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Friday, March 25, 2005
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I'm getting a crash course in high-tech babymaking.
Before last December, acronyms and abbreviations like IVF and DE, down-reg and stim, RE and ART and ICSI were simply not part of my vocabulary. The boy and I had just barely started trying to get pregnant and we assumed, like most folks assume, that it would happen the way they told you way back when you first asked as a kid. We pictured lots of good old private us time (wink wink nudge nudge); I vowed I wouldn't be one of those people who tells everyone in the world they're trying to get pregnant. The boy teases that I like to maintain this illusion of perfection, make it look like I get everything just right with no effort at all, and in a way, I suppose he's right. But mostly, I thought that making a baby was going to be this great joyous miracle that I could hoard all for me and the boy.
This, as it turns out, is exactly the opposite of how it will actually be, if we should be so lucky as to have things work out at all. Instead, I'm discovering that this wonderful intimate bonding experience that I'd always imagined is going to be a big complicated semi-public thing. There'll be drugs and needles and hospitals. There'll be doctors and nurses, lawyers and another woman. There'll be money, lots of money, so much money that it makes me feel faint just thinking about how large those numbers I've been quoted really are. Strangers and science and great heaping piles of cash, with me and the boy and all our love just a tiny part of a very complicated equation.
I know I'm lucky, to live in an age where I might still be able to have a baby, ovarylessness and all. And I know there are couples who try for years to get pregnant the old-fashioned way, with no good reason for why it hasn't worked, and how heartbreaking that can be , trying to decide if and when it's time to move on to plan B. The boy and I, we can skip all that waiting and wondering; we can accept that it's IVF and donor eggs or nothing; we can proceed directly to go. And as hard as the going will be, at least I know: we're doing what we have to do, to get the family we want.
And so: it begins. Bring on the acronyms.
# posted by y @ 11:47 AM
