Bringing in Finn by Sara Connell Page B

for her long, shiny, super-straight hair and sculpted calves. Her father was a skilled painter, and through her family I explored art and had my first contact with artists like Monet, Miró, and Picasso. We’d remained best
friends through high school and kept in close touch during college. We’d both taken jobs in advertising right out of college and somehow, by some generous cosmic gift, we had ended up in London at the same time. Amanda had met her now fiancé while we were all living there, and when he proposed, she had called me from their flat in North London and asked me to be her maid of honor.
    The bachelorette fell during the final two days of my stim injections, requiring me to bring the medication with me and to leave earlier than I’d originally anticipated on Sunday (to make it home in time for Bill and me to have sex). Dr. Colaum upped my dose of Follistim. She approved me for travel but encouraged me to listen to my body in terms of activity. “Be sure to take your injections at the same time as you would in Chicago, and keep the medication cold.” Follistim required constant refrigeration—so I needed to find a discreet place to store it in flight and during our hotel stay. I wondered about flying with needles, but was able to find a note on the American Airlines website informing me that as long as I could produce a prescription for my medications, I could bring them with me on the plane.
    On the Friday of the bachelorette weekend, I rubber-banded the medication, needles, and prescription labels between two ice packs and left for the airport.
    I arrived early and alerted the officials at security that I was traveling with injectable medication. The guard waved me through and didn’t even ask me to unpack the package or for a prescription. The flight boarded on time, but we sat for over an hour on the tarmac as the Follistim box grew wet with melting ice.
    Once we took off, I wrestled with whether to bother the flight attendant for ice. I walked toward the back of the plane ready to offer a heartfelt appeal, and found the flight attendant in the galley, standing in front of the beverage cart, flipping through a magazine. I’d
barely made it through the word “medication,” when she held up her hand, as if to spare me from any further explanation, removed two club sodas from the ice drawer, and laid the Follistim package with care in their place. She handed me the sodas and told me she’d put some ice in a bag for me when I deplaned.
    I was touched by the flight attendant’s kindness. My throat tightened into a knot. I began to thank her, but she waved me back toward my seat; the extra hormones may have finally started to affect me. By the time I reached my row, I was wiping tears from my face with my hand. I pretended to be looking for something in my bag, sticking my head in as far as I could to give myself a few seconds to catch my breath. When I emerged, I made a show of blowing my nose as if I had allergies, in an attempt to assure fellow passengers that they were not flying with a crazy person.
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    The bachelorette party’s gathering place was the Gansevoort Hotel in the Meatpacking district. We’d booked a suite for seven of us who were traveling in from out of town. The eight other guests, all New Yorkers, would join us for various events throughout the weekend. Pastis was a hive of activity across the street, with paparazzi staking out the front entrance. I experienced the jolt of energy I always felt in New York, but it gave way quickly to a wave of dizziness and fatigue. If I didn’t know every minute detail of my fertility status, I might have thought I was pregnant.
    I found out at the front desk that Amanda and several others had already arrived, and I made my way to the room on the fourth floor. I heard laughter coming from the room and hesitated in the hallway amid the mod carpeting and silver-framed black-and-white photographs