid-century modern sofa looking for an outlet to plug her phone into, so she was already very loved by me. Her phone was out of juice at ten A.M. That’s a busy-ass, in-demand bitch. My battery was at 90 percent, so I was clearly the loneliest, least e-mailed person there.

  I was pleasantly surprised by the doctor I met with. Let’s call him Dr. Dong because if I was reading a chapter about this depressing topic, I’d want some levity and the word dong to appear every couple sentences. Dr. Dong was lovely. I don’t know why that surprised me so much. In my experience doctors can be patronizing and annoyed by vulnerability, but he seemed genuinely happy to meet me and patient with my being a female. Although when I explained my situation, he turned sympathetic, which pissed me off. I was thirty. I wasn’t dying. “I would like to get my fertility checked and possibly freeze my eggs,” I said. “Good for you,” he responded, nodding his head slowly. I didn’t realize then this would be the first of 327 times I would hear that phrase over the next five years.

  I’m obviously being unfair. Anything short of him saying “You’re way too young for egg freezing, ya knucklehead; get out of my office and go live your life, ya tiny fertile fetus!” would have annoyed me. It also didn’t help that his office was decorated with endless photos of babies and on his desk he had an array of glass jars full of colorful Starburst. If you’re in a room full of photos of children and tubs of candy, you’re either in a pedophile den or at a fertility doctor.

  Dr. Dong scooped out a handful of colored Starburst and spread them across the table with the smoothness of a card dealer that made it clear he did this countless times a day. He demonstrated with my least favorite candy how the quality of a lady’s eggs declines with age. He used yellow to represent “good” eggs, which was offensive given yellow is the shittiest Starburst flavor. It’s the buttered popcorn Jelly Belly of Starburst. I facetiously said, “Can you at least use the cherry ones to represent my good eggs?” He didn’t laugh. However, he did offer me a Starburst seconds after he told me eating sugar isn’t good for you during the egg-freezing process. This oddly made me like him more, but I sort of lost my appetite for candy after imagining it as my future zygote.

  I wish I could describe to you how egg freezing works, but I didn’t hear anything Dr. Dong said in his monologue. I have a mental wiring issue where I short-circuit and black out when someone smart starts explaining something complicated that I really need to know. As soon as they start saying important things, I totally power down. I’ve worked so hard to achieve mental serenity and bliss through meditation, therapy, marijuana—you name it—but I can only really transcend into complete Zen when people tell me incredibly important information. When I ask for driving directions, I instantly zone out and stare at the person’s pores and fantasize about squeezing the gook out of each one of them.

  After I pretended to listen for twenty minutes, Dr. Dong snapped me out of my haze by asking, “Have you ever terminated a pregnancy?”

  “No,” I said.

  This would be the first of many lies I told Dr. Dong and myself during the egg-freezing process.

  Dr. Dong could tell I wasn’t sold on his whole operation, so he figured out how to appeal to my ornery nature. “Look, this may not be for your first or even second kid. It might be for your third kid after having two naturally. Or when you’re forty-five, maybe you want a surrogate . . .” The word surrogate pulled me out of my entitled zombie state. You mean freezing my eggs could mean another woman could have my kid for me? Now we’re getting somewhere.

  I asked if I should come back in five years when I’d be closer to knowing if I had the patience for a kid or a possible baby daddy on the horizon. Dr. Dong explained that the technology is finally available to freeze and de-thaw (what?) eggs ten years later without defrosting, since the eggs are now freeze-dried (seriously, what?). I can’t pretend to understand how it’s done, but clearly the universe was urging me to increase my chances of creating another generation of neurotic children chock-full of my alcoholic, giant-feet-making DNA. To refuse modern technology felt oddly ungrateful and even—might I say—unpatriotic, given how much a future crazy Cummings child would stimulate the economy with her purchases of antidepressants, self-help books, and dog costumes.

  After I grabbed a couple of cherry Starbursts for the road, I was led into another room down the hall and left to disrobe. This was the one moment I didn’t regret wearing my pajamas. It did feel weird, though. Usually when you take your pants off during the day, your life is going either really well or really not well, and I couldn’t tell which category I fell into.

  A chipper nurse burst into the room and asked how my day was going, possibly trying to distract me from the fact that what was about to happen was gonna cost me twenty thousand dollars. While she fluttered about, she expertly put a condom on a sonogram wand with a smooth swooping movement that was downright humbling. Frankly, I was jealous. I don’t want to brag, but I’ve put a couple condoms on in my day. However, after being sexually active for more than fifteen years, I still don’t know which part of the condom is supposed to face up. I noticed the nurse was wearing a wedding ring, and all I could think about was if Chipper is ever single again, she’ll have to pretend to fumble with condoms in front of men just so they don’t think she’s a prostitute. As if the condom swoop wasn’t impressive enough, she then slipped the wand inside my female entry point without even looking, like a world-class fencing champion. I was taken aback by way of my front.

  Suddenly my innards showed up on a TV screen. Let me be very clear with you about my next realization: My uterus is very ugly. Having inner beauty is pretty much my main goal in life, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve failed miserably. Turns out my uterus looks like a moldy shipwreck crashed into GoPro footage of a haunted house on a snowy night.

  Chipper swiveled the wand into the corners of my insides and pointed at a screen, saying, “Look, there’s one follicle, two follicles . . .” I remember thinking, “Of course I have hairy ovaries.” That’s how little I knew about my own reproductive organs. She explained to me that follicles produce hormones and release eggs during ovulation. I figured this was probably covered in the Starburst lecture I tuned out earlier.

  After examining the TV for a bit longer, Chipper unceremoniously removed the wand from my lower half and breezed out of the room rather quickly, which made me think she knew the glob of lube left inside me was now sliding down my leg with aplomb. And to answer your question, yes, I did throw my back out trying to wipe it off.

  And that was that. I was on track to freeze my eggs. The first step was going off birth control and waiting for my period. For a myriad of reasons it took a while for my period to “start up again.” After hearing all the phrases used to describe how my innards function, I now get why people use a female pronoun for cars.

  Later I did end up learning all the important crap I was too dissociative in the consultation to absorb. I found out that us lassies lose a whopping 90 percent of our eggs by the time we’re thirty years old. “Fertility peaks in your teens and twenties,” I
kept reading. Suffice to say I had a very hard time accepting that my fertility had its shining moment when I was slamming back Amaretto sours and dry-humping to 50 Cent.

  I realize this is, like, Sex Ed 101 to most people, but I guess it just never crystallized in my brain that us gals hit our “fertile peak” between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-one. This fact sunk in when I was at the ironic age of thirty-two, the exact year I fell off the aforementioned peak. It just baffles me how badly evolution is bombing on the fertility front; it makes no sense that when I was the least equipped mentally and financially to have a kid, I was the most able to. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: Biology is a raging sexist psychopath.

  Anyway, back to my uterus. Three weeks after the consultation, my period finally came. I texted Dr. Dong to give him the news. I was a little rusty at this, given that the last time I urgently texted a guy about my period, I was in high school and it was to my panicking boyfriend. Dr. Dong told me since I finally started ovulating, it was now time to start the fertility shots. Yay?

  I feel like I worked so hard not to be the kind of person who desperately injects herself with an expensive substance every day, but here I was, doing exactly that. Only it wasn’t something as glamorous or cinematic as heroin. It was a hormone called gonadotropins. Even though I spent a good hour with a nurse learning how to inject myself delicately, I kept puncturing my tummy with the kind of anger with which I’d stab at an Ann Coulter voodoo doll. Maybe I had spatial intelligence issues due to my body dysmorphia. Maybe it was yet another manifestation of my seemingly endless masochism. Or maybe it was to punish myself for not being younger.

  After a couple days my stomach was covered in blue and green bruises. I injected myself twice daily until my torso eventually looked like a Monet. I found this both funny and a source of pride, both of which seem like the wrong reaction to have, and perhaps yet another indication that I was doing the right thing by postponing motherhood.

  As if you weren’t seething with jealousy enough, dear reader, it gets even sexier. In addition to shooting myself up with hormones every day, which caused brutal headaches and dizziness, I had to go into the office every other day to get penetrated by Chipper with the cold slimy phallus to reveal how, if, where, and at what size my eggs were growing. Every time I went to one of these appointments, not only did I lose three hours of my life driving there and back and thus a large chunk of my sanity, but I also had to drop about four hundred dollars per visit. I know. A heroin habit would actually have been way cheaper than egg freezing, and frankly, might actually have also increased my chances of getting pregnant before forty.

  After a couple of weeks, my belly started swelling up. I had terrible cramps, felt like I constantly had to poop even though I didn’t, and got migraines that felt like a tiny woodpecker was going to town on my right eyeball. I think this is what Shania Twain was talking about when she sang “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” Finally, about three weeks and fifty sloppy bloody stabs later, it was time for me to have my eggs sucked out and put into the fridge.

  The retrieval was shockingly fast and somewhat anticlimactic. I had to go to another place for this procedure, and this waiting room was full of bloated women furiously typing on their phones awaiting their retrievals. We were like a bunch of busy cows waiting to be milked.

  I don’t remember much about the egg retrieval because I was given the drug Michael Jackson died from overdosing on. I love Michael Jackson, and after having a dose of that drug, I can confidently say he died doing what he loved.

  I woke up after the procedure to the doctor telling me to “take it easy.” Now, I have a pretty type A personality, so for me “take it easy” means no paragliding or riding mechanical bulls. I had shows booked that weekend because I, like many women, have a job and I couldn’t just clear my schedule for three months to do silly things like “heal.” Plus, I needed to work in order to afford the insane cost of this process. Side note: If you attended any of my stand-up shows from May through July 2015, you basically paid for my frozen eggs, so thank you.

  The day after the retrieval, I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. I was able to ignore the pain because, well, ignoring pain is pretty much the skill I’m best at. And by design, women always seem to be in some kind of discomfort, so if I reacted every time my body hurt, I’d live in a cannabis dispensary.

  That night I drove out to Irvine, California, to do two stand-up shows. Halfway through the second show, I suddenly felt an intense stabbing on either side of my lower stomach. There was a minute there where I was sure I was actually in labor and was perhaps having an “I didn’t know I was pregnant” type situation on my hands. Adrenaline and audience laughter anesthetized me enough to get me through it, but once I got in the car, the only thing I could do was scream at the windshield and tell myself what my way-too-intense-for-nine-in-the-morning Spinning class instructor yells in my face a lot: “Pain is temporary!”

  I texted a friend who had frozen her eggs before. I asked her if I was dying and she responded, “Did your doctor tell you to ‘take it easy’?” I racked my brain. All I could remember anyone saying was “good for you.” Turns out, her doctor told her to take it easy as well, and she’s employed and has dreams too, so the same thing happened to her.

  I had hyperstimulation, which is when the holes in your ovaries from the extractions fill up with water, then swell up. “You’re supposed to be on bed rest,” she said. I texted another girlfriend. Same thing. She told me to cancel all my plans for the next three days and to waste no time purchasing a laxative.

  It was then I realized that the generation of women I’m proud to be a part of have no idea how to “take it easy.” Women have had to “take it easy” for thousands of years. We’ve been on involuntary bed rest for most of the time and we’re kind of over it. We’re off the bench and ready to play. I realized the exact qualities that put me in the position of needing to freeze my eggs were the qualities that were making the procedure so harrowing. Even within my surrendering to my biology, I refused to surrender to my biology. I wanted to live life my way, have kids my way, freeze my eggs my way.

  In a deep twist of irony, the only relief from the severe abdominal pain was lying in the fetal position. As I lay there, I moaned and whimpered and cursed Dr. Dong among pretty much anyone else I could think of: my parents for having me, my ex-boyfriends for not being father material, whatever incarnation of God I was believing in at the time, Dr. Dong for not coming over and giving me more of that Michael Jackson–y painkiller reality-eraser stuff.

  I had to cancel the next night’s show. It was heartbreaking. I know that canceling a show doesn’t sound like a big deal and you probably think I’m being dramatic and victimy, but I take people’s buying tickets to come see a show very seriously. As I’ve told you, I’ve encountered sexist treatment before, but this is the first time my own body was the one doing the sexist, discriminating behavior. I called my therapist, who as you know by now always cuts right through my ego and entitlement: “Get over it. You didn’t settle for a bad marriage. You didn’t have a kid before you were ready. You can afford to freeze your eggs. This is not a real problem.” Well, there you have it. I had become so spoiled by the fruits of feminism and modern technology that having pain from a fertility-prolonging procedure had become something to complain about.

  I learned from this that I needed to get some goddamn perspective about and gratitude for the time I was born into. Yes, it’s very annoying to have a body that has an expiration date, but it’s insane not to acknowledge the progress science has made. I also can’t help but think that in fifty years women will be, like, “Thank God we weren’t alive back in the Dark Ages when women had to pay for egg freezing! Remember when women were having their own babies out of their bodies? Yuck!”

  I also had a rude awakening about how little people know about egg freezing, myself included. When I showed up to my rescheduled stand-up perfor
mance, the manager of the club ran up to me looking very concerned. He blurted, “Are you okay? I heard you had your ovaries removed!” It was then I decided I’d write about my experience and talk about it publicly to possibly help lessen the stigma and confusion about the procedure. I figure this is the only way we can start the process of making it accessible to more women, covered by insurance, and all that smooth jazz. Hopefully one day freezing your eggs will be as commonplace as getting a teeth cleaning or a bikini wax. Someone call Shark Tank because if there was a service that could wax me while I was under sedation getting my eggs extracted, I would have taken all this way more seriously. Whoever patents that business, you are welcome for the billion dollars you’re about to make.

  After the hyperstimulation madness passed and I was back to my old self, and by old I mean former, I truly felt an invisible weight lifted off my shoulders. I hear that cliché a lot but figured I would never have that feeling, given the gigantic size of the purses I carry and the fact that I’ve actually broken my right shoulder, so it always feels like it has weight on it.

  Something about having my eggs on ice gave me an enormous sense of relief and filled my lungs with just a little more oxygen. I didn’t feel an incessant hum of anxiety in my stomach. I stopped feeling guilty about taking on jobs that would mean working long hours or being out of town, which would prohibit me from being able to date or nurture a relationship. My inner monologue wasn’t populated with misogynist hecklers yelling, “You’ll never meet a man in time!” or “Motherhood just isn’t in the cards for you, godless weirdo!”

  This sense of relief manifested itself in ways I take a lot of pride in. Before I froze my eggs, I’d flirt with literally any guy who had real hair and a car. Post-freezing, I suddenly had these weird things called standards. Today if my gut tells me I’m not into a guy, I don’t go out with him. I realize that concept may be very obvious to most people, but I used to talk myself into going on dates with guys I didn’t like because I was so scared of running out of time or ending up alone. I mean, if I’m going to be very honest, I’m not scared of being alone; I love being alone. I was more scared of people thinking I was alone and that my life wasn’t congruous with the socially acceptable timeline of when we’re “supposed” to be paired up with someone. I rationalized dating guys I wasn’t really into by defending their deficiencies and making excuses for them: “He cheated on his last girlfriend? Well, technically monogamy isn’t natural . . . Monogamy was invented when our life expectancy was thirty! Maybe that just means he’s a great multitasker.” I adopted philosophies I didn’t even believe to justify going out with mediocre guys. “He drinks eight glasses of wine a night? Well, science has found that wine has lots of antioxidants! I gotta meet this health nut!”