Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  But as I was allowing myself to be angry, I still had to confront the reality that we might not end up with the baby I had convinced myself that we deserved. Instead of depressing me, though, this thought actually liberated me. What if we just didn’t have a child? What would our lives look like? What would our marriage look like? What if the true “miracle” wasn’t actually having the baby, but being at peace with however the so-called journey concluded?

  “If we didn’t have a kid,” Matt said, “you know our lives would be easier.”

  “I know that,” I said. I sighed. It almost felt transgressive to allow myself to think about a childless life that wasn’t depressing but, rather, fulfilling. “We’d definitely be able to travel more.”

  “And get more dogs,” he said.

  “Dogs!” I said. “You know my fantasy is to have a huge piece of land where we just have a gajillion dogs running around.”

  “Well, that would be doable,” he said. “I mean, maybe not right away. But we could start with, like, one other dog.”

  “And we’d definitely be able to sleep in more,” I said. As I talked it through, I was warming to this plan. “Which would be a plus. And we’d have more money, and we wouldn’t have to buy a big house because it would just be the two of us, and I wouldn’t need my big dumb car, and I’d still be superclose with my nieces and nephew. I’d be the cool aunt!”

  “You are the cool aunt,” he said.

  “I know. But I’d get to really lean into it,” I said. “Plus, we’d never have to think about childcare.”

  This whole time, I’d been framing infertility treatments as the means to an end that I was sure I wanted. But now, I felt a weight lifting; it was so freeing to allow myself to be truly happy with the alternate version of my life. It reminded me of the period in my life when it felt like I was never going to meet a partner, and instead of letting that fear overtake me, I decided to try on the vision of my life as a single person, and that was comforting. Now I felt like I’d regained a tiny bit of control over a process that was almost completely outside of my control.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I decided to get a second opinion on our options, so I made an appointment for a phone call with a doctor from the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine, better known as CCRM, which is widely considered one of the best clinics in the country. I don’t know what I was looking for, exactly, in that phone call, but I think I was hoping for something that no good doctor would tell me: We can get you pregnant! Just sign here!

  Instead, the doctor I spoke to was perfectly straightforward. Yes, our poor results could have been because of my old eggs or Matt’s dumb sperm, and if we did a retrieval at their clinic, we would both have to be on supplements that supposedly improved egg and sperm quality. But, he suggested, it was also possible that the lab at my current clinic was simply not as good as the CCRM lab. I hung up the phone even more uncertain about what to do than before. Was it pointless to put another $25,000 we didn’t have on credit cards, plus travel to Colorado, for a retrieval when our last three had been failures?

  Matt was adamant that this was not what we should do. “Enough!” he said. “Don’t you think we’ve been through enough? Let’s just transfer our last embryo and be done with it. And if it doesn’t work, then we can have a lot of dogs.”

  The transfer itself felt anticlimactic, like I was just going through the motions: Go to clinic. Undress in bathroom and leave clothes in locker. Come out in hospital gown and lie on bed. Fill out forms. Take Valium. Watch Matt struggle to get into protective gear. Get wheeled into operating room. See embryo up on screen. Lie back while doctor inserts catheter. Watch embryo be deposited into uterus. Get dressed. Go home. Try not to think about whether cells are currently multiplying inside of me. Try not to think that every twinge of a sore boob or unusual fatigue means I’m pregnant. Insert progesterone suppositories into my vagina twice a day (I was given suppositories this time instead of shots, and even though suppositories are messy and kind of gross in their own way, I was extremely grateful to not have to be doing the butt shots again). Repeat, repeat, repeat.

  My parents came to visit a few days later. At lunch, my mom asked if we’d thought about names yet. “Why would we do that?” I said. “It’s not like this is going to work.”

  “Don’t say that,” Matt said. “You can’t say that.”

  “Why not?” I said. I was feeling punchy. “It’s not like anything I say or do now is going to make a difference, and I really don’t think it worked.”

  My blood test was at the end of the week, the day before I was supposed to leave for a trip to Upstate New York, where Kate and I would be speaking at a retreat. The clinic’s lab opened at 7:00 a.m., and I was the first one there. “Good luck,” the phlebotomist said as the dark red blood dripped into the tubes.

  “Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t feeling lucky. I wasn’t even feeling cautiously optimistic. I was feeling like every last shred of hope had been sucked out of me.

  The hours ticked by with no call from the clinic. After lunch, I headed to Target to get some last-minute supplies for the trip, like bug spray and sunscreen. I texted Matt to say I was worried that it wasn’t a good sign that I hadn’t heard from the clinic yet. “They probably call all of the positive tests first and leave the negative ones to later in the day,” I wrote. As I sent the text off, my phone rang. It was Dr. Baek.

  “Congratulations!” she said.

  It took me a moment. Surely…she wouldn’t be saying congratulations if it was bad news, right? But I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the idea that it was good news. “Wait. No,” I said. “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “You’re pregnant. You’re very pregnant.” My HCG was high, over three hundred. I thought back to the blood test when my HCG had been six, and how I had held out hope that it would be viable. Now, there was no question that I was pregnant. Dr. Baek had said I was extremely pregnant! I hung up, dazed, still in the bug spray aisle. I selected a can of OFF! and called Matt. He didn’t answer. “CALL ME,” I texted, and headed to the cash register. He called back as I was paying.

  “Hi,” I whispered. “Guess what. I’m pregnant.”

  This time, I started crying. But for the first time since I’d started this long, horrible journey, they were actually tears of joy.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD TEXTED my sister right after I called Matt. “OH MY GOD!!” she wrote back. “I knew it! I wrote down that I thought you were going to have a beta of 217!”

  “It was higher than that!” I responded. “I’m *really* pregnant!”

  It was hard to wrap my head around being pregnant. I didn’t really feel any different. Of course, it was early—very early. Earlier than most people told their friends and family that they were pregnant, but because I’d already been so public about every step of the process, I felt like I could tell people.

  And everyone was thrilled. “You’re pregnant!” Kate said when we met up in New York the next night. We were sharing a room at a fancy hotel in Brooklyn the night before we would be driving upstate.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said. No matter how many times I said it, I still couldn’t totally believe it. It had worked. All the money, all the meds, all the tears and the heartache—that part was over.

  Except it wasn’t, not really. I think lots of pregnant women, no matter how they got pregnant, are nervous about miscarriage in the first trimester, but I was borderline obsessed. It’s estimated that up to 20 percent of confirmed pregnancies end in miscarriage, and the risk is five times higher for women over forty than women under thirty-five and slightly higher for IVF pregnancies. I became hyperaware of the week-by-week statistics for miscarriage and I fixated on certain pregnancy milestones: If I could make it to the detection of the heartbeat on an ultrasound, the miscarriage risk went down. If I made it to twelve wee
ks, the miscarriage risk went way down. Each day, I repeated a mantra I’d seen in the Eggcellent Adventure Facebook group: Today, I am pregnant. It didn’t make me completely forget my miscarriage anxiety, but it did force me to live, ever so briefly, in the moment. Today, I was pregnant.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  One Saturday when I was around five weeks pregnant, I went to an orientation at an animal shelter in the San Fernando Valley where I was thinking about volunteering. I sat through the presentation by the volunteer coordinator, then we were released to wander around the kennels and get a sense of what the shelter was like. As I assumed, it was grim: cage after cage of dejected-looking dogs, some clearly hyperanxious, some just seeming depressed. Would I be able to handle volunteering here? I wasn’t sure. I had to use the bathroom, and when I wiped after peeing, there was bright red blood on the toilet paper.

  “Oh god,” I whispered. This was it—the miscarriage I had been bracing myself for. I tried to blot out as much blood as I could and hurried back to my car, where I called my clinic to speak to a nurse.

  “Um, yeah, hi, I’m around five weeks pregnant, and I just saw some blood and I’m really nervous,” I said, the words tumbling out of me.

  The nurse seemed calm—maybe too calm. “Okay,” she said. “Spotting is very common in early pregnancy, especially IVF pregnancies. How much are you bleeding?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Enough to notice? It seemed like a period, I guess.”

  “Put a pad on, and if you fill more than a pad an hour with blood, call us again,” she said. “Again, this is very common and probably nothing to worry about.”

  “I still want to see Dr. Baek as soon as possible,” I said. Suddenly, the threat of losing the pregnancy had made it seem deeply real. And I needed to do whatever I could to make sure that I wasn’t going to lose it.

  The next day, Matt and I went in to see Dr. Baek. I lay back on the exam table as she inserted the ultrasound wand into my vagina—it was too early to do an ultrasound on my belly—and I took a deep breath as she looked on the monitor. “There it is!” she said, calmly but triumphantly. “And look—we can already see the heartbeat!” She turned on the volume and I heard a rat-a-tat rhythm. “See that?” She pointed to a tiny vibrating speck on the screen. “That’s the embryo. It’s doing great!” She squinted at the screen again. “Sometimes the bleeding can be from a subchorionic hematoma, but I’m not seeing one,” she said. “I can’t really say why you were bleeding. It’s possible that the progesterone was irritating your cervix, but I’m not really sure. Either way, you’ll need to take it easy for the next few days, okay?”

  I was relieved, to be sure, but the whole experience had scared me. It was a reminder of just how precarious those rapidly multiplying cells inside of me were. I still felt like the pregnancy itself wasn’t totally real, or at least, that it could disappear at literally any minute. I know it was how I had to protect myself after so much heartache and disappointment, but it made me anxious.

  While that bullet had been dodged, a few days later, my iced coffee just tasted…off. I drank a couple of sips of it and put it down in the cup holder in my car. That’s weird, I thought. I usually slurped down my morning iced coffee in record time; since getting pregnant it was my only caffeine of the day, and I needed it, I thought, to function.

  Then meat started to seem unappetizing, and then salad, and then one afternoon I was sitting in the living room with Matt when I suddenly felt awful. “I’m going to go lie down,” I told him. “Really not feeling great.” Then I threw up.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t know anything about pregnancy nausea. My sister had had it really badly with both her kids, once puking in a cardboard box in her office because she knew she wouldn’t make it to the bathroom in time. But I hadn’t grasped the totality of pregnancy nausea, how it would come to dominate every moment of every day, that my baseline would be to feel queasy all day every day.

  If you’ve never experienced constant nausea, I’m not sure there’s a way to describe it that fully expresses how completely debilitating it is. Even if I wasn’t actively throwing up, I felt like I was about to. The list of things I could eat without immediately puking got smaller and smaller. Toast, bagels with cream cheese, cereal, Saltines—that was pretty much it, and to drink, Gatorade or seltzer or water with an electrolyte packet dissolved in it. If I tried to drink plain water, I threw up. My doctor prescribed a medication called Diclegis that was supposed to mitigate the nausea, and it did, a bit. I still threw up and I still felt nauseated all the time, but just slightly less nauseated. But the medication also made me sleepy and foggy, like my brain was suddenly full of cotton batting, and I struggled to get out of bed.

  Throughout all this, I’d heard from so many women on social media and through both podcasts who had had similar experiences—except they worked in offices, or retail jobs, or factories, or, really, anywhere that wasn’t their home. They were women who were on their feet all day, women who dragged themselves to workplaces when they could barely get out of bed, women who were afraid of revealing their pregnancies for fear of being fired. I didn’t have to deal with any of those things, and I thought about it every day. In the same way that I’m convinced if men got their periods, they would all get a week off every month, I’m convinced that if men got pregnant they would be allowed to take unlimited paid sick days with no repercussions. Hell, they would probably get a law passed that said they could take their entire pregnancies off work, fully paid.

  “I think I need to do the podcast at my house for the foreseeable future,” I told Kate. “I’m trying to minimize the amount of time I spend in the car.” For the times that I couldn’t avoid getting in the car, I had bought a package of barf bags that were now in the pocket of the driver’s-side door. “Do you mind coming here?”

  She did not. On pretty much a daily basis, I thought, Thank God for Kate, as I shuffled from the bedroom to the office so we could record the podcast, stopped in the kitchen for a slice of toast, and then shuffled back to the bedroom. I couldn’t believe my naïveté about wanting to be pregnant at my wedding—that would have been an utter disaster—or how I’d planned to get pregnant while I was still working at BuzzFeed. If I’d still been working in an office, I would have had to take medical leave.

  Now I was getting very little done because I felt so sick, and Kate was covering for me. And yet millions of pregnant people every year are expected to just pretend like they’re fine, because pregnancy nausea is usually the worst during the first trimester, which is also the trimester where most women are keeping the news of their pregnancy to themselves, because the odds of miscarriage are highest before the twelve-week mark. It plays into the pernicious expectation that women’s suffering should not just be invisible, but also is barely worth acknowledging.

  But we’re used to that, aren’t we? From the time we get our first periods, we’re told explicitly and implicitly that the pain and emotions we feel around the time we get our periods are just “women’s troubles.” Again, I am 1,000 percent convinced that periods would be national holidays if cis men also got them, but since it’s mostly just us gals (and trans men and nonbinary people who get periods!), we’re supposed to act like it’s cool! It’s totally cool; let me just run this marathon and lead this board meeting while my insides are literally bleeding out of me, I have a splitting headache, and my stomach cramps are nothing short of debilitating. Really, NO BIG DEAL! DON’T MIND ME!

  Another devastating version of this stigma surrounds miscarriage, because there has historically been just one way to experience a miscarriage, and that has been silently. But whose feelings are we protecting when we tell women not to tell friends and family that they’re pregnant? A miscarriage is a horrible thing to endure alone, but when women haven’t told anyone that they were pregnant, they don’t have anyone to turn to when it happens. Not telling friends and family isn’t just to protect
the person who’s experiencing the miscarriage; it’s also to protect the feelings of the people who may not know the right thing to say, how to respond, or what to do. It’s another way that women are told that their grief and their trauma shouldn’t take up space. But now, I was taking up more space, both literally and figuratively. It seemed especially cruel of my body, after the gut-wrenching IVF process, to now be betraying me yet again. I wanted everyone to know how much it sucked.

  So I began, hesitatingly at first and then more confidently, to post on Instagram about how I was feeling. You also don’t see many women talking openly about pregnancy nausea, in large part because of the whole not-telling-people-you’re-pregnant-too-early thing, but I recalled that Kate Middleton had been diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum, which was like pregnancy nausea on steroids. I was in a somewhat different situation, though: Thousands of people already knew I was pregnant, because I’d talked about it in great detail on Eggcellent Adventure, and people had been following my pregnancy since my fetus was literally just a few cells. So I wasn’t hesitant because I was worried about revealing an early pregnancy, but because even though I was suffering, deep down I felt like I didn’t have the right to complain after such a long and public struggle with infertility. I was still the person I’d been just a couple of months before who would have given anything to have pregnancy nausea—wasn’t I? But did that mean my pregnancy would be forever defined by what had come before?

  To my great relief, most people were extremely supportive, commiserating with me and offering up what had worked for them to quell the nausea. But not everyone. A woman wrote me on Instagram to say that she’d been a fan of mine—she had even supported our podcast on Patreon, paying each month to get bonus episodes. But she wanted me to know that she was really sick of hearing me complain about being pregnant. Didn’t I know that things were going to get so much worse after the baby was born? I didn’t know what I was in for, she told me, so really, I should just shut up now.