Dealerships (part 1)
Our first fertility clinic waiting room and our first clipboard full of fertility questions. I balanced it on my lap atop my folder full of info from the clinic’s free seminar we had been to a few weeks before. The waiting room was slick and Kubrick-y white, but upbeat. I didn’t even really look around and take in the heaviness of the other people in there. You learn to do that later. I was just there to collect on my “free consultation” and finally ask some questions I had been looking up online for at least 15 years.
How long have you tried to conceive?
I thought about filling it out with a huge zero, or perhaps an “N/A”. I ended up just leaving it at zero, and then added a slash through it for emphasis.
How many times have you been pregnant? Zero. How many times have you miscarried? Zero. Have you tried IVF or ICI before? No. Nope. Nothing. I was not infertile. Neither was Michael. We had never tried to have a baby. This was step one, day one.
I got to the part of the questions where I think it asked something or other about what, specifically, was the purpose of my visit. Man, it was a long story and they only left me two small lines. I think I wrote something like “bad genes”. I’d need to explain in person.
We were called in for our appointment and got ready to meet our potential doctor we had selected from the big, fancy group of Beverly Hills fertility doctors at the seminar. She seemed to be the warmest of the bunch. Michael liked her because she was a native Angeleno like us. I had a great feeling. A super nice lady in a Beverly Hills fertility clinic! She was going to help me. I knew it.
She looked over some of my answers, and before she got too far, I just came out and explained, as plainly as I could, that a few of my siblings had committed suicide after struggling with very severe versions of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, among other things. I then told her about my dad’s much more functional bipolar disorder, and all the other family members who suffered from your more garden-variety mental illnesses. I told her aside from a little anxiety here and there, I was actually fine, but given my situation, I was seriously concerned about my genes. Were they poisonous? Am I going to have a child who would, you know, self-destruct? Nothing on the internet would answer me. No geneticist would meet with me because there is no identifiable gene and no genetic test for these things and there was nothing they could do for me. The best thing I read was to look at your family history and those are pretty much your odds. So the odds were not good, and I was at a fertility clinic to come to a conclusion on the issue I’d wrestled with for nearly two decades: should I just skip my genes? I desperately wanted out of The Worry, but, God, who makes a decision like this? Who has to? Should we just adopt? Michael should have his own biological child at least. Maybe I should suck it up and get pregnant the old-fashioned way because it’s so awful to put Michael through all of this. Maybe it’s completely selfish to feel like I “need” to have my own genetic-biological child given the risk. What even is the risk? Maybe I’m being an asshole looking at spending all this money we don’t have on a voluntary fertility treatment I don’t technically need. Maybe I do “need” it. Which decision will make me feel the least terrible? It’s amazing how long I had to ponder it and still had no good answers.
But there I was. I was finally sitting in front of a real live fertility doctor. She was the warmest of the bunch. She was going to help me navigate this. She was going to give me facts and information. I was going to tell her I maybe wanted maybe an egg donor? Maybe? Probably. Definitely. But also maybe.
She didn’t flinch at anything I said. (Cool?) She kept her chipper tone and with her smiling round face told me “oh yeah well you’d probably have a 1 of 3 chance of having a child with a serious mental illness so let’s look at getting you donor eggs!” Oh whoa. Ok. In the entire time I had spent researching and asking questions, nobody had ever told me what my odds were. And how could she say that so confidently when no geneticist would touch my questions with a ten foot pole? She said I had a one in three chance of having a kid who would likely not want to be on this planet. Well shit.
And there she was, still smiling, because she had great news for me. “Oh but if you want one of our donors, I know some girls who look just like you! You can pick from girls who are good at the flute, or math – anything you can imagine! You’ll have no problem getting pregnant. It takes somebody like you one, maybe two tries no problem…” I think there were some anecdotes, but I don’t remember them because I was starting to fade. One in three. She started talking costs with Michael and it was a lot. A whole lot. One in three and to escape those odds it will cost everything we have and then some. She kept smiling and assuring me I could have it all, whatever that is.
~Melissa Lippman