Baby Dreaming Hands holding a deck of cards

Published on July 13th, 2023 | by Jessica Harvey

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Variations of a Flush

Instead of a baby to hold, with ten girl toes and eyes of any shade—I’m not picky—I get three holes in my back yard, two novels, and a bill for forty thousand dollars. At the beginning of infertility treatment, I am 42 and under the misimpression that what stands between me and that girl child is the issue of my partner. She has ovaries instead of sperm with which to impregnate me. And she only has one ovary at that—we’ve three between the two of us—and so we’re gambling with a real deficit. These stats are made even more irrelevant by the fact that we actually have only my woman parts to harvest from and then my womb in which to grow the baby.

A lady doctor we consult, who did first an obstetrics and gynecology residency and then took one of the forty-nine American fellowships awarded annually in reproductive endocrinology, describes the rules of the hand we’re playing. This woman is intelligent. She knows calculus, biostatistics, and more hormonal axes than there are variations of a flush. I suspect she’s so on top of her game that she probably had the good sense to freeze her own eggs years ago, when I should have. Because a reiki healer told me eight years ago that there were no blocks in the way of motherhood for me (not the deadbeat husband, not the alcoholism, not my melancholy, my insomnia, nor a sixty hour work week), I elect to consider this sage advice still relevant at 42.  So when this honest lady doctor–a witch doctor in her own right–shows a graph indicating that women in my demographic produce 0.5 eggs after a cycle of infertility treatment with injectable hormones (I’m talking the good stuff: Grade A hMG, HCG, GnRH—molecules so big and fine they can’t even be contained by real names), I—a woman of basic numbers and letters myself—decide that it is appropriate to gamble. 

I ante into the celestial poker game with my shades on and my acid wash denim collar up and am overconfident I will take the house. I know lots about cards and gambling, you see, because I grew up in a family that played Euchre and our family name, Bower, is the trump card in that game. Plus, my grandmother on that side had seven children.

A row of six dice in different colors
Image by annca from Pixabay

In the first round, I trick my body with two shots once a day and then one shot once a day until we get to day eleven and we add one and subtract another. There’s a spread sheet for it all and I think even an accountant could fuck this sequencing up. I jam the shots in the fat of my belly until it’s so pocked and stained with purple and blue that I look like the past-its-prime-fruit that I will prove to be. At this point, I start injecting into my inner thighs. I don’t have the will to push the needle into my body, so instead I squeeze my fat until it burns and flushes and then reverse ram it back onto the needle.

My partner and I drive one hundred and sixty miles every other day for sonographic evidence of the size of my follicles. Despite the slam, smash, and force of those hormones that cost the price of a blood diamond, only five of my ovarian follicles grow large enough to target with a needle and ultrasound. If I were just three years earlier on this game, I might have produced fifteen follicles, and if I had had my shit together ten years earlier, I may have made a wild thirty. I insist upon going to work after each of these runs to the city, because I don’t want to eat up my sick time for when the daughter actually comes. 

Because I also practice medicine, in surgery, I go to my hospital with a resurrected empathy for the plight of my patients. Before we shepherd and whisk them off down the cold hall of the OR, I acutely feel their preoperative anxiety over their own statistics and the cards they are working. Though my patients are hesitant for their own procedures, I myself am most thrilled by the prospect of my imminent egg retrievals. It will be my turn for the nice anesthesiologists to legally drug me up and I will have a reprieve from my diurnal fret about not being able to fall asleep for once in my life. 

Neon sign that says "Loose Slots"
Image by Erin Alder from Pixabay

Spoiler alert: the embryos die off by the day and are all gone by the third. 

For the next month I am counseled to give my body a rest from hyperstimulation, and so naturally I rekindle an addiction to cigarettes as I slide my remaining cards around on the green card table of my life and pretend-play variations of winning hands. My whacked-out hormones have influenced my wandering uterus to drift untethered throughout my body in all manner of hysteria. One day the womb is in my pelvis where it’s supposed to be, and then the next it is proving Freud a sound neurologist and analyst, wreaking havoc first near my left elbow and then the next behind my eyes and then finally under my tongue making it wag about with the craziest of ideas. The humors spill in tears from eyes, and I know that I have been bested by my biology. 

The day that I cry the entire day, I dig three holes in my backyard. I planned to fill them with hellebores, my favorite flower, but to this day they are still deep and empty, the roots of adjacent ivy and ferns beginning to fill them. 

In the second round of infertility treatment, I decide that I have taken the wrong approach all together. I always know when I am wrong and am the first to announce error. I relied too much on the needle and science that first hand. What was missing was the candle, the pendulum, the right runes. So I cast my most elaborate spell ever. My girl partner and I fuck on the Wolf Moon. We rattle and drum and conjure the spirit of my eldest dead dog. I wake his sleeping spirit with the clacking of stag bones my father hunted down when I still had viable ovaries. he bones are wrapped in red thread blessed in the temples of Avalon. When this dog had passed a few years back, I had sung him to the other side with these bones and whispered in his ear to come get me when it is my turn. I. This dog was not a sharp stick and in retrospect perhaps choosing his spirit is where I next go wrong. 

Vintage playing cards. The queen of spades and 10 of diamonds are face-up.
Image by Emilia from Pixabay

But with vigor and faith we send this dog’s spirit behind the veil and into the aether world, to bring back the spirit of our unborn son. You see, I am willing to take a son for a prize this second hand and I reason that perhaps this is how I was failing at producing a baby to hold to my breast. Off we send my dead dumb dog to bring the boy to us. I should have sent one of the girl animal ghosts, or a more responsible ancestor like a great-grandmother.

After the second procedure, I make seven eggs. When they tell us this in the recovery room, I fold without a production and no hassle to anyone. I know that we have lost. I apologize to my dog for sending him on a pointless mission and hope he did not get too lost along the way. In my grimoire, I describe a series of gestures and prayers that do not manifest any baby. We write a check for over a grand every month for the debt to the house. Because there is no child to feed and fuss over, no baby of any gender or eye color, the eternity of leisure I already had is returned to me. This is where the two novels come in: I needed to grow something.

 At a follow up appointment, the hopeful lady doctor describes a different game of drugs with another woman’s eggs. And maybe if I were a different kind of mother, I would have considered it. Though I’m not risk averse, I have boundaries. I do not need twelve steps to navigate out of a casino or away from a table. One of my great gifts is transformation. There are other births, other journeys, other creatures to rear.

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About the Author

Jessica Harvey writes fiction and personal narrative. Her themes often explore the cultural intersection of Western medicine and embodied experience. She is a two-time winner of the Texas Health Resources Literature and Medicine Award. She is the two-time winner of the Laura Richardson Whitaker Memorial Award for Research in Women’s and Gender Studies. Jessica lives in California with her partner, a dog on Prozac, and his tripawd brother. She is a devoted witch and unlucky gardener. Jessica is finishing her first memoir, “Burnt: A Medical Memoir of COVID-19.” Her website is jessicaharveywrites.com.



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