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.