Dr. P is a tall
man, fit and, most ideally for my adventure...calm. If I were to
receive news of an imminently terminal illness, I'd want it to come
from him. He has a way of breaking bad news that left me feeling
surprisingly OK.
The back of his
office is loaded with dozens of fertility talismans, carvings and
masks apparently given to him by patients. Primitive people as well
as the most sophisticated women of Los Angeles use them to bring on
the baby-makin' juju. Propped up behind him as he talked, these
hand-crafted creatures brought a little wild, fertile life into this
14th floor corner office. Dirty, imperfect and slightly
terrifying, they stood like an army in defense of chance and luck.
And boy, did I need them there while Dr. P spoke of the statistics
and science stacked heavily against me.
First we discussed
my situation. Forty-two. Unmarried. Without a babydaddy. I explained
my boyfriend's lack of desire to have another kid. Dr. P nodded
silently at that, and I didn't let myself tear up at the thought,
because I'll admit it, I'm sad about that fact. But I'm bucking up.
I told Dr. P I was
considering my options: 1) having a baby now with a sperm donor, 2)
fertilizing an egg with a sperm donor, then freezing the embryo, or
3) freezing my eggs.
“Yep, those are
your options,” he said, then launched into a very well-trodden
lesson in fertility.
After a refresher
course on how a baby is made, complete with hand drawings, he showed
me a scary line chart: a woman's chances of conceiving based on age.
It had the same drop-off-the-cliff curve of an estrogen chart that I
recently saw in my gastroenterologist’s office, titled
Understanding Menopause. I took a picture of that chart with
my phone as I waited for the doctor. I've shown it to many women
since because it was so shocking, so terrifying, that viewing it
always evokes gasps. For women in their late 30s and early 40s, it's
a bitchslap in the face. That chart struck so much fear into my heart
it motivated me into this office.
Both charts, the
estrogen levels and conception chances, look a lot like the profile
of an elephant facing to the right. The elephant's back is conception
rates (and estrogen levels) in our 20s and 30s. His head is our late
30s. The sudden drop down at his truck, a perpendicular line, is age
40, 41, 42. By 44, when estrogen levels are mere morsels on the cage
floor, rates of conception are, uh, shitty.
I knew I needed to
do something quick, but now I knew just how quick.
Dr. P went through
my options for conceiving with a little help from medical tools.
IUI: Interuterine
Injection. That's basically the turkey baster technique, with finer
instruments. When the ovary releases the egg, the doctor inserts a
long tube into my uterus, squirts in a vial containing thousands of
spermies, and then we keep our fingers crossed that one of the little
guys will successfully woo my egg so the two can settle down together
in the comfy lining of my uterine wall.
IVF: Invitro
Fertilization. This is the test tube baby option. It starts with me
shooting myself up with lots of ovarian stimulation drugs to promoted
extra egg growth, then when the eggs are ready, the doctor sticks me
with a long scary needle (I will not be looking at that) and pulls
them out. The viable eggs are then injected with sperm, and we watch
them like fussy hens to see if they grow into an embryo. The ones
that do are allowed to keep growing for a few days in the lab, like a
bacterial sample, and the embryos that do well are then inserted into
my uterus. Then we cross our fingers and hope at least one settles
into my uterine lining to begin its nine month journey to become
fully human.
After explaining
the science, Dr. P explained my statistical chances of conceiving at
my age with each technique. There's no need to belabor the point. It
sucks. I fall below the 6th percentile, even with the meddling
efforts of IVF. That's not a failing grade, that's blowing off the
whole semester of classes.
What's worse, as
Dr. P so calmly put it, is that my chances are decreasing every
month. He didn't use the word “plummeting” but the picture was
pretty clear. I was more than halfway down that elephant trunk,
heading straight for the dung heap.
“I'd want you to
be pregnant by the end of the year,” he said without a quibble.
Apparently 42 is a milestone age for women's fertility. It's like the
last gas station before hitting the desert.
Dr. P tells me,
every year, he helps several women who are 42 get pregnant. That
success rate drops to “a few” every year for 43-year-old women.
But after 43, it's a veritable wasteland. “I can remember the names
of all the women I've helped get pregnant at 44.” And he's been
doing this for 25 years.
Maybe he just has a
really good memory, I tell myself. But his expression says otherwise.
To be clear, we are
talking about the statistics for women who use their own eggs. Women
who use “donor eggs,” eggs carrying the genetic codes of whoever
gave them away, have an easier time becoming pregnant in their 40s
and even their 50s. But I was hoping for a shot to raise a little
half me. Call it arrogant, selfish, egotistical, snobby, whatever.
But I believe there is an intrinsic human drive to produce our own
offspring. It's the hard wired impulse that has motivated the
survival of the species. I admit I have it. If I can't have my own,
then I will consider other options, but for now a genetic progeny is
the goal.
Dr. P then explains
egg freezing. It involves the same process of jacking me up with
stimulation drugs to retrieve as many eggs as possible from my
ovaries. Instead of fertilizing them with sperm, the eggs are slowly
frozen and stored for an annual fee until I find the right sperm, at
the right time, or just say, Fuck it, it's now or never.
Next to the
diagrams and statistics Dr. P was drawing out for me on a sheet of
paper, he wrote “Lots of pressure” next to the IUI and IVF
pictures, explaining that if I wanted to get pregnant that way, we'd
need to start right away, like today.
Next to the egg
freezing, he wrote, “ Less pressure.” Meaning, by putting my eggs
on deep freeze, I could stop the clock on their aging. They would
forever be 42 years old. How many chances in life do we get to stop
time? If only I had come in when I was 38, or 32, or even 22, when my
eggs were as springy and robust as my 22-year-old ass.
Knowing what I know
now, I've begun to be the preacher to young women about preserving
our eggs. As women interested in a life other than just being a
mother, delaying said motherhood later and later, we are delaying our
chances of actually being able to do it. Men don't have this problem.
And the fact that women do skews how we must navigate our decisions.
It is one of the most significant influences shaping the course of
our lives and careers. That's why I'm so thrilled and grateful that
medical science is catching up with women's lib.
Egg freezing, while
not perfect, is about choice and control and, yes, liberation. Women
still spend a disproportionate amount of our lives waiting for men.
Waiting to find the right one. Waiting for them to propose. Waiting
for them to be ready for children. Of course, we also are waiting for
our own lives to be right to bring a child into it, but now we can
put a stop to that nagging ticking clock that has always complicated
our ambitions, our dreams and our relationships with men. We can shut
it up, or at least quiet the countdown that beats irrepressibly in
almost every woman's heart. By putting our baby-making opportunities
on ice, we are free from the tyranny of our hard wired impulses that
consciously and subconsciously motivate us to find a mate and make a
baby.
That impulse often
distracts women from our other ambitions and dreams. It sometimes
requires us to give up on our careers and life adventures. It causes
some women to settle for the wrong man just because he offers the
dream of motherhood and family. Certainly, it's frustrating and
frightening to men. What is scarier to a man than a woman desperate
to get her hooks in him permanently with pregnancy?
I wonder what
would women's lives look like if we took the biological clock mostly
out of the equation? How would it change the dynamic of how we moved
through the world? I can imagine a future when egg freezing is
affordable and a common practice for ambitious women. I can see these
women moving farther ahead in their young lives, and feeling less
anxiety about finding a babydaddy. This will be good for men, not
bad. Both men and women will be better able to decide if they are
right for each other without the added pressure of a subtextual
ticking clock.
But back to my
situation... the woman who didn't stop the clock...
Dr. P very
diplomatically acknowledged the in-between place I am at with my
boyfriend (who I'll call D) the man with three young sons, who is
definitely not ready for a new baby now but could be in the not too
distant future.
“You give
yourself some time with this,” Dr. P says of egg freezing, “and
maybe in a year, you can tempt him with a daughter.”
Wishful thinking.
Low odds. Big risks. But that's where I'm at. It's all I got.
So I leave the
office with a big decision to make right away: Start trying to get
pregnant immediately with a sperm donor, or freeze some of my eggs on
the low-odds chance I'll soon have a man in my life who wants to
breed and raise a kid with me.
Yeah, right.
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