A Woman of Advanced Maternal Age
Posted By Daisy on July 13, 2010
Despite being 35 when I remarried — and knowing what that meant in terms of natural pregnancy odds — the storyteller that lives in my head was convinced we’d have a honeymoon baby, conceived while listening to the serene waves from the beaches of Phuket. Two days of food poisoning didn’t exactly help the cause, but there was more than that in our way. After the honeymoon and six more months of trying, we decided to get fertility screening. Results? Nothing in particular seemed wrong. My FSH level was maybe a little borderline, but still within the realm of fertile. My husbands’ “boys” seemed fine. Some docs encouraged us to keep trying naturally, as it can take up to a year even for couples with no fertility problems. Given my age, I was not willing to wait so long and so we began exploring our alternatives. (Our fertility clinic was more than happy to oblige — much more so than our insurance.)
We started with Clomid, a fascinating drug that increases a woman’s ovulation but has the ironic side effect of sometimes KILLING SPERM. We stepped it up to IUI. Umpteen times. No luck. As we discussed our alternatives, including adoption and childlessness, the bar kept moving with respect to the forms of advanced reproductive technology we were willing to try. I think that acceptance of technology happens subtly as one becomes steeped in medical lingo and acronymns. Each new steps seems small and incremental. We’re also in a geography where a great many couples face fertility issues, a fact I didn’t fully realize until I became comfortable revealing the trouble we were having. Suddenly it seemed every child I knew had been born via IVF. It wad a relief to learn I could talk very freely about what we were confronting, and get advice from those that had been through it.
The trickiest part of the whole process was negotiating my life at a law firm during all this, because when you are going through fertility treatments you are at the doctor’s office ALL THE DAMN TIME. Most fertility centers these days know that this is an issue hopeful mothers-to-be struggle with, so early morning appointments are often available. For many months I was getting blood drawn or an ultrasound performed multiple times a week at 7am before heading into the office as though nothing were going on. Scheduling the actual IVF procedures was trickier. You can’t really map that out in advance between corporate closings. You harvest those eggs when your body is ready, and same goes for implantation. I had to cancel business travel for a mysterious “no big deal outpatient medical procedure that just came up.” Looking back, I can’t believe I wasted so much energy worrying about what clients and colleagues might think.
When it finally came time to harvest, I had three eggs. Three. I knew the goal was ten to fifteen to ensure at least a few were viable. They told me “three” as I was coming out of anesthesia. I burst into tears. Friends afterward assured me “it only takes one.” We took no chances and used ICSI to fertilize the eggs. (That’s a process for injecting sperm directly into an egg rather than letting them all swim about together in a petri dish and assume they’ll find each other.) After growing the fertilized eggs in a dish for several days it appeared two were robust enough for implantation. We wouldn’t have wanted to implant more anyway. Five days later we got the news: I was pregnant. The numbers were even through the roof. (Turns out this was because both blastocysts took — I had what’s known as a “vanishing twin”, a second embryo that did not survive past a couple of weeks.)
Thus was my journey from undiagnosed infertility to pregnant. While it might have been nice to point to some clear reason we were unable to get pregnant short of IVF, I have to content myself with the vague explanation that I am a Woman of Advanced Maternal Age. A funny term. It’s trying too hard to be polite, and feels like it comes with a not-so-subtle wink and maybe a smirk, the same way we sometimes use “ladies of a certain age” when we really mean “old as dirt.” No matter — I was on my way to having a baby.
No related posts.
[...] proud. I am going to toss two out there, for very different reasons. I liked this one: A Woman of Advanced Maternal Age — because it was a raw and honest post that needed a raw and honest title. But I also [...]