Exhale

When I heard that this issue of Exhale was being devoted to “levity,” I laughed. Not a little laugh (barely distinguishable from a small puff of air), not a series of giggles, not a chortle, not a chuckle. I laughed: an all-out, that-is-the-most-ridiculous-thing-I-can-imagine laugh that ended with a swipe of my hand across my teary eyes.

Pregnancy loss is not funny. Fertility treatment is not funny. I just had another miscarriage and a completely botched attempt at IVF. I am not writing “Life is Beautiful: The Infertility Edition.” The end. Column done.

Of course, I couldn’t let it go. I went back to the clinic. Another round of blood tests, ultrasounds, and more injections than I care to count. And as I drove back and forth to the clinic, 45 miles each way, I kept mulling over the question of levity. Is there anything funny about fertility treatment? What is the place of humor in fertility treatment and pregnancy loss?

Even at the lowest, most-self-pitying moments, I have to concede there have been small pockets of levity along my journey. Comic relief, like the gag reels from serious films, when the actors spray each other with water guns to let off some proverbial steam.

Take for example, the story of Dr. Probe (name changed to protect the guilty), who held up the frighteningly phallic transducer and slapped a condom on it just prior to my very first transvaginal ultrasound, way back when I was trying to conceive my first child. I lay back on the exam table, knees knocked together and covered by one of those pink paper sheets used for such occasions. I was a virgin; he was my new husband. When we were done, there would be blood on the sheet. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I know it’s big but only part of it goes in.” I bit my lip so I didn’t snort. Maybe it’s only funny if you’ve been there, but I suspect the penis size joke translates well.

I remember laughing as I sat on the hospital bed before my D&C. The friend who drove me was telling a story I can’t recall now, but gosh was it nice not to be thinking about the non-viable embryo about to be ripped from my uterus. I laughed again a few hours later after the procedure, when my legs gave way under me in the bathroom. I was a Raggedy Ann doll in a hospital gown. Then my friend took me home, warmed up a can of soup, and gave me a hug. After she left, I cried big, gasping sobs that lasted about two weeks straight. Then I moved on to bitter and morose.

It was a long and literally bloody year. I bought my favorite nurse a garden gnome for some reason I’ve long since forgotten, but she made that year of treatment and despair as light and easy as it could possibly be. She named him Ned (or perhaps I did), but anyway I was pregnant with my daughter by the end of the month.

The second clinic I went to used a timer with a cartoon picture of a sperm on it to count the minutes I had to lay with my legs raised after a procedure. They hung butterfly mobiles over exam tables and handed out key chains with images of fertility gods for good luck. That, I thought, was hilarious. And wonderfully naïve. I left them after four cycles. Superstition doesn’t get an infertile pregnant.

It was also pretty funny when the fire alarm went off at my current doctor’s office—I was still sitting on the exam table, chatting with the ultrasound technician—and I had to throw on some clothes and find my shoes and scurry outside with the staff. I was the only patient there, and it was a nice moment of bonding—but only because it was a false alarm. Before that, there was a terrifying moment when I wondered how long a cryotank filled with sperm samples could survive in a building fire. The nurse told me that had to mean good luck. She was wrong. Two weeks later I was starting birth control in preparation for IVF.

It was funny when my lovely doctor came in to do my insemination and hadn’t brought in the vial of thawed sperm. She looked on the rolling cart lined with instruments, beside the sink, next to my chart (all four inches of it, bound together with a rubber band). She smiled, a small embarrassed smile, when I said, “I don’t think you brought it in,” and quickly returned to the lab. Maybe funny isn’t the right word; maybe it just lightened the mood.

And that’s all that levity can ever do in the end. This process is so awful, it’s those moments of comic relief that I want to hold on to like a life raft. I want to be laughing when the anesthesiologist puts me under for IVF Take 2. I want to be laughing when I wake up, when my doctor tells me the eggs are beautiful and numerous. And I want to be laughing when, finally, there are two lines on the test stick; when, finally, the nurse calls to congratulate me on a positive blood test; when, finally, I hold a new baby in my arms.