The night before the egg retrieval I got in bed at 9:00pm and listened to my Meditation for IVF CD on repeat. The soothing female voice told me there was nothing to do in this moment. She instructed me to relax my body and imagine the medications pumping through my blood into my ovaries, making the best eggs possible. Noah went to a Soundgarden concert. He got tickets with a group of friends months ago and had been looking forward to the show for a while. He hadn’t seen Soundgarden since 9th grade, and I didn’t give a shit. As long as he didn’t wake me up when he got home he could do whatever he wanted. Maybe a little rock n’roll would energize his sperm.
But he didn’t make it to the show. He drove out to Hollywood and then turned around and came home. I was still up, on my third round of “IVF For a Fertile Soul.” He crept upstairs and put his head to my stomach.
“Hey guys. This is your daddy. We need you to be big and strong tomorrow. The doctor is going to come and get you so we can have you soon,” he whispered to the follicles that felt like little rocks in my ovaries. Little tiny water balloons pushing the latex to the absolute limit.
“You’re home so early?” I questioned.
“I wanted to be here. We have to be up early. It’s a big day,” he said, taking off his clothes and getting into bed.
We snuggled up tightly. The two of us and our bursting follicles. And when the alarm went off at 5:00am, we popped up. Noah reminded me not to eat or drink anything and I had this overwhelming rebellious feeling that my mouth was going to eat something, as if it were detached from the rest of me, trying to sabotage us.
It was pitch dark when we left the house. We drove the familiar route down Venice, up La Cienega. The streets were empty and quiet.
“I’m surprised you came home last night. Did I make you feel guilty for going out?” I asked. I was surprised. Noah never leaves a rock show or a baseball game early, let alone drive all the way out there only to turn right back around. He loves a night out with his boys and had been looking forward to this show. But I was glad he came home. It felt like he was being responsible and helping me to not worry about missing our alarm or about him being too tired to properly perform the next morning. I felt like he was prioritizing us and what we were going through, and that he really did want to support me and be with me.
“There were three shows going on in Hollywood and all the parking lots were totally full. I was so fed up trying to park and work was blowing up my phone, I just decided it wasn’t worth it,” he said.
Just like I thought. He wanted to be with me and he was prioritizing our big day.
When we got to the office Noah almost immediately went in to make his sample in a tiny sterile room with a little DVD player and a few sticky magazines. I went into a pre-op room and got undressed from the waist down and covered myself with a little gown. My cousin Howard is Dr. N’s anesthesiologist, and he came in to prep me. Howard was the one who suggested I come in to see Dr. N about eight months ago, and we’ve been waiting for this moment ever since. Everything else was a blur. When I woke up, Dr. N seemed excited and surprised.
“We got five eggs!” He said. “One excellent, two good, two poor. But the poor ones could potentially make good embryos. You never know.”
FIVE EGGS?! From where? My body? What secret Santa snuck in two extra eggs in the night?! Dr. N said that the best and biggest follicle actually had a poor quality egg in it, so you really never know.
He then told Noah that his sperm were “awesome” and the report was worthy of being put up on the fridge so he could walk by it and puff his chest like a peacock. Noah beamed, a home-run, dimple-faced smile plastered across his face. He had done his part, and he’d done it well.
I was afraid to be too excited. I didn’t want to count my eggs before they……fertilized, but it really couldn’t have gone much better, given what we started with. Do I celebrate the milestones and the small victories or do I keep a straight face knowing it could all fall apart tomorrow? When we get too happy, the crash feels that much harder. Is there a way to be thankful in this present moment only and not start thinking of baby names and how many embryos to put in? Nothing may fertilize. It has happened. Once, in Dr. N’s career, many years ago. A good egg can meet an “awesome” sperm and tell it to go fuck itself. An embryo can start out looking good, but then stop dividing. There could be genetic issues, who knows? But in this moment, after Noah rushed off to work and I spent the day rolling around in bed, we came back together and smiled. We got through one hurdle, but there are a lot more ahead of us, and we’re hopeful and we’re grateful. We could very well be making a baby while Noah was directing a scene at work and I was emailing my dad in Poland to tell him the news. His sperm could be canoodling up to my little eggies and creeping their way in, creating the miracle that is life, in a little dish in an incubator in a cold sterile lab in Beverly Hills. How romantic.
I spent the next day cleaning the house and washing the sheets. I wanted to prepare the house for when I was on bed rest, in case we had any visitors. I bought a pineapple because Gilli told me to eat the core after the transfer to help with implantation. I emailed the few friends I had that had gone through IVF, asking their advice about how many embryos to transfer. We, or should I say I, wanted twins, but thought maybe we should put in all three, even though there was a risk to that. I was excited. Everyone was excited. Throughout this process I was sending update emails to family and friends, asking them to buy themselves “follicle flowers” to send blossoming energies to my follicles when they were growing well. When we got the five eggs out, I asked them to get Junior Mints and pray that our little embryos would grow big and strong. People sent hysterical pictures of themselves and their pets with the Junior Mints. Everyone had a good feeling. Noah was in such a good mood the day after. I found two little turtles carved of stone that I had and we slept with them that night, a symbol of fertility and of our two babies.
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