No Spring Chicken
Previous post: Laying the Groundwork
The egg jokes are only gonna keep getting worse, folks. Sorry not sorry.
As I’ve talked to more and more people about this process, I’ve realized that I’ve been assuming a lot of knowledge in these posts that in some cases I, myself, did not even have until maybe a few months ago.
So. Let’s back up and do a quick anatomy lesson.
So you start out with all the eggs you’ll ever have — like, millions of eggs — but a whole bunch of them die off by the time you’re even born. The vast majority of the rest will also never get the chance to turn into babies, instead continuing to die off at what strikes me as a somewhat unsettling rate over the next 50 years or so. It’s basically a horror show in there.
Things that apparently do not delay the slaughter: late-onset puberty, a decade on the pill, or one’s own premature birth. Don’t worry, I asked.
Anyway, each month the female body releases one egg (occasionally two, or more, which is where fraternal twins come from), while, again, a bunch more just casually kick the bucket. You continue releasing one a month until menopause, but over time, the quality of those eggs decreases, leading to increased difficulty getting and staying pregnant, as well as higher rates of (sometimes fatal) chromosomal abnormalities. The sharpest drop-off in egg quality begins around age 35.
People who are having trouble conceiving, especially if they’re older, will often turn to in-vitro fertilization (IVF). In that process, hormone injections are administered to stimulate the ovaries to release many eggs at once. The maximum number of eggs in one cycle varies from person to person, but ideally you could get 15 or 20.
After about a week and a half of hormones, the eggs are surgically removed, and a few are selected to be fertilized and then re-introduced into the uterus, with the hopes that at least one will survive. (This is another way you can end up with fraternal twins, if not quintuplets.)
What I’m about to embark upon is essentially Part 1 of IVF. The only difference is that instead of fertilizing the eggs now, they’ll be frozen until I’m ready to use them, at which point they’ll be thawed for Part 2. This way, even if I’m 40, the eggs will be 33. And the age of the egg is what matters.
I may not even need to use them. Plenty of people do get pregnant the old-fashioned way, even later on. But this way, I’ll have them. It’s essentially an insurance policy.
So, over the course of the next couple of weeks (starting tomorrow), approximately what will happen is:
Every two to three days, I’ll go in for bloodwork at the ass-crack of dawn. (Okay, okay, I have to be there by 8:30. But still. If I wanted to get up early, I’d already have kids.) It has to be that early because they need to be able to get my results back the same day, so they can tell me what dosage of hormones to inject myself with that night. And the next morning. And the next night. Etc. (Oh right, have I mentioned that it turns out the self injections are twice a day? The hits just keep on coming.)
All those extra eggs will cause my ovaries to grow to the size of what I envision being a grapefruit but is probably actually, you know, a clementine or something. Whatever. It seems large. I expect it will also make my back hurt, because everything makes my back hurt.
I’m not allowed to exercise, because I could “twist an ovary,” which sounds totally chill. So this is the part where I complain about not exercising to cover for the fact that I’m secretly delighted to have an excuse to lie on the couch all day. Cool, glad we got that out of the way.
After around 8 to 12 days, the bloodwork will indicate that it’s go time. At that point I give myself a “trigger shot,” which also sounds super fun and not scary at all. Then, exactly 36 hours later (could this be at 2 a.m.? It’s unclear), I go in for the retrieval, which involves a low dose of general anesthesia that they call twilight sedation, and takes about 20 minutes.
Then I spend a couple days recovering, while they run some tests to figure out how many eggs are mature enough to be frozen (hopefully most or all of them).
After that, we’re done! Unless we have to do it again! I will also be billed $500 every six months to keep the eggs on ice until I’m ready to use them, but lucky for me, $500 is the equivalent of one week’s rent and is also approximately how much I spend every time I walk into a Duane Reade, so all in all, that part is not a huge hardship.
So that’s essentially how it all works, and how we’ve ended up here. If I left out any details you’re curious about, feel free to ask in the comments! And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
