Avalanche by Julia Leigh

Injecting needles each night at 10 p.m. was unsexy; being bloated and hormonally loaded was unsexy; the white goop of progesterone pessaries during the two-week wait was unsexy; explaining I was doing IVF by myself was unsexy; I was unsexy. And recalibrating my fine chemical equilibrium was unnerving. Why invite a bull into the china shop? I’d even say a part of me didn’t want to bodily introduce any sperm other than my donor’s. Foolish. Minimizing. While doing IVF I allowed the world to become a smaller place.
    Ways of having approximate sex: feel the heat of a stranger on public transport during peak hour; finger thedowny peaches in the fruit store; call out “Coming!” to the man who brings home delivery to the door.
    The baby was born. I attended the birth. Everyone cried with joy. I held the tiny newborn in my arms and smelled her.
    How to be an object of pity? My sister has a great answer to this one. “Most people think only about themselves, they don’t really care.” Other people’s pity is flimsy. Harmless. If it even exists, it passes. Other people’s compassion is a boon. So it’s self-pity that’s the killer.
    When I went to the counselor at the clinic she drew me a picture. “This is the grief,” she said, marking the page with an elongated black hole. “The divorce grief, the infertility grief.” She explained that when we were triggered by an event—it could be anything—we returned to the grief. She marked a dot near the black hole and drew a loop between them. She drew lots of dots, lots of small concentric loops. “And then, over time, we find we have fewer triggers.” She marked a dot at a greater distance from the black hole, drew a bigger loop. More dots, four bigger loops containing all the other loops.“See—it’s a butterfly.” I just nodded. I wanted to take a pin and stick it between my eyes. Pinned and wriggling on the wall .
    February 2014. Eight eggs were harvested on my third collection. Five of those were mature and were injected with sperm. The lab assistants called on schedule with their morbid countdown. Please, please develop. You can do it! I was an embryo cheerleader. I filled those Petri dishes with love. On Day 5, the morning of my transfer, I learned that this time I only had a morula to transfer, not a blastocyst. I’d never heard of a morula before—essentially it is an embryo less developed than a blastocyst but still worth transferring. When I asked the doctor about the difference she said that the pregnancy rate for a morula was 25 percent compared to 40 percent for a blastocyst. My heart fell. Whatever eyes-wide wonder I’d had when first doing a transfer had dissipated and now Charlie’s chocolate factory was a factory plain and simple. Efficacious. I didn’t enjoy my acupuncture—all those pinpricks—and wondered whether it was worth pursuing. I still had hope the transfer would be successful, I still conducted my inner conversations with the embryo, but my hope wasn’t as intense as it had been before. I slept a lot. Snow fell in thenight. I paid visits to my sister and the new baby. One day I was wearing a wraparound dress that she said looked handy for breastfeeding so we did a costume change. She lent me a loose blue dress she had worn up until the birth. “If I wear this dress,” I joked, “maybe it will rub off and I’ll get pregnant.” I waited and waited. Come Day 28 there was no sign of bleeding. That shy little hope grew and grew. How kind the nurse was when she took my blood. I held my breath all day waiting for the call. “I’m sorry, it’s negative.” I told the nurse I was too wrung out to go straight into another cycle. Wept on the floor.
    I had my annual conversation with a woman (mother of two) who was once a close friend. “What’s next for you? Forget about babies,” said the friend.