Tales from the IVF Trenches: From Dirty Needles to Petri Dishes

Of surgeries and legacies

A life lived is measured in legacy, not lifetime, but in the empty palm of the present it is only measurable in the promise of that space.

Part 1

Driving through a freezing downpour in Brooklyn, raindrops exploding like bombs on the windshield, I start to scream. “This is my fucking fault!” Not satisfied with my outburst, I try slapping and strangling the steering wheel without crashing.

We’re out of syringes for my wife’s IVF shots due to the incompetence of the medical staff (me). The extensive medical training I received (none) has failed us. I hadn’t counted the supplies the right way. We are out of the exact thing we needed.

I pull into a CVS and sprint to the pharmacy. I ask for spare needles from a twenty year-old behind the counter. Turns out, most places don’t just give out needles at nine at night. Looking for “syringes” and “needles” on Google Maps yields no easy answer, so I skim Reddit posts from years ago about missing IVF shots. Not a good idea, the anonymous crowd concludes. I wonder how many became parents.

The creeping crisis crawls up my spine. I drive through the rain looking for off-brand pharmacies. The M train screams over Broadway, bug-yellow lights blinking in the puddles. In the car, it’s just me and the wipers thudding back and forth like a heartbeat.

A month into our successful, miraculous positive pregnancy test and we’re out of the supplies to keep it going. If anything goes wrong from here until November, when we’re expecting, it will be my fault forever. Especially if we miss this injection.

“I looked it up,” my wife says when I come back into the loft, needleless. “It’s not good to miss a shot. Not good at all.”

“We’ll find one.” I rummage. I find a syringe in the back of a cupboard from when I had tossed the bags of our absolute medical necessities into an obscure corner. It’s unclear if it’s been used or if it’s new. There’s no wrapper, but the needle seems intact. Unspoiled.

I inject my wife, like I’ve been doing for the past forty days, straight into the butt with a maybe dirty needle.

*

At an expensive Persian restaurant in Bushwick, my mom drinks wine with us. My wife doesn’t take a glass.

“What’s new?” she asks with a searching light in her eyes.

In the early days, the hardest part about pregnancy is keeping the delicate candle of belief alive. The second hardest part is talking to family and friends when they ask questions. Because to protect the candle of belief, the newly pregnant have to shield it from even the slightest whisper, the faintest hint of hope.

“Nothing is new,” I still have to say. So conversations continue, but at this age even my rants are on repeat.

We start IVF in November. Walking out of a new clinic that will examine the quality of a deposit I left in a cup, I walk up First Avenue singing Frank Sinatra: “What is a man? What is he worth?”

When my wife’s eggs are deemed ready, the “retrieval” begins. The fertility treatment center is styled like an airport lounge, complete with postmodern couches made for the spineless and chairs that curve in the fashion of cupolas and fungi. Vaguely biological artwork with colorful chromosomal motifs hang in IKEA picture frames in the halls. Having masturbated in a small room with an ominously plasticked living room chair and a window in the wall earlier, I answer work emails while another husband is on a video call next to me, bragging about investment opportunities in Norway.

My wife disappears with a baker’s dozen of doctors and student doctors. In her memory, the operating table burns under a light as bright as a UFO during an abduction. A needle is inserted into her. And as she recovers from anesthesia and I call an Uber, the doctors assure us that the eggs have been retrieved. My wife falls asleep on the way home as the Uber glides through Midtown, the sidewalk-slicking November rain ticking like grammar on the windshield. A nurse calls at the end of the day. The operation is a success. We’ve created future promises of future people. But we’ve elected for more tests to understand if these future promises really could be future people. So we wait.

Two weeks later, my wife calls me when I’m at the office in Soho.

“Do you want a boy or a girl?” she asks.

“What do the doctors say?” I ask, leaning into the window watching people with heavy shopping bags squeeze past each other on Spring Street. I check my work calendar, making sure I’m not missing a meeting.

“They say that we only have one boy. But since I’m younger now, if we really want the boy, we should try him first. The chances are higher if we do it when I’m younger.”

Two lifetimes unroll in front of my feet. A small boy, giggling and running. A small girl, giggling and running. Circling me, searching for my hand.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“We should do the highest-graded one,” she says. “It’s a girl.”

“Okay,” I say.

I head to a meeting room.

The miracle of life truly is amazing, I think as I unmute myself.

Or at least the promise of life, a promise on ice.

*

Back at the hospital with my wife in the hospital chair and me holding her hand. I watch the nurse put our high-grade daughter on a petri dish. I’m stuck in some time and space between life and death and legacy and science and destiny that makes no sense as I see the nurse chase the embryo across the dish, once, twice, three times before she finally manages to pull it into the syringe.

Is that my daughter, dancing into this world already?

Or is it just a trick of the light?

What can be new without the who?

Part 1

Part 3 due next week!