The night before Noah was to give me my first shot on his own, he lined everything up on the dining room table. Three little vials of Menopur, one vial of sodium chloride, check. The syringe and the (thankfully smaller) swap-out needle, check. The Q-cap to get the medication from the vials into the syringe, check. The alcohol swabs and the red biohazard waste container that Noah wanted to keep to use as a “piggy bank” instead of for disposing of our hazardous debris, check. He read over the directions twice and we went to bed.
At 3:17am Noah jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom to throw up. He was coughing and hacking for several minutes before I knew what was happening.
I went into the bathroom and he looked green.
“Are you OK?” I asked, groggily.
I wondered what might have poisoned him. We both had eaten all the same thing the night before, so I didn’t think it was the chicken. But he had no other symptoms except for an upset stomach and vomiting.
“I don’t know,” he hurled.
“Did I poison you? You can’t die, I need you to shoot me this week.”
The look on his face said he wanted nothing more than to shoot me, right NOW!
“I was having a dream that I was doing my schedule at work and everything was conflicting with our retrieval date. I was so anxious in my dream, my nerves woke me up,” he said.
His nerves woke him up? Was Mr. Nerves of Steel, Mr. Hasn’t-shed-a-tear-since-some-random-Giants-game-in-the-mid-1980’s, having an anxiety attack? No way!
“Maybe I didn’t cook your piece of chicken all the way. I’m sorry,” I said bringing him a glass of water. Though his dream, or perhaps nightmare, wasn’t too far off from reality, there was no way it would wreck him like that.
We got back into bed and I ran my fingers through his hair. He wasn’t sweaty or hot, but he looked…sad.
“I’m supposed to shoot the day of the retrieval. The other producer is out of town so it’s just me. We’re on such a tight deadline,” he mumbled, falling back to sleep.
“Well, if you can’t make it for your big debut, we can always ask Gabe to step in and fill the cup for you,” I joked.
Noah ran back to the bathroom and threw up three more times.
“Maybe I took my vitamins too late,” he said getting back into bed.
Neither of us really slept that night. Noah had been holding us together for the last two years, and was grasping at whatever he could for the last six months. He was working like a dog so we could afford for me to work part time and take care of my body, and for us to be able to enter the very elite world of IVF. He wanted nothing else but to be there for me, always and every day, but he had a responsibility to the show he was working on and to the ridiculous whims and demands of his impossible stars. I wasn’t always easy on him. IVF was a priority, but it wasn’t the only thing on his plate. No matter how the hormones made me feel, I knew I had to do my best to channel whatever I could to be on good behavior.
At 7:00am sharp, his alarm went off and he went downstairs and started assembling the shot the way a sharpshooter would put together his gun the day of a big assassination. Cool, calm, collected, he double checked the directions and flicked the syringe the way they do on those medical shows. He pushed up on the bottom part to let the air bubble out and called me down when he saw the first drop of liquid come out of the needle.
I shuffled downstairs thinking that while most normal people are having their morning cup of coffee I’m having my morning shot of hormones. I didn’t feel the unfairness of it, it was just fact now.
“Ready?” He said, his hair standing straight up.
I lay down on the couch and he measured two fingers away from my belly button, pinched the skin, and angled the shot in at 90 degrees, exactly as he had been taught by nurse Danielle.
He took care to cover my tummy back up and he walked over towards the biohazard box to throw the syringe away. We had come so far together. I remembered a time in our lives when it was a big deal for him to see me pee, and now we’re doing our very own little science experiment on my body, which requires intimate and invasive moments between us.
We ate the leftover chicken for dinner that night. I asked him if he thought I should just throw it out, not to risk another night spent leaning over the toilet, but he insisted that he didn’t think he had food poisoning. It was a case of extreme emotion, the kind he’d never known before. My unemotional island of a husband was so overwhelmed by the stress of trying to balance life and work, of the worries he had about what the medications may do to me, of the frustrations of the past two years and the responsibility he had to somehow make this OK for us and our family to be, that for a moment he broke.
But just for a moment. We had grown up together over the past thirteen years and somehow this moment, of him walking away from me holding the empty syringe, felt like the culmination of it all. The true entry into adult world.
I watched him gather the little vials and other scraps of plastic from the table. With my entire family out of the continental U.S. and unreachable, it really was just the two of us. I felt so proud of him and so thankful that this is the man that will one day be the father of my children. I almost got teary, but maybe it was just the hormones.
He walked towards the trash and hesitated, syringe and trash in hand.
I could see he was contemplating just tossing it all in our regular trash.
“Noah?” I said, the way a schoolteacher says the name of a student on the brink of getting into trouble.
He rerouted himself towards the hazmat box and tossed the dangerous waste in with a disgruntled exhale.
“I just really wanted to keep this as a piggy bank,” he mumbled, defeated, and walked away.
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