Bastards in the Bank

None of us are free from the vile trappings of gender, but there are certain occasions associated with more elaborate punishments. One that seems to be mostly reserved for the ladies is the continuous open season for input on our reproductive choices. I cannot speak on this from personal experience, but I believe that there are many self-righteous breeders out there who are all too ready to tell women how to think and feel about childbearing and parenthood, especially women who choose not to have children. For unknown reasons I’ve mostly been spared the presumption and inquisition. Maybe I look gay or give off maiden aunt vibes, or studiously not talking about my personal life at work for the past eight years has paid off. Whatever I have to thank for it, I’m sans progeny and pretty close to aging out and no one has been too weird about it. What an incredible prank from the universe that just now when I’m almost in the clear, I’ve changed my mind and possibly do want to become a parent.

The path that led me from decades of certainty that I don’t want to have a kid, to now leaning towards “yes”, is not really worth mapping out. Anyone’s decisions about this are deeply personal and if I laid out my thought process I think it would be akin to making an argument in favour of my own preferences. But I do think it’s worth noting that it wasn’t some brute biological system override or psychological weakness that made me start to want something I didn’t before. My thoughts about it now are probably irreconcilable with what my position was in the past, but the reasons for that contradiction are me developing in ways that I’ve chosen for myself and operating in a different context than I did before. Those are healthy things that could lead anyone to change their mind about something. I don’t think it would have been possible for me to reach this point earlier, but because of my age I don’t have the luxury of another ten or fifteen years of keeping this thing hypothetical or of planning the whole course of my life around having a family. Although having a fairly hard time limit has helped to test my feelings and prepared me to have to make a big decision within the next few years, I am definitely not ready to have a baby right now. But I am committed enough to buy myself some more time.

Procreation moodboard, L-R: Jennifer Saunders and Julia Sawalha, La Goony Chonga, Cate Blanchett in Tár.

As a handsome, urbane, early-late-thirties single woman I do not immediately see myself represented on the Fertility Associates website.The stock images on the homepage show a forty-something woman with a baby, a gay guy couple, and a straight couple who are young, but the man looks a bit sheepish so perhaps his sperm are lazy. When I fill out the inquiry form the four genders on offer are man, woman, trans man and trans woman. “Woman” is alright for me but as far as my own gender goes, I’m just not very interested in it. “Vagina owner-operator” is the way I’d prefer to describe myself and I kinda like getting they/themmed, but so far I haven’t cared enough to set up camp outside of the big tent. It doesn’t really matter when it comes to reproductive cells anyway. Most of us regardless of gender are either firing off millions of gametes at will, or harbouring a relatively small number of cells which have a short natural shelf life and are very expensive to extract and store. This discrepancy seems like enough hassle to deal with without also doing womb phrenology about how each part of the menstrual cycle makes us unfit to participate in society in different ways, but here we are.

While not an insurmountable barrier, the friction of gendered expectations has always been detrimental to being able to see myself as a parent. I’ve seen very few women who have children with men whose position I would want to be in. I’m already violently bored of the conversations people have with new parents (I actually think new dads have it worse). I’m wary of the narrowing possibilities for the sort of person you’re supposed to be and the way that self-erasure is lauded for women who have borne children. Of course having a baby also intersects with accessing medical care while female, which I’ve been thinking about more as the idea has become a project. I’m a bit apprehensive about being treated like a sad spinster whose biological clock is ticking, or even worse, having to play into that role to get taken seriously. When I get the call back from Fertility Associates it’s all reassuringly neutral. I explain my situation and the nurse asks me basic health questions and gives me an overview of the egg freezing cycle, then leaves me to think about whether I want to proceed. Which I do. I get booked for an in-person doctor appointment for about a month later, in advance of which I have the first of many blood tests.

By the time my doctor appointment rolls around my most pressing question is whether I have to have my IUD removed to do the cycle. The one I have now is only about a year old and it’s excruciating to have them taken out and inserted. As it turns out it’s totally fine to leave it in. The only difference it will make is that my hormone levels might be affected, which they will be testing and adjusting the medication for anyway. In other good news my first blood test shows that I have high AMH (anti-Müllerian hormone) levels for my age, and an ultrasound shows that my uterus and ovaries are normal, with one ovary just about to ovulate. I feel smugly fecund. The doctor explains in careful, managing-expectations language that the AMH levels can help predict how many eggs I may be likely to get. He runs through slides on his laptop and shows me various graphs where age is one of the axes. Hypothetical numbers are mentioned, like twelve, or fifteen. In a standard delusion of grandeur I think that I’ll probably get like fifty. Aside from the fertility indicators looking pretty good, another nice surprise is that I can donate the eggs if I end up not using them, or not using all of them. I thought I would be too old for anyone else to want them, but apparently if you’re 37 or under it’s fine. I feel better about spending so much money on this thing that I’m not even 100% sure I want, knowing that even if it amounts to nothing for me somebody else could still get something out of it. The doctor is really good and the whole consultation feels lucid and collaborative. I start to feel like this is something smart and forward-thinking that I’m doing, rather than it being a massive fine I have to pay for being a stupid slut who can’t commit to anything.

I get assigned a bunch of fertility homework that I have to complete via online learning modules, which contains lots of information about my own biology that I immediately forget. Going through the consent forms I find out I’ll be on fentanyl when I have the retrieval surgery, which will be novel for someone who doesn’t drink or do any drugs. The next appointment is with a nurse who explains the medication regime and shows me how to inject myself with a little squishy synthetic flesh pad. The medication will start on the first day of my period and the surgery will follow about two weeks later. I’m worried about not knowing when my period has started because I barely have one and she explains that it’s not all or nothing regarding springing into action on the first day; they can do a blood test to check if my hormones are at the right level to begin the medication and an extra day probably won’t matter. I ask whether the company has ever lost or compromised someone’s reproductive material. Only once have they lost some long-frozen semen in the process of changing ownership, she tells me - “it was in the news, you can look it up”. I believe her. I ask some questions about donation again because I’m so pleased by the idea that I could sire a dozen children by different women. The breeder experience. We talk about cum a bit. I learn that there’s a shortage of donors because to do intrauterine insemination they need the really vigorous stuff from 25-year-olds. It’s illegal to pay for sperm donation in New Zealand, but maybe they should start giving out vapes and those LED lightbulbs that change colour via an app. Or take out some ads on Grindr, they’re giving it away all over town.

I can’t act on my next period because I have a holiday planned, during which my 37th birthday passes. When I get back home I’m late and the wait is stressful. There’s a window when it’s going to be the most convenient time to do it and I’m just not fucking bleeding. I calculate and re-calculate what would happen depending on what day I start, and what I’d have to change or cancel in each scenario. I have other things on my mind too and I try not to be stressed in case the stress compromises me on a cellular level. I still stress. Finally I get my period on a Monday morning and feel very organised again. I get sent for a blood test and the next day I get to go pick up my meds and pay the clinic $14,610. I still don’t know exactly which day I’ll have to be out from work for surgery, but it won’t clash with anything major and I’m relieved that it’s underway now.

I can’t figure out how to operate the pen for my first estrogen injection, which I discover when the needle’s already sunk in my tummy fat. I end up twisting it down click by click. By the second night I’m competent enough to get the whole dose in one motion. The progesterone is just a tablet that I take in the morning. Before this point I’ve thought about doing some half-cooked citizen science experiments on myself while under the influence of the extra hormones. As dubious as I am about reading too much into it, I do notice some minor changes to my looks and mood during my normal cycles. My thesis is that all of the estrogen will make me really beautiful and horny, but the only changes in the first few days are carsickness, a bit of lightheadedness and quickly becoming very soft around the middle. I take a photo of my face each day for comparison, look at pictures of babies to gauge my maternal response, and watch this video of Kristen Stewart doing pull ups to check if I’m still bisexual. On the seventh day I go to the clinic for a scan to check how I’m responding. I watch the nurse count blurry ovals on the ultrasound screen and relay measurements to another person who notes them down. These are my follicles, swelling up like a bunch of grapes.

I’ve felt ok up until this point, but after that the nausea and discomfort get worse. My abdomen is tender and swollen and my breasts are heavy. I feel like my ovaries are sucking the life out of me and it shows in the series of selfies I’ve taken. I accept it as a preview of the possibility of losing my looks during pregnancy and the inevitability of feeling like my body isn’t mine anymore. I have another scan two days after the first one and I immediately resent the man who’s performing it. He doesn’t do anything wrong, I just hate him for being a man. I can tell he knows as soon as he collects me from the waiting room. I don’t care. It takes way longer this time and I stare at the ceiling and clench my fists as he reads off the measurements. Afterwards I go into a room where a nurse is looking at a screen and says “wow”. The scan took a long time because more follicles have developed since two days ago. I’m responding to the medication so strongly that I have to give myself the trigger injections that night and have the retrieval in two days’ time, which is a Friday. I was hoping for the weekend but I’m told it can’t wait. I imagine my ovaries as bags of marbles; the follicles are up to something like 30 each side and the ones they’ve measured range from around 9mm to 20mm. I feel steadily worse and look forward to Friday. I’m so out of sorts that I become indifferent to both the babies and Kristen Stewart.

Faces of Puregon/Provera/Cabergoline

On Friday morning I take 4 paracetamol with a tiny sip of water, abstaining from any other liquids. A bird shits on me on my way to the clinic. I wash it out of my hair in the bathroom before they prep me for surgery. I meet two or three nurses, the embryologist and the doctor who will be performing the operation. I tell a nurse about how awful I’ve been feeling and she says it’s not surprising given the way my ovaries have responded. I ask if this is what being pregnant feels like and she says it’s comparable. She cautions me that I won’t feel normal again for a while afterwards; after my ovaries are drained the follicles will fill with blood. Another nurse inserts a cannula and says that I can have IV anti-nausea when I tell her how sick I feel. My sister arrives and waits in the recovery room while I get taken to the surgery room. I lie down and put my legs on some little foothold things, then the nurse connects the IV and say that I feel like I could fall asleep. I don’t think I do, but I can’t remember the doctor going into my vagina or the local anesthetic that would’ve happened. As the doctor extracts the contents of my ovaries they are relayed to the embryologist, who counts aloud how many eggs she’s found. I can remember the counting from about 8 onwards, then the doctor saying that she had finished one side. I’m so relaxed that a nurse by my side has to keep prompting me to take deep breaths - maybe my blood pressure is flying low. The count is up to 28 when they walk me out of the operating room. The whole surgery is much less painful and intrusive than having an IUD inserted.

I lay semiconscious on the recliner in the recovery room and my sister makes me drink water and eat the toast they bring me. In the end my delusions weren’t too far off - they’ve extracted 43 eggs. By the time we get home my anti-nausea has worn off and I spend most of the day drifting in and out of sleep with an ice pack on my face. A nurse calls me and I find out that 34 eggs were mature enough to freeze. 34 potential bastards in the bank. It’s enough that I don’t have to consider doing a second round of treatment, which is a big relief. I’m a little unnerved that I got so many because I’ve had a joke with myself for a long time that I’ll have twins one day. Timmy and Susie, Raúl and Anahera, Ledy and Ivan. That would be a lot to manage by myself, but I’m not one to get upset about a bargain.

My sister has to stay the night because I’m not allowed to be alone for 24 hours after the surgery; I watch some really awful television and have a poor sleep overnight. The next day I’m well enough to go see a friend but need a lie-down after, the day after that I miss a half marathon that I’d signed up for - there’s no chance of me even walking it. I have to take medication for a week (cabergoline) to bring me back to normal, which ends up being the worst part of the entire treatment. I get very nauseous on it and can’t tolerate screens, lights, smells, noises or standing up too quickly. I work from home with my screens as dim as possible and sunglasses on, eating imperial mints and porridge. It works though - I lose nearly 2kg over four days from my body de-swelling. By the end of the week the side effects diminish and I can go back to work properly. I’m very content for my normal life to go on and for my kids to wait in the realm of possibility, where they haven’t yet experienced refined sugars or screen time, until they enter this beautiful terrifying world via a caesarian while mum’s on fentanyl.