THE NARRATIVE ARC
IVF Was My Only Hope
I couldn’t have a baby the ‘natural way’
“I can give you a baby with IVF,” said the Thai surgeon-doctor. His language made me cringe — but I felt a wave of hope.
The week before, he performed a surgery to remove an ectopic pregnancy from my body. Ectopic means in an abnormal place.
I met that baby once and only once, when an ultrasound revealed my child implanted in my remaining fallopian tube. Crying until I could scarcely breathe, I begged the ultrasound tech, “Wait, let me look, let me look.”
The tech was heartbroken for me, I could tell. In Bangkok, the medical workers didn’t show emotion, but she had tears in her eyes. I was crying hard, so hard I worried about rupturing the untenable pregnancy.
An ectopic pregnancy is the leading cause of first-trimester deaths for women. I was in danger. It was my second ectopic pregnancy. I knew the drill; I’d been through this before. Total heartbreak. I was crushed.
On the ultrasound screen, my baby’s heart was strong. It ticked like a stopwatch. She was a girl. I felt that like a jolt of electricity. Her name was Annika, or would have been.
At that point, I’d lived in Cambodia for six years. My husband Ken and I backpacked…
