Perhaps it started with the fortuneteller.
Though I’d spent my 32 years steering clear of all tarot card readers and psychics — aware that whatever they prophesied would indelibly burrow itself into my mind — one happened to be holding court at an event I attended.
I maintained my usual skepticism, until my co-worker returned from her minisession in bewilderment. “That woman is amazing,” she said. “She predicted a man with dark hair would come back into my life, and one already has!”
I decided to try my luck.
The woman, festively attired and unnervingly forthcoming, invited me to take a seat as she flipped through her card deck. Her predictions seemed like predictable party tricks: She saw money and a relationship for me. “But wait,” she said, her whole face darkening. “You don’t want kids, do you?”
It felt as if my stomach dropped several feet. “Are you saying I can’t have kids?”
“Just get everything checked,” she urged.
My gynecologist insisted everything was fine. But, upon noting my sore lower abdomen, my general practitioner sent me for an ultrasound. I had a cyst in each of my ovaries. What’s more, my symptoms suggested endometriosis: a condition affecting one in 10 American women, in which the lining of your uterus grows outside of it. While the slew of specialists I enlisted told me that surgery is the only way to definitively diagnose and remove it, it’s highly likely if you have intolerable periods (read: the sit-in-a-bathtub-for-three-days episodes I’d since learned to manage with birth control) and a family history of it, which I did. Besides pain, the main complication of endometriosis is infertility.
I considered myself a perfect candidate for egg freezing, formally known as oocyte cryopreservation. Particularly when I discovered how common it was.
“How many people at this table have frozen their eggs?” one of the women at an older girlfriend’s birthday dinner asked.
Nearly every one of the 15 educated, independent women beside me raised her hand.
So when I hit age 35, after which point egg quantity and quality diminish and pregnancy is termed “geriatric” — I didn’t think twice.
I wanted to go to the exact clinic in Manhattan my friends had, to have my mother administer the twice-daily shots, and most of all, to take back some control.
The fertility doctor said I had fewer eggs left than a 35-year-old woman should. So we moved full speed ahead.
[Read more about what patients should know about egg freezing.]
Egg freezing is prohibitively expensive. The clinic I went to charged $10,000 for the procedure, $4,000 to $7,000 for the drugs (I fortunately inherited leftovers from friends), and $1,000 a year in freezing fees. The killer? Most people I knew had had to do it more than once.
For the next eight months, I became a science experiment. As I had another ovarian cyst, I had to induce ovulation and wait a month before starting the carefully timed process. Then, each day for two weeks, I sang at the top of my lungs as my mother injected shots of hormones into my abdomen — which blew up into a pouch as if I were pregnant.
Each morning, I went in for an ultrasound and hormone-monitoring blood work, during which I always looked away.
I didn’t want a baby right then, or if I never met the right partner, maybe not ever. What I wanted to freeze were my options.
After all of this effort, I had just five viable eggs (plus raging emotions, an inflated midsection, and a novel sense of inadequacy as a woman). But since egg quality matters more than quantity, we went through with the retrieval surgery — which my friends assured me was so unremarkable, they returned to work right afterward.
I awoke from this procedure in such excruciating pain I fainted. My body, from my sternum to pelvis, ached, I couldn’t urinate for an entire day, and when I returned in lingering pain and fear a few days later, an ultrasound revealed there was loose blood floating in my body that would have to reabsorb.
No one could tell me what had happened: maybe they’d hit an endometrial cyst. Maybe blood had leaked out of my ovaries. The pain eventually subsided, but my ballooned abdomen didn’t. However, since I had fewer than the targeted 10 eggs to show for it, I went back on birth control for a few months and did it again.
This second procedure went smoothly and yielded more eggs — though my lower abdomen still uncomfortably protruded (was it endometriosis? scar tissue from the mishap?), and I felt permanently bloated.
Years later, my distended abdomen has yet to return to normal. I live with a bloated feeling all the time, and I’m out a considerable sum of money — which I’m reminded of every six months, when I have to fork over some more to keep my eggs on ice. I’m not rushing to do the laparoscopy that is sometimes done to treat endometriosis, because I can manage the pain, and because I’ve come to understand how medical procedures can disrupt the delicate equilibrium of my body.
Sometimes I wish I’d never frozen my eggs — wish I hadn’t been so quick to tamper with my body, without asking any questions, researching the dangers or rates of success (the chance of one of my 36-year-old frozen eggs resulting in a baby could be anywhere from 29.7 to 60 percent).
Other times, I think of how much I still really want what the fortuneteller once outlined for me — the things she deemed probable, and those that she didn’t. I wonder, truly wonder, whether, if I could have looked into a crystal ball and seen the outcome of my egg-freezing experiment, would I still have gone through with it? I reconsider the risk.
And I’ll take it.
Jasmin Rosemberg is the author of the novel “How the Other Half Hamptons” and is working on a memoir.
