Court Square

i know you want to be with me

We were driving through the city on Saturday and passed 5 Columbus Circle, looked up into the penthouse windows, said probably there were doctors or nurses there. I said I felt like I lived there, like all I do is go there, all the time. 

I went again yesterday for a saline sonohysterogram. It’s when a doctor floods your uterus with saline and looks to see if there’s anything in there that maybe shouldn’t be in there. Of course, because I’m me, there’s something in there that maybe shouldn’t be in there. 

When I’m doing an IVF cycle I go to the clinic at first every other day and then every day. I could do the route in my sleep: the G from Myrtle-Willoughby to Court Square, transfer to the E, out at 53rd and 7th Ave, and then two blocks up, past the Starbucks, past the Pret, past the Joe and the Juice. The guy working the elevators at 5 Columbus either recognizes by now or clocks me by demographic: late thirties, female, alone, looking tired, more tired than the first few times because by now we’re on our third round. 

I didn’t write last week because I couldn’t. We retrieved nine eggs last time and five of them fertilized. I’m a witch, so I knew that three of them would make it to blastocyst, and a few days later my doctor wrote and said that, in fact, three of them had made it to blastocyst. My daughter is here. There’s this long corridor at Court Square that I walk down when I transfer from the G to the E, and I remember walking down this corridor and knowing that my child was here. I know you want to be with me, I thought. You will be with me soon. 

I talked to a friend who’d done IVF about how we were going to delay implanting until our home renovation was done, and then I said but at the same time I don't want to delay because they’re already here. “They’re already here,” she said, mirroring back to me what I knew was true. If you haven’t done IVF, this probably sounds deranged. If you have, I get it now. For a week, I thought about those little blastocysts. I felt them with me every second. 

I told P that there were six hundred cells that were made of both of us. Embryos aren’t half of one person and half of another, they’re entirely one person and entirely another. We are bound together for life now, I thought. We aren’t married, but I feel more married to him than I ever did to anyone I was ever married to. I didn’t mind the thought of being bound together for life by six hundred cells. 

On Wednesday, I was on my way to a work party when I got an email from my doctor. “Not the best news,” he wrote. None of the embryos tested normal. Two were aneuploid — totally non-viable. One is mosaic, which some people say is fine and some people say isn’t. Our particular mosaic makeup doesn’t look great. The good news, he said, is that we can do a third round. 

We did IVF so that we wouldn’t have to worry about fertility. We thought we would just be able to go on with our relationship for a while and stave off the inevitable fear that we wouldn’t be able to have kids because of our ages, my endometriosis, my adenomyosis, my fraught medical history. Then we started IVF, and now we worry about fertility. 

I worry about fertility. I can’t just go on with things, didn’t know I wanted it until now I maybe can’t have it. I am so tired. I am so exceptionally tired, so thoroughly worn out. I have nothing left. And I’m about to start again: the injections, the pills, the mood swings, the not wanting to eat anything besides banana pudding, the crying, the sobbing, the fear, the fear, the fear, the anxiety, the trying to trust, the resentment, the fear, the fear, the fear. 

We believed for a second that we could control life. “Nature is cruel,” my mother writes to me after I tell her the news. Not cruel, I think. Just unforgiving.