by Jessi Klein
“I’m barely even touching you,” Dr. Bander says tersely. I’m not sure why she is telling me this. She makes another attempt with the catheter and again I let out a yelp.
“You have a very sensitive cervix,” she informs me. She seems annoyed with me, which is a bit of a mystery since I am the one who is stuck with the crappy cervix. “I’m going to try to use a different instrument.”
She uses the different tool that hurts slightly less, which begs the question of why she wouldn’t have used the less painful tool in the first place. Then she begins to fill my insides with the dye fluid2 and I experience a whole other level of pain. It feels like someone is punching me in the stomach over and over. I flinch and Bander tells me not to move as I start profusely sweating.
A few minutes later we are done. She presses PLAYBACK on the monitor to show me as one fallopian tube, thin as a hair, goes dark with the fluid. On the other side, there is nothing. “Well,” she says matter-of-factly, “your left tube is totally open and clear. The right tube did not fill. So either it’s blocked, or else your cramping was just so severe that it temporarily blocked the tube.”
Can I get pregnant with one blocked tube?
Technically yes, she says. But it’s harder.
I ask her what the upshot is.
“It’s inconclusive,” she says. “But really, your reaction to the test was unusually difficult. When you have a baby, you’ll definitely need to get an epidural.”
When you have a baby.
If we are so sure it is “when” and not “if,” why did we just inflate my innards like a water balloon?
And no doy! Of course I’m getting an epidural, you monster.
She leaves. I am led back to the sad little changing room where I am given a plump hot dog bun of a maxi pad to contain my post-test bleeding. My stomach is still cramping. I limp the three blocks to Magnolia Bakery, where my friend Zubeida is meeting me for a pint of banana pudding. Banana pudding has been my go-to feel-sorry-for-myself treat for many years. Usually I eat it after breakups and Mets losses. Now I’m eating it because one of my fallopian tubes is apparently garbage and also my cervix is a disaster. I finish an entire pudding pint, only to realize my feelings are still stubbornly feelable, thus necessitating an extra red velvet cupcake to try to stuff them back into the sand. I definitely do not enjoy the cupcake and 100 percent feel worse when it has been deposited on top of the feeling pile. Now I’m barren AND fat, I whine to myself.
On the subway ride home, I luxuriate in a hot tub of self-pity. I think of a new acronym:
IABFDB—I’m a barren fat dumb bitch
A few weeks after the test, Dr. Bander tells me that if I’m not pregnant by August, I should definitely plan on doing IVF because I am running out of time. She wants me to start doing shots. I hate needles, and the idea of having to learn to administer them at home myself necessitates more pudding, cupcakes, and ice cream. As someone who primarily writes sex jokes for a living, this task seems beyond my ken. My husband supposedly could learn to do it, but he has sausage fingers and by his own admission is terrible at small, detailed tasks requiring dexterity. If he cannot help me zip up a dress, I do not feel great about him plunging a syringe into my body. I ask her about trying an IUI3 before moving on to IVF (acronyms!) and she tells me it’s a waste of time.
I fire Dr. Bander.
5. Dr. Mukherjee
My beloved primary care doctor, Dr. Rahman, recommends Dr. Mukherjee as my new fertility Sherpa. We show up to his office on a warm afternoon in May, and I like him immediately. He grew up in the Bronx and has the build and bearing of John Madden, if John Madden were Indian and fiddled with ladies’ baby junk for a living.
Even his office has a different vibe. He is a part of a very large practice, and it’s constantly packed with the women who make up our strange club—Hasidic women, black women, white women, young women, older women, and very rich women bedecked in very fancy jewelry, which for all its fanciness still has not bought them a baby. The sound system is always playing upbeat contemporary pop, which I suppose is better than depressing music—I mean, who wants to contemplate their barrenness to Portishead or Pink Floyd?—but on the other hand it’s no less surreal to wait for your estrogen levels to be measured for the umpteenth time to Whitney Houston’s “Million Dollar Bill.”
Unlike Dr. Bander, who treated the fertility process with the cold exacting manner of a scientist herding lab rats, Dr. Mukherjee’s attitude resembles more closely that of a high school football coach who truly believes the game isn’t about winning or losing but should really be about Fun! I like this attitude.
I ask him if he thinks I need to be rushing into IVF.
“Nah, you just started trying,” he says with a wave of the hand. “Let’s give you a chance, see how it goes.”
I pepper him with more questions, making up a few to hide the one that is most important, which is obviously how much I can drink while the Trying process is happening.
“Don’t get blackout drunk,” he says. “But beyond that you’re fine.”
This is tremendous news. I consider leaving Mike to marry Dr. Mukherjee.
We agree that for the next three months I will take a pill that will help me sprout extra follicles (ew, follicles!) in the middle of my cycle (ew, cycle!). I will come to the office for an ultrasound wherein we will count follicles, and if there are enough (but also not too many), I will receive an injection of Ovidrel into my stomach, which will induce my eggs (barf, eggs!) to slide down my tubes (no words). At which point Mike and I will know it is time to bang it out for a few days. “Doesn’t have to be every day, every other day is fine,” Mukherjee says. I decide to quit while we’re all ahead and not to do my vaginal/anal joke even though I feel like Mukherjee would totally get it.
As we are wrapping up, he says there is one other thing we should do before we begin this phase of Trying. “Have you done your HSG yet?” he asks.
“You should have the results,” I say with the eager smugness of a teacher’s pet who did all the homework before being asked.
He shuffles through my incredibly thick file.
“Hm.”
?
“You should redo the test,” he says. “You wanna know what’s up with that other tube.”
I ask if it’s really necessary because, not to be all dramatic, but the last test was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.4
“Yeah, well,” he says as he eats half a meatball sandwich (he wasn’t really eating a meatball sandwich, but that is always his vibe). “You don’t want to waste your time trying to get pregnant with just one tube if you could have both tubes. If you only have one tube open we should try to do something about it.”
Do something about it?
“Yeah, the doctor I’m gonna send you to could blow it open if it’s blocked.”
Blow it open?
He explains that a blocked tube can literally have air blown into it to try to clear it out. This brings the plumbing analogy to new heights. Or rather, depths.
6. The HSG Part 2—Dr. Brady
I show up for my second hysterosnuffleupagus. I have been told that for this test I will be sedated, which is heartening, but then I inquire further and discover that I will not be completely unconscious, as I’d been hoping. Anything short of complete blackness feels like not enough.
Dr. Brady’s practice is one of those Upper East Side shmancy offices where there is a doorman who lets you in and dark wood everywhere and nice carpeting that you would maybe even choose to have in your house. However, these amenities fade into the background as my appointment, for which I have been instructed not to eat or drink eight hours prior, gets pushed farther and farther into the day. I arrive at nine a.m.; by noon I am starving and my nerves are frayed. I’ve instructed Mike to pick me up with banana pudding in hand.
At one, I am finally led to the sad little paper gown room. I am then guided to a dimly lit surgical suite where I lie on a steel table. I’m so scare
d I’m physically shaking. The nurses begin prepping my arm for the sedation IV as the doctor comes in.
“What are you giving me?” I ask. He tells me it’s a mixture of morphine and Demerol. I ask if they can maybe crank it up a smooch so I’m knocked out. He says they need me to be awake so I can respond and move during the test. I explain that I have a very special cervix that’s particularly sensitive and thus I should get double the normal amount of drugs, and as I am making my case, the drugs enter my vein and in about two seconds I am enveloped by a wave of joy. It gently smooths out all the anxiety and fear and depression I have been feeling about this test, and Trying in general. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, this sudden rush of relief from everything in my life that doesn’t feel like warm velvet.
The high also makes me completely silly, even though I’m not aware of it.
“Tilt your pelvis a little to the left,” Dr. Brady says.
“Do you guys smoke pot?” I ask him and the nurses. “We should all smoke pot together.”
They don’t respond. I realize maybe there’s been a misunderstanding.
“I don’t mean now. Right now you guys are doing a procedure on me. But later. Another time.”
There is still no response. I think to myself, I can’t believe I’m bombing my own procedure. It turns out I’m actually saying it, not thinking it.
“And tilt to the other side,” Dr. Brady says.
I tilt. Wheeee!
This is what heroin must feel like, I think. Maybe I should do heroin.
“Okay, we’re done,” Dr. Brady announces. “Both of your tubes were open. You’re fine.”
I look at his screen. I see the two black hair-like tubes. I am sad to leave this place. I feel so good. Maybe this is how Lou Reed felt?
I look down. There’s blood on my paper gown.
I look up. Mike is there.
He holds my arm as I stumble back to my locker. The nurse tells me to sit for ten minutes before leaving. Mike hands me the banana pudding, and I eat it in the waiting room. As the high wears off, I think about the fact that my tubes have been open this whole time, and how annoying it is I had to do this test not once but twice to confirm that there was never a problem in the first place.
But there is a problem. Because the tubes are not broken, there is one more thing not to fix. But I’m still not getting pregnant.
I continue not to get pregnant through April, May, and June. I keep taking pills and getting once-a-month shots in my stomach, but nothing is happening. Much has already been written about the negative effect of Trying on your sex life, and I have very little to add except to say it is true. Before we started I had a fantasy that we would be different, that we would continue to have fun and romantic sex, but that notion was as immature as the one I had in junior high school, right when my hormones started raging, that being a prostitute must be super fun, because of all the sex they get to have! Having sex at a specific moment, as an assignment, is a drag. I wonder if there is a personality difference between people conceived spontaneously during hot, condomless one-night stands in Brazil, and people conceived by anxious married couples who schedule medically necessary intercourse in the brief pause between Netflix episodes.
By August, I need a break. I don’t want to keep getting blood tests and taking pills and knowing when I’m ovulating. We go on vacation to Martha’s Vineyard where I drink tons of wine and eat oysters and relax. We have sex if and when we feel like it.
This is the point in the story that well-meaning people tell couples who are Trying about how, once you stop worrying and just relax, you’ll get pregnant. Please do not tell it to anyone you know. It’s really annoying and also it’s bullshit. I did not get pregnant in August. Or in September, when I also took the month off from Trying.
In October, I report back to Dr. Mukherjee. “Welp,” he says. “It might be time to bring in some bigger guns.” He thinks I should start doing hormone injections at home. This is the moment I have been fearing, the moment when I transition from Trying 101 to AP Trying. There is one Hail Mary left, I think.
I ask Mukherjee if he thinks we could maybe just try one cycle with an IUI.
He shrugs. “Sure, why not,” he says, in the same tone he might use if someone asked him if he was interested in a pair of free movie tickets. While Mike and I are in his office we schedule a date in early October to begin. Mukherjee tells us how we will prepare for the procedure, which is supposedly painless. I have to take my pills as usual and come in for my Ovidrel injection and my ultrasound the day before. Mike’s only instruction is that for the twenty-four hours before the IUI, in order for his sperm to be at peak numbers when he “donates,” he should abstain from masturbating.
A few weeks later, it is the morning of the procedure. I have a terrible cold. In addition to Trying, we are in the process of moving and I have three Airbnb apartments to go see later in the day. I couldn’t be more stressed. Then, in the cab on the way to the doctor’s office, Mike confesses to me that he forgot his one instruction and masturbated the night before.
On the doctor’s table, before I get basted, the nurse shows me the tube of sperm with Mike’s name on it. “Confirm this is your husband,” she says. There has just been a highly publicized lawsuit against a sperm donor clinic by a lesbian who was basted with the sperm of a black man rather than the white man whose profile she had chosen. I confirm that this is indeed my husband’s sperm, but can’t help but think for a moment that perhaps some random dark-skinned stranger would have at least had the wherewithal not to jerk it right before the test.
I get basted with my husband’s sperm.
Two weeks later, I take a home pregnancy test while Mike is at work. I’m so used to seeing the words NOT PREGNANT appear in the pee stick’s window that I know their shape. Still, I stare for a long time at the test.
I’m pregnant.
Fuck you, Dr. Bander.
Six weeks later, we go back to Mukherjee’s office for him to perform the ultrasound that will confirm there is indeed an embryo. He is going to check if there is a heartbeat.
Mukherjee himself comes into the room. Up till now, all the ultrasounds have been performed by a nurse. But this is obviously his big moment. He flicks a switch. A ghostly little white thing appears on the screen. He flicks another switch and now we can hear it. Baboom baboom baboom.
He presses a button and the machine prints out a picture. “Grain of rice,” he says casually. He hands it to us. The first photo. He saunters out of the room.
We clutch this photo, like millions and millions of couples all over the world have done before us. This little piece of shiny black paper with an abstract representation of a thing that is the nexus of thousands of people who used to exist, and don’t anymore. My grandparents, our great-great-grandparents, Mike’s great-great-great-grandparents. Jews on boats, Jews who didn’t make it onto the boats, those pale serious sepia people who always look like ghosts in their formal brown gowns. All of these people forming a chain that goes back to the end of forever, to whatever Jews used to be when they were still amoebas in the ocean like everyone else. For the next three months I pray that all of these ancestors magically pass along their strength to the grain of rice, so he can continue to hang on tight to his little branch of the family tree.
We clutch our piece of paper all the way home. It’s printed from a machine my great-great-grandmother could never have even imagined, even though the echo of her molecules is now pulsing through its wires, until they stain this piece of paper with the image of a future boy.
And as I write these words, he is five months old and in the other room. He is a happy baby but is having trouble sleeping. Mike thinks it’s time to let him cry it out a bit. I’m not sure. I call him The Champ because he always comes through. He’s such a good kid. I know he wants to sleep.
He’s Trying.
1 Speculum.
2 The Diet Coke.
3 Intrauterine insemination. In layman’s ter
ms, your husband/boyfriend/donor spooges into a jar and then the contents of that jar are gooshed up your puss with a turkey baster. SCIENCE!
4 Me = my uterus.
Acknowledgments
It’s so exciting to be writing the acknowledgments for this book. First of all because it means the book is finished, and secondly because there are so many people I want to thank for their generous help in getting me from the first page to the last.
Giant thank-you to Jimmy Miller for believing, early on in my career, that I should be writing stuff at all. Emotional thank-you to David Kuhn and Becky Sweren for making me believe specifically that I both could and should write a book.
Eternal thanks to Emily Griffin for her steadfast confidence in this project and for championing the proposal before it even existed, and to Gretchen Young for taking the baton and getting me across the finish line. A confetti of thanks to everyone at Grand Central Publishing for being just lovely all around, and especially to the eternally kind and patient leader Jamie Raab.
There are a few ladies in particular who have given me more support and encouragement (book-related and otherwise) than I can ever properly thank them for: Kate Grodd, Rebecca Kutys, Maura Madden, and Zubeida Ullah. I love each of you tons.
Michael Lasker, Christie Smith, Tim Phillips, and Ali Waller all were the best of good sports about reading chapter after chapter and telling me to keep going when I really needed to hear someone say to keep going. Bless you all.
In the middle of writing this book, I got preggo and gave birth to my baby boy. It is very hard to write and take care of a baby at the same time, so I owe massive thanks to Bella Luz Antonelli and Lucy Sibrian for taking such incredible care of my son while I was working on this thing.
