top two tests are mine. I made Brian pee on the bottom one as a control.)
“Nomi thinks she’s pregnant again, but she can’t decide if it’s a second line or a pee line,” Elisabeth said.
She showed Andrew the picture.
“What’s a pee line?” he replied.
Elisabeth felt actual excitement upon taking her last birth control pill. An unfamiliar calm settled over her. For the first time, nothing could penetrate. It wasn’t just about her anymore. She felt like she was rolled in layers of tissue paper and Bubble Wrap. A precious and fragile object.
Her first miscarriage was upsetting, but she knew lots of people who’d had one. The second made her scared to try again, for fear that another loss might destroy her. After the third, Elisabeth’s OB suggested testing, which revealed chromosomal issues. She referred them to an endocrinologist on the Upper East Side.
There was usually a two-month wait to see him, but his secretary said Elisabeth was in luck—she called on a Wednesday, and he’d had a cancellation for that Friday.
“We are so lucky,” she kept telling Andrew.
What you consider luck can change fast, she thought.
The doctor said if they did IVF, they could test the embryos, only put in the healthy ones.
“You’re thirty-five, not twenty-five,” he reminded her three times in ten minutes, as if she might have forgotten.
Even though it was a consultation, Elisabeth was swept into a room for an ultrasound immediately after he finished his sales pitch.
“Are we doing this?” she asked Andrew. “Should I be having an ultrasound?”
A few minutes later, she was having it.
“Your uterine lining is thin,” the doctor said, moving the wand around inside her. “Your lining is the Holiday Inn, okay? I am looking for the Four Seasons. Don’t worry, we can thicken it.”
He started naming things, like items on a grocery list. Progesterone injections. Viagra suppositories.
She and Andrew both had blood work, sitting in two cubicles, facing each other. The worst date they’d ever been on. Afterward, they went for beers at an Irish bar across from the hospital. She wondered how many dire conversations had played out between those walls.
She had dinner with Nomi that night, at a Thai place on Smith Street.
Elisabeth had the folder the doctor had given her tucked beneath one arm. She put it on the table between them.
Nomi ordered the drunken noodles with extra tofu. She was eight weeks pregnant, a vegetarian, trying to get as much protein as possible.
When Elisabeth opened the folder, and said she was sorry to burden her with it, Nomi said, “Bad news isn’t catching.”
Because she was such a good friend, Nomi asked how Elisabeth felt about her being pregnant. Elisabeth told her she never wanted to be that person, jealous of her friends. But she was jealous—of Nomi, of their friend Lauren, who just had her third healthy child by accident and without incident.
At home, she went deep with the online searches to find out what IVF would entail. The doctor had told them already, but Elisabeth wanted to see it written out, all in one place. You will be injected with four different kinds of hormones a day, you will have blood work and a transvaginal ultrasound every day or two, and after two weeks of this, you will be sedated and have surgery to extract your overgrown eggs. Meanwhile, in another room, your husband will ejaculate into a cup.
This seemed to sum up everything there was to the problem of woman versus man.
In the middle of the night, she googled.
Does IVF cause cancer? Possibly. Maybe. What doesn’t?
She grew obsessed with the idea that children born through IVF looked abnormal. She emailed herself images of babies, success stories from various fertility sites. In the morning, she showed them to Andrew and asked, “Do these look like real kids to you?”
Once, she googled “Do IVF babies—” and the search results autofilled the rest with have a soul?, which sent her down a Catholic fertility message board rabbit hole.
A woman on another board said if you tried IVF six times, statistically speaking, you would most likely succeed. Elisabeth thought if she had to try six times, she would run away. She’d go off the grid, become a hermit.
But then, you never knew. Before all this, she hadn’t understood IVF, period, those people so hungry to make a child in their own image. Why wouldn’t they adopt? she had said. We would adopt if it ever came to that.
She confessed her message board addiction to friends over drinks.