by Sara Connell
“So, I haven’t ovulated in almost nine years?” I said, incredulous. “Could not ovulating for so long have an impact on my fertility?”
“I wouldn’t worry,” she said. “Most women are able to get pregnant, even after taking the Pill for many years. You are young and healthy, and you have no reason to be concerned about your fertility.”
I relaxed a little in Dr. Eagen’s confidence. I hadn’t been worried about my fertility until I’d read the article, even though I’d already had one reproductive issue—an ovarian cyst when I was fifteen years old that had ruptured, causing my left ovary to be removed. The surgeon and every gynecologist I’d seen since affirmed that the operation would have no negative impact on my ability to have children. Of course, in the years to come, as we navigated the tangled world of fertility treatments, I often questioned whether this assessment had been accurate, if perhaps the removal of my ovary did play some role in my fertility issues. That day, though, I took the affirmation with relief and reassurance. I had no reason to doubt.
“Each ovary has enough eggs for many lifetimes,” the doctor had assured me the day of the surgery. “The human body is pretty incredible. You’ll even have a period every month.”
And I had, or I had until I’d gone on the Pill in college and apparently started pseudomenstruating.
Melissa Assilem’s article scared me. Several of Bill’s peers at the ad agency were having trouble conceiving, women without any reproductive trauma at all. I’d also worked with clients at the clinic who’d undergone fertility treatments. One of them, a writer for a top UK magazine, detailed her journey in a monthly column. She wrote candidly of the fear, the painful longing to have a child, the crushing despair when an in vitro cycle was not successful. In private, she’d confided in me that her marriage was in jeopardy, that she was jealous of her friends who were having babies, that she felt like a failure and was ashamed of her inability to conceive.
I held her hands while she talked, my palms growing sweaty as she expelled her pain. My desire to be a mother was like my desire to continue breathing and maintain the use of my limbs. It sounded excruciating to want something so deeply and not know whether you’d ever be able to experience it.
I knew that I couldn’t control any of these women’s destinies, but I looked for ways I could give support. I let their sessions run overtime, and Kaitlin and I concocted herbal tinctures made with ingredients known to increase fertility. We poured them into amber bottles with black rubber stoppers and wrapped them in handmade paper and petals from Quasadi roses, a marriage and fertility flower from a village in Iran.
Dr. Eagen supported my decision to go off the Pill.
“It can take some time for the body to remember what it’s supposed to do,” she told me. “It takes some women up to ten months for their regular cycle to resume.”
When I told Dr. Eagen that our expat term was up and that Bill and I would be moving back to Chicago at the end of the year, she encouraged me to find a good OB-GYN.
“Find someone you really like,” she said, winking. “Someone you’ll want to deliver your babies.”
As we prepared for the move, I said goodbye to our friends and our life in London. It was a sorrowful parting with our friends, so many of whom had become our family in the UK. But the crushing wall of sadness I expected in making the move never came. In the previous four months, a kind of homesickness for America had come on; Bill said he felt it, too. A new vision emerged in my mind: a spacious house with a home office, a roof deck/garden, space for a child, a place to grow our family.
Seven months had passed since our conversation back in May. Per our agreement, we hadn’t used any birth control. And I hadn’t had a period.
Every so often I would feel the twinge of a cramp or mood changes that I hoped were indications that my period was coming. I would find the nearest bathroom in anticipation, but no blood came. The cramps were like the phantom pains of an amputated limb, or maybe psychosomatic; I wanted so much for my period to return. If I thought about its absence for too long, I became fretful until I remembered Dr. Eagen’s words: that it might take close to a year for my cycle to resume.
After we’d been in Chicago two months and I’d finally unpacked the last of the moving boxes, I decided it was time to find a doctor. I didn’t have any close friends in Chicago yet, so I went online to research OB-GYNs in the city and found Dr. Angelli.
Dr. Angelli was one of four female OBs in what many patients and the media considered a top-rated practice. The office was located in what people called the Playboy Building, named for the notorious magazine that had occupied its upper floors from 1966 through the’90s. Its ninety-five floors were now filled with luxury condos, doctors’ offices, and an Asian-fusion restaurant on the first floor.
I arrived at the office feeling nervous, as if I were going there to take an exam instead of be examined. I arrived early and sat in the plush waiting room. After a few minutes, a nurse came to get me and showed me to an examination room. Dr. Angelli was already poised at the door, wearing pin-striped Brooks Brothers pants and a pink cashmere cardigan. She shook my hand and motioned for me to take a seat on the examining table. The room was neat, clinical. Dr. Angelli took a seat on a stool next to the table and asked me about my medical history, making notes as I spoke. When I told her the date of my last period, she stopped abruptly.
“Excuse me,” she said. “How long has it been?”
“Almost ten months,” I said. “My doctor in England said it can take some women a while.”
“Two months is average,” she said. “Three months max. Ten months is absurd—not to mention unhealthy.”
I received her words as a slap.
“I have been trying to let my body resume a cycle naturally,” I sputtered.
“Well, it’s not working,” she said.
My face burned. I wanted to explain my dedication to a holistic approach, but I stopped myself, thinking I would sound foolish, like a child describing a make-believe world.
Ignoring my obvious distress, Dr. Angelli pulled a prescription pad out of a drawer and began writing in neat, perfect script, the kind children are praised for in elementary school. She prescribed a low-dose birth control pill and told me to start immediately.
“But if I go back on the Pill, I won’t have a full cycle,” I said. “I won’t ovulate.” My voice sounded wobbly and pleading. I was embarrassed at my vulnerability but determined to voice my concern. I wanted to ask how taking a pill that suppresses ovulation would be a good move for someone who wanted to become pregnant in the near future, but didn’t think I could speak further without my voice breaking.
“You have to have a period,” she said, ignoring my concern. “Then we can talk.”
I started crying before I made it to the exit. The building was downtown, a block or so from Lake Michigan, and the March wind whipped through the tunnel created by the tall rows of buildings. Tears forced themselves out in a chute and blurred my vision. I pulled my coat closer as I leaned on the side of the building and called Bill.
“I feel so humiliated,” I said when he answered. I felt childish for crying, for being upset by the appointment. I’d crumbled in front of a woman I’d just met, just because she was a doctor. “She doesn’t understand my concerns about the Pill. She didn’t talk at all about underlying causes. This is my complaint about Western medicine: Treat symptoms. Literally, ‘just take a pill.’”
Bill listened patiently, then said, “There are other doctors. You can get a second opinion.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a shard of confidence return. I felt relieved. I wasn’t under any orders to do what Dr. Angelli prescribed.
I wiped the corners of my eyes with the backs of my hands and told Bill I’d see him at the house. On the way to the parking garage, I passed a metal-mesh trash can. Inside I could see candy wrappers, Big Gulp cups, and half-eaten sandwiches. I pulled out the prescription Dr. Angelli had given me and threw it inside. The square o
f white paper fluttered in the wind for a moment and then fell into the basin. I felt lighter.
As I walked the rest of the way to the car, I remembered a colleague of Bill’s who had mentioned that he was studying Chinese medicine. Acupuncture had a good record for helping with fertility; I made a note to contact him. By the time I’d turned onto Lake Shore Drive, I was humming along with the classical station on the radio. The sun peeked out from a congregation of gray clouds, and I felt warm inside the car. Winter might go on for months longer in Chicago, of course, but if I looked intently enough at the trees, I thought I could see the earliest notes of spring.
Bill’s friend referred me to the College of Oriental Medicine (COM). The school was one of two large acupuncture and Chinese-medicine schools in Chicago. COM worked like a teaching hospital, offering acupuncture sessions with a supervising instructor and team of students several afternoons a week. For my first consultation, I met with Elizabeth Jane, who, at thirty-five, was the youngest female supervising instructor. She was intelligent and comely, with round brown eyes behind black-framed glasses.
I told her about not having had my period, and Elizabeth felt confident acupuncture would help my body resume a regular menstrual cycle and ovulation—reestablishing the balance of my reproductive system at a root level.
I started seeing Elizabeth once a week. Each session, she guided her students to insert a series of needles into my hands, legs, feet, low abdomen, and ovaries. I looked forward to the treatments and COM’s utilitarian space; the smell of moxa, with notes of deep spice and earth, that permeated the treatment rooms and hallways. During the treatments, I liked looking at the posters of the meridian channels taped up on the painted yellow walls.
At my second treatment, Elizabeth informed me that she was going to give me loose herbs to make into a tea.
“I’ll send you home with instructions,” she told me. “The tea has to be made precisely. The process takes about two hours, but the loose herbs are much more potent than taking them in pill form.”
Having worked with dried herbs at my clinic in London, I was thrilled by the idea of making my own tea. Elizabeth led me into the room where the herbs were stored. The room was cool, windowless and temperature-controlled, to maintain the herbs’ integrity and medicinal properties. I took a tour of the large glass jars, delighting in the variety of large and small leaves, the spore-bellied mushrooms, and silken strands of lemongrass. Elizabeth carefully picked herbs from at least six different jars and folded the contents into a piece of stiff white butcher paper. She wrote my name on the package with a Sharpie and handed it to me. I carried the packet home as if it contained precious gems.
My affinity for the tea was matched proportionately by Bill’s intense dislike.
“What’s the problem?” I asked, when he groaned as I began to prepare the tea for week three. “You don’t have to drink it.”
“The smell is disgusting, and it’s laborious. I cannot imagine what it must taste like.”
The tea was acrid and, truthfully, hard to get down. I developed a strategy to avoid having to taste it: I poured it into my throat without letting it touch my tongue, then chased it with small sips of grapefruit or some other juice.
“It’s not so bad,” I said, not wanting to concede anything negative about the tea. I shoved the juice glass into the dishwasher and licked my lips, pretending the taste was delicious.
“It’s supposed to be very potent,” I said, continuing my defense.
Bill pantomimed throwing up, until I laughed and dropped the strainer I’d been using to distill the herbs into the pot.
“Seriously, though, this tea could help me have periods and then help us get pregnant,” I said.
“With what? Rosemary’s baby?”
I shook my head at him but didn’t resent his complaints. Despite his protesting, I knew Bill supported my efforts. He sat with me in the kitchen, preparing food for dinner, while I got the tea ready. If he finished the cooking prep, we’d look through cookbooks for inspiration or he’d play a bootleg recording of a new band he’d discovered. Bill was a drummer in bands since high school. He was shaped by the Who, the Clash, and Rush the way I was by the Brontës, Tolstoy, and Sylvia Plath. His passion was what attracted me to him most strongly when we met; art bonded us in spirit long before we took formal vows of marriage.
Once the tea was ready, I’d pour it into a glass jar and put it on the top shelf of the refrigerator. Bill said it would be better to keep it outside. “It’s not like any animals would drink it.”
I told Bill if he kept up the jokes, I’d slip some of the tea into his morning coffee.
“Fat chance I wouldn’t notice that smell,” he said, poking me in the ribs.
When I hadn’t had a period after nearly twenty-four months of acupuncture, something in Bill caught like a trip line. For two years he’d taken the support role, letting me seek the treatments that felt comfortable to me for my body.
I was thirty-two, still within the optimal fertility age, according to Web MD, but he was six years older, and attending his friend’s fortieth birthday party the week before had triggered a sense of biological urgency in him.
We came together in our kitchen, where we always seemed to have our serious discussions. I sat on one of our bar stools at the island in the center of the kitchen, going through mail. Bill was prepping for dinner. He julienned carrots, shaving them precisely into ribbons of orange that fell soundlessly onto the dark wood surface of his cutting board. I was organizing bills into file folders, and the granite countertop was strewn with open envelopes and mail.
“I should have put my foot down months ago,” Bill said, assuming a parental tone. “I don’t even want to think about what we’ve spent on these treatments, not to mention the teas. It’s a total scam.”
“Acupuncture has helped thousands of people get pregnant,” I protested. “Probably millions if you take into account the thousands of years it’s been used.”
“It’s bullshit,” he said.
“It just hasn’t worked for us,” I said.
My shoulders slumped and I slid down the back of the chair until my neck rested on its metal rungs. I’d only just allowed myself to admit, in the midst of Bill’s tantrum, that acupuncture really hadn’t worked. I had remained so convinced that it would just take a little more time, that surely my body would remember to ovulate and I would start having periods again.
I was quiet for a moment, listening to the sound of garlic frying in a pan on the stove. We agreed that I would seek out a Western medical doctor, and I began making inquiries among my friends.
Even with Caroline putting in a personal referral, the first available appointment I could secure with Dr. Bizan was three months away. I asked the receptionist to call me if anything opened up earlier. Once I’d booked the appointment and circled the date twice with a Sharpie in my calendar, I felt a cold shock of fear. For the first time, I was afraid that something might be seriously wrong with me and afraid that we would have problems becoming pregnant. I was scared enough that I was even ready to take the Pill if that was what Dr. Bizan prescribed.
“You’re sure Dr. Bizan is an actual medical doctor—with a real degree?” Bill asked as I came out of the shower on the day of my appointment.
Bill had been testy since I’d told him Dr. Bizan was a DO, rather than an MD. I had just learned about DOs: Western medical doctors who are trained to treat the whole person, as opposed to being symptom-focused. I was excited to find out this kind of doctor existed.
“Yes—geez,” I said, hanging my towel on the back of the bathroom door and pulling a dress over my head. “DOs are fully licensed Western medical doctors. Dr. Bizan has been Caroline’s OB for three pregnancies, and she works out of St. Joseph’s, a totally Western hospital. Like I said, you’re welcome to come with me.”
Dr. Bizan’s office had called the day before with a cancellation, and I’d scrambled to reorganize my own schedule to be able to make the appoin
tment. Bill had recently left the advertising agency and started his own creative group with a best friend. He had two meetings and a shoot scheduled that day, so we’d already agreed that I would go on my own. As I waited in that grungy, airless office, I was happy I’d come by myself. Bill hated small spaces—and waiting—and I could imagine him pacing back and forth like a caged tiger in the cluttered room.
I’d moved through the remainder of Cosmo, Elle, and a ten-month-old InStyle, when the nurse finally called my name.
“I’m Sara,” I said, jumping up so she could see me.
“Follow me.”
She ushered me into an examination room and told me Dr. Bizan would be in shortly. Another nurse came in and took my weight, blood pressure, and temperature: all normal. After she left, I looked around for something else to distract me. I felt more nervous than ever, afraid that Dr. Bizan either wouldn’t be a good fit or would chastise me for going so long without consulting a doctor.
In direct contrast with the waiting room, the examination room was spare and orderly. My stomach grumbled. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was after 3:00 PM, and I hadn’t eaten lunch. I decided to lie back on the exam table and meditate. I’d studied various meditation techniques in my training in England and joined a meditation group when I moved to Chicago. Someone from the group had recently shared an article about an order of yogis from Tibet who were able to nourish themselves with their breath instead of with food. If they could fast for weeks at a time, I could wait to eat until after my appointment.
I’d found meditation impossible when I first started; I’d been unable to sit still for more than one minute at a time. I’d dedicated myself to the practice, though, believing for reasons I did not understand that it was important for me. In the years to come, I would often thank whatever intuition had guided me to meditation. “The middle of a crisis is probably not the ideal time to start a practice,” one of my teachers in England said. A gift of meditation was said to be equanimity, calmness within uncomfortable situations.
