? ? ?
The doctor came in, and when he asked for my paperwork, I tried to speak, but ended up making erratic breathy grunts in an attempt to explain that I was too scared to do it. He seemed delighted to offer me an alternative solution. He told me he was working on an experimental procedure I should try: a cancer treatment in the form of a suppository that had a side effect of killing fetal cells. It had a 75 percent chance of working, and if I was scared of the invasive method, I should try this instead. I was too obtuse to understand what he was actually saying, but it seemed to make more sense at the time to my naive, completely uneducated brain. I uttered another primal noise that rhymed with “okay.”
I went home, and once my mom was asleep I jammed the suppository thing into myself and hoped for the best. For the next five days I was tired and dizzy, which I remember feeling like I deserved. I wasn’t particularly scared or crestfallen about the whole thing, maybe because I hadn’t told anyone, which would have made it all real. A week later, I put on my best Urban Outfitters tank top and went back to the doctor. I remember this tank top well. It was purple with lace around the top and had a little rose bow on it. I used to think it was my “good top,” but looking back, it’s hardly appropriate to wear as an undershirt. After I sat in the waiting room for an hour, the doctor called me in, gave me a sonogram, and casually told me the medication didn’t take.
The doc explained that I’d have to populate my undercarriage with the capsule yet again. He said something about the fetal cells growing. Growing? Excuse me? Growing? For whatever reason, that’s the word that made me realize what was actually happening. “Growing” triggered an emotional avalanche of seemingly endless tears and snot.
The next time I used the medication, it “worked.” I put that word in quotes because I don’t consider sitting in a bathtub crying and bleeding to be a feasible solution to one of the most complicated emotional issues a teenager could ever face. It might be an ideal solution to waking up in Mexico and discovering you’re missing a kidney, but not this.
I don’t know if the FDA ever approved this medication, and if it didn’t, I don’t think I want to know why, although it might explain a couple weird rashes and random eye-twitching I’ve had over the years.
I find regret to be an immense waste of time and energy, but I did learn a lot from that fiasco. Notably, shame sucks. I was too ashamed to ask questions or ask for help from someone who had terminated a pregnancy, so I ended up putting my health and trust into the hands of a mercenary, callous doctor who made me a guinea pig for his new product. I decided that from now on I would take responsibility for my body. I mean, that wouldn’t be the last weird, emotionally damaging thing that ended up inside me, but certainly it was the last unapproved medical suppository.
Fast-forward to me thirteen years later in yet another gynecologist’s office, this time without a life-changing, emotionally overwhelming predicament on my hands. She was poking around and suggested I get my fertility checked. She was staring right down the barrel of my orifice, so I’m really hoping the sight of it wasn’t what reminded her about my waning fertility. I like to tell myself she probably saw how gorgeous and unused it was, hence assumed I wasn’t out there in them streets getting sprayed with a deluge of sperm every night, thus I clearly needed to put some huevos on ice for when I did decide to hand-pick from my throng of enamored suitors. Yeah, let’s go with that.
It didn’t seem right. Why do I have to freeze my eggs when guys can have kids well into their sixties? I was so outraged by the biological injustice that I refused to make the appointment for two years. I made childish proclamations to justify my stubbornness: “I can have a kid whenever I want. I mean, I eat kale!” and “I’ll just adopt. So many kids need homes. At this point having your own kid is basically like buying a dog from a breeder.”
To be fair, some of my excuses may actually be true, but my motives for making them were coming from a deep denial of reality. The truth is, biology simply has not evolved fast enough to catch up with feminism. It will take a long time for our bodies to evolve to accommodate this whole ladies-having-dreams thing, which makes me want to punch Darwin in the face.
Worse, admitting I had to freeze my eggs made me feel like a failure. I failed to manage my time properly, I failed at taking care of my health therefore my ovaries broke, I failed at figuring out how to want to marry someone, I failed at being a woman, I failed at being lovable. The only thing worse than feeling like I wasn’t loved was that it ultimately just made me feel old. Old people freeze their eggs, I thought. That’s what women do when they’re desperate, lonely, wrinkly. In my head, freezing your eggs basically came with a walker and a free set of cats.
My brain made up all sorts of conspiracy theories to justify my stubbornness. It was a scam, a pyramid scheme, a misogynistic racket, just another bullshit lie to keep women scared. The fact that egg freezing isn’t covered by insurance is outrageous, but in America neither is a lot of birth control, so I don’t even know where to direct my fury at this point. The two things that would postpone women’s having children aren’t covered by insurance. So in America, it’s literally cheaper to just have a kid before you’re ready.
After a big breakup with a guy I thought I’d marry (don’t ask), I finally lost enough hope for my future to be motivated enough to make an appointment with a fertility specialist. It was what I like to call a “fear-mality.” A fear-mality is something I like to pretend is a casual formality, but the undercurrent is paralyzing fear. Also filed under fear-mality: laser hair removal, dating, stretching, voting.