When Your Body is a Pharmacy
How does it feel to be a pharmacy? From what I’ve seen in the waiting areas at Clinic 2, it requires you to wear comfy, semi-athletic, semi-street style clothes to your appointments. When we line up for bBoodwork and ultrasounds, it’s in sweatshirts and running shoes. Dressier for consults. I’ve seen one pair of heels, and the person was also wearing tight jeans; it must have been her first time. We habituées know that there’s no good reason to dress up for a vaginal probe.
When your body is a pharmacy, you want to wrap it in softness. Several times a day you are stabbing your own flesh with various gauges of needle and so when you’re not doing this, I suggest you wear as close to pajamas as possible. During your first round of IVF, it is inadvisable to agree to perform your solo play for a national festival. Dancing and sweating will irritate your injection sites, and IVF is enough of a drama on its own.
When your body is a pharmacy, it’s hard to know what exactly is responsible for your mood swings: the huge number of hormones worth approximately $4,000 or the knowledge that you have consented to a festival of injections and oral medications, and that none of it might work? Or the roller coaster of grief and excitement that accompanies each IVF and IUI patient on their journey? On any given day, either the excitement or the grief can feel overwhelming to a person; here you are balancing both, in tandem, in your flesh. And being told to relax.
When your body is a pharmacy, it’s difficult to concentrate on anything else. Nevertheless, you likely have a play to rehearse or a kid to tend to or a full-time job to show up for from which you can’t “call in sick with IVF.” It’s just not allowed. And yet you are likely emotionally vulnerable, tired, uncomfortable, and suddenly bound by an additional timeline of appointments, pills, and injections. It’s a lot. And it hurts.
*
Today is day 5 of taking Lupin-Estradiol, which is basically estrogen. Side effects include:
- Nausea
- Headaches
- Mood swings
- Anger
- Uncontrollable weeping
- Frustration
Oh yeah, also, it’s a vaginal suppository to be taken twice a day for thirty days. Bonus side effect: greenish vaginal discharge that is apparently perfectly normal.
None of this is normal.
Last week K. drove me to the new ultrasound clinic. We’ll just call it Clinic 3. I got to have my third (or is it fourth) hysterosonogram; it is indeed hysteria-inducing and fucking painful. This is when they open you up with a clamp (why has no one invented something more comfortable?), put a probe inside you, and shoot saline and iodine into your uterine “cavity” to see if the liquids flow out of your fallopian tubes properly.
My body constricts during this test and the fallopian tubes protest and don’t want to release anything. My tubes know that this test makes no sense for an IVF patient because who cares if the tubes work? Dr. H is going to hyper-stimulate my ovaries, suction eggs out, fertilize them, and implant them in my uterus. No tubes needed.
I’m sure that this test is “mandatory” because the medical tech industry just wants to test out their gadgets as much as possible.
None of this is normal.
Clinic 3’s doctor is too rough. He blames his roughness on my fallopian tubes. How dare he. He has never had this done to him. Does he know how much it hurts to have a fucking metal clamp keeping you open so someone can shoot liquid through your fallopian tubes? These are the kinds of gynecological procedures that must have been invented by men, and which continue to be under-researched and under-funded, slowing innovation.
The next day I am still bleeding, spotting, and cramping from the procedure. I am angry too. This test is standard but why? And why did he have to be so rough, especially after I told him that I had already done this test three times and that each time was terrible? I fainted the first time.
I just feel sad that I must endure rough doctors at all, and so sad that none of the other equally intrusive things have worked so far, and so sad that I haven’t been able to have a baby in all these years of trying. Yet no doctor can tell me why.
According to them, nothing is wrong inside my body. Nothing seems to be the matter. The reluctant diagnosis is “unexplained infertility.” It doesn’t make sense.
How am I supposed to not blame myself? Who else can I blame?
Yesterday at the Blood Lab of Clinic 3, after my approximately 743rd vaginal ultrasound, I nearly fainted during a routine blood draw. The technician was struggling to find a vein. She tried four times before managing. It hurt. Afterwards, I felt dizzy. That has never happened to me in all the 1,036 or so times I’ve had blood drawn since first starting The Baby Project. But yesterday, with four punctures in my left elbow, I felt dizzy and couldn’t get up.
The lab techs are super nice when this happens. Suddenly there were three of them on deck: one fanning me, another bringing me an ice pack and putting it behind my neck, the third coming in to promise she wouldn’t send any new patients in until I was better. I was invited to take off my mask and to take in big gulps of air. I was invited to take my time. They were so sweet.
*
That was yesterday. This morning I am back to inserting capsules of Lupin Estradiol into my vagina and hoping not to get dizzy and nauseous. Last time I took these, it was like clockwork: waiting to throw up every morning around 10:30. Apparently, if all goes well, I will get to take these capsules twice a day for the first ten weeks of my pregnancy too.
Why am I agreeing to do all this? What part of my brain got unlocked and then stayed unlocked to agree to years of increasingly intense intervention and medication? When and why did I decide not to accept myself as a woman who simply would never get pregnant? Why did that seem like an impossible situation for me? Why couldn’t I simply accept being childless?
Maybe I would have saved myself a lot of grief, money, and pain several years ago had I accepted to be a person who never makes a baby, or never has a baby. Why could I never take this on? Even now, when I know more about how miraculous conception, pregnancy, and safe deliveries are—even now, I don’t want to accept NO CHILD and I keep staying on this ridiculous track called Fertility Treatment.
Why do I refuse to accept the NO CHILD possibility?
At the beginning, I didn’t want to bring on the Evil Eye by reading or calling down anything to do with infertility. I still hate naming it as my problem, preferring to emphasize my official diagnosis as what Dr. H and Dr. J have both said is “unexplained infertility.”
But it’s still there: infertility. Science just can’t explain why or what to do to fix it. So instead, someone like me, someone who knows her Oma underwent reproductive-system torture by Nazi doctors at Auschwitz, thinks about that each time she has an ultrasound or another pelvic exam or a hysterosonogram or is asked to take more mysterious pills.
Someone like me endures year after year of medical intervention to exactly the area of the body that is the site of nightmarish family history. Oma Suzanne was rendered infertile by those tortures. She could never have children. She became deranged after Auschwitz. She was my dad’s stepmother. And here I am, lying with my feet in stirrups once again.
“Relax,” pleads the lab tech. But my body is clenched tight like a fist.
Maybe procreation is just something I cannot do. I am forty years old now. It wouldn’t be too surprising if I never had a child of my own. Maybe, like Suzanne but not like Suzanne, I could be a decent stepmother.
I cannot bear to think of her suffering.
I’m still trying, though. Still showing up to the ultrasounds, still inserting Lupin-Estradiol into my vagina twice a day, still here, but why? Because Dr. H is hopeful? Because I’m hopeful? Or because I’m too stubborn to stop?
Because it all feels like too much, I have figured out how to feel nothing during most of these procedures. I can go numb now. I let it hover above me, slightly unreachable. “It” is my grief and my fear. “It” is my conviction that the Nazi doctors will show up. “It” is what should have sidelined me by now but which I keep out of reach most days so I can keep showing up to those appointments.
It: my grief, my fear, my anger, my resentment, my fatigue, my loss — it hovers above my head. I could bring it all down to examine, but I know if I do it will overtake me. It is potent and better kept above me, away from me, out of my hands. I am afraid of what will happen if I allow myself to confront it, or if it stops waiting for me to make the first move and crashes down instead.
About the Author
Sarah Waisvisz is a multiracial theatre artist, writer, and professor of drama living in Kingston, Canada. Recent works for the stage include the plays Heartlines (Methuen Drama) and Monstrous (alt.theatre 13.3). This essay in Mutha is from an as-yet-unpublished memoir manuscript about unconventional family making, revolutionary love, and grief. (Photo by Gary Stein.)
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