Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
As Dr. Alsarraj invited Iris into his elegant office overlooking a leafy cross street between Fifth and Madison, it was clear she had entered the privileged world of elective healthcare.
Family Tree Fertility was located in a posh Upper East Side building, and his spacious private office had built-in bookshelves with leather-bound volumes bookended by crystal professional awards.
Iris took a seat in one of two matching wing chairs that faced the doctor’s imposing mahogany desk.
Dr. Alsarraj was in his fifties, fit, with thick, dark, wavy hair—“like Omar Sharif,” Iris could hear her late grandmother say.
He wore a silk tie with a gold tie clip, and as he navigated with his computer mouse, Iris noticed enameled cufflinks peeking from under his white coat sleeve.
Behind him hung his framed degrees from Yale College and Columbia Medical School, and a Certificate of Excellence for the practice.
Everything about this process made her anxious, but Iris reassured herself that this was out-of-network money well spent.
Dr. Alsarraj was saying, “So we’re on track to begin your egg retrieval cycle next week.
From there, the entire process will take about two weeks: twelve days of injections for ovarian stimulation, then a special one called a trigger shot, and forty-eight hours later, a short outpatient procedure to retrieve the mature eggs.
During those weeks, you’ll visit us for frequent monitoring appointments, which will include ultrasounds, blood tests, or both.
This way I’ll keep a close eye that everything is moving along as it should and tailor your medication levels exactly to your needs. ”
“I’m a little nervous about doing the injections myself.”
“It’s very straightforward. Nurse Dani will walk you through exactly how to do it.
Side effects of the hormones and ovarian stimulation are minor but worsen toward the end of the cycle.
Bruising at injection site, cramping, bloating, mood swings, think PMS on steroids.
Normally, an ovary is the size of a walnut, but as we’re turbocharging ovulation to make them overproduce, each ovary will eventually swell to the size of an orange. Hence the bloating and tenderness.”
Iris reflexively crossed her arms over her body, imagining her internal organs more than quadrupling in size.
Dr. Alsarraj continued, “So my general advice is to be gentle with yourself. Avoid high impact sports or activities, because if you incur trauma to the abdomen, there’s an increased risk of a ruptured follicle or ovarian torsion, which is extremely painful.
These complications are rare, but we want everything to go smoothly so you have a great result. Any questions?”
Iris had almost lost her nerve to ask. “If I’m seeing someone, what’s your advice on…intimacy?”
“Meaning, penetrative intercourse with a male partner?” Dr. Alsarraj bluntly clarified. “When I was a resident, my attending used to tell his patients, ‘Don’t do anything that bounces your ponytail!’?” He chuckled.
Iris recoiled.
“That hasn’t aged well, has it? But you get the idea, nothing too strenuous.
Sex is safe early in the cycle, provided you use a condom—the hormone therapy will control the release of your eggs, but during ovulation, there’s a danger of ectopic pregnancy.
I do recommend abstaining in the last few days before retrieval to guard against torsion, but I doubt you’ll be in the mood at that point. ”
Iris nodded. So maybe she could get away with keeping this to herself.
“And you will need pelvic rest for five days after your retrieval. So tell your guy to get it out of his system now and in the first half of your cycle. After that, easy, tiger.”
Iris smiled politely and opted not to clarify that she was the tiger.
She thanked him and he said she could schedule her next appointment on the way out. Iris had just reached the door when Dr. Alsarraj stopped her:
“One more thing, I was reviewing your intake questionnaire, and I see you’ve checked one prior pregnancy three years ago, but you didn’t indicate its result—live birth, still birth, miscarriage, or abortion.”
“It was very brief. Maybe it doesn’t even count.”
“Would you be comfortable sharing the details with me? It could be relevant history.”
Iris forced a shrug. “I was a few weeks late, had one positive home test, and then a few days later, bleeding. Nothing, really.”
“I see. And you’re right, nothing to worry about. Even in perfectly healthy women, early miscarriage is very common.”
Her heart winced. “I thought it might’ve been a false positive.”
“In any case, it won’t affect our course of treatment.”
—
Iris hadn’t worn the perfume to the appointment, so she descended into the subway station at Sixty-eighth and Lex and boarded the downtown 6 train, average and invisible.
The shushing and rocking of the subway car lulled her as the memory returned. Ben had just moved into her apartment, half his things still in boxes as they tried to jigsaw two lives into one. And she found herself on the toilet, holding a positive pregnancy test, and her first thought was, Fuck.
Then, I shouldn’t have taken this test, as if unknowing it could undo it. But it didn’t make any sense, she was on the pill, and she was only a week late on her period. It was overkill to buy the pregnancy test at all, she bought it on impulse, on a whim.
Or intuition?
And now it read positive.
How would she tell Ben? She didn’t want him to feel tricked or trapped. It was an accident. It was a fluke.
Or a miracle?
She remembered standing at the edge of the living room looking at Ben on the couch, separated by boxes of his unpacked belongings like cardboard ice floes.
He had his hat on backward, tufts of his brown bangs sprouting out the front as he bent over his phone.
He looked more like a teenage boy than a dad.
“Ben?” Her heart pounded with nerves.
“Yeah.” His head stayed down, and his thumbs tapped furiously like the phone was a Gameboy. “Sorry, this partner doesn’t understand the concept of a weekend.” The whoosh sound of a sent email coincided with his sigh, and finally, Ben looked up. “What’s up?”
Iris couldn’t find the words, so she just said, “Look.”
His jaw dropped when he read it. “ Fuck . Sorry, that’s not what I meant. Let me start over, catch me up. Can this be real? I thought you were on the pill or something.”
She stammered, “I was, I mean I am. But I ran out of refills last month, and it was the weekend, so my doctor’s office was closed and so I couldn’t renew the prescription right away, I only missed a couple days, that’s happened before and it was always fine…”
He put a hand on her shoulder as much to calm her as to lean on her for balance. His exhale puffed out his cheeks. “This is a lot.”
“For me, too.”
“You! Yes, God, even more for you, you’re—” another puff of breath, “Whoo, damn!” He took off his hat and raked his hands through his hair. “Shit, I never swear this much. Why can’t I stop swearing? Fuck me.” He laughed. “I mean, what the hell? This is great, right?”
“Is it?” She often looked to Ben first, his emotions were so much easier to read than her own.
“Of course it is! Holy shit, we’re having a baby! I love you—c’mere!” He pulled her into him and hugged her tight. “That’s why they call it a love child. It’s our looove child.” He said it in a silly voice. “We’re having a loo-oove child.”
Pressed against his chest, Iris thought maybe it was a good thing.
Ben surprised her by instantly embracing this turn of events.
Right then, he finished his unpacking, newly energized to nest. And he was more doting, more affectionate, more lustful.
It was as if he became infatuated with Iris all over again, and she felt herself blossom under the attention.
His positivity was infectious, and Iris quickly adopted the new narrative, that this accidental pregnancy was just proof of the kismet quality of their union, messy and down-to-earth, yet written in the stars.
This was the story they’d tell their child one day: that even if his or her arrival wasn’t planned, it was ordained.
That night they made love and stayed up talking, wrapped up in each other on top of the bedsheets. Ben was marveling at her body, which was completely unchanged from the outside. “I can’t believe my mom doesn’t know.”
“I know.” Iris couldn’t believe her mother didn’t know either.
The next night, the same amorous routine, and Iris felt like everything in her life had fallen into place at once. Until Ben’s pillow talk upped the ante.
“We should elope!”
“Elope? Your mom would kill us.”
“She’d kill me . She might actually stop liking you so damn much, which would be nice. I miss being Mom’s favorite. But she’d forgive us when she saw the baby.” He met her incredulous mouth with a kiss.
“She’d forgive you. No, when we get married, we’ll do it right, with family and all our friends there.”
“Why bother? We can’t do it in a church now anyway.”
Iris playfully shoved him, and he caught her and pulled her onto his chest.
“What if we got married at the courthouse this weekend? Surprise everyone!”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do! See? I just said I do, by accident! Let’s go tomorrow!”
She grinned but eyed him warily. “I don’t think you can just walk up and do it, it’s not Vegas. We have to get a license, and I think a blood test or something.”
“All right, let’s get a blood test and then get married! Why are you finding reasons to say no, when we have such a good reason to say yes?”
“I just don’t want an unplanned pregnancy to be the reason we get married. I want you to have thought it through.”
“I’m a guy, this is not the first time this scenario has crossed my mind, and since I was young, I always knew I would do the right thing.”
“?‘Do the right thing?’ Ben, I don’t want you to do it out of your Eagle Scout sense of duty. I want us to choose each other.”
“We haven’t chosen each other?”
“Of course we have. Look, the pregnancy is a big enough thing to process. I just don’t want you to do something impulsive that you’ll regret.”
“I’ll regret, or you will?”
—
The next morning, things were tense between them.
Iris hadn’t slept, she had stayed awake thinking of how she might have phrased her words differently.
Ben went to the gym in the morning, and she gave him space to reset his mood.
The more Iris thought about it, the more she softened her position.
She decided that if he brought it up again, she might say yes.
But he didn’t.
And on Monday, she started to bleed.
Iris remembered how she phrased it to Ben when he came home from work: “It turns out I’m not pregnant, I guess.” She couldn’t bring herself to add another loss to her tally, even if it felt like one.
“Are you okay?” Ben searched her face.
She nodded, but the tears came. He dropped his bag and hugged her, holding her for a long while, letting her cry.
“Good thing we didn’t tell anyone yet.”
Iris nodded dolefully. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for!” He squeezed her. “It wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place. You were right. We were getting ahead of ourselves.”
“I don’t know why I’m so sad.”
“Don’t be. We’ll do it right someday, all planned out like you like.”
—
Iris, the planner, had planned herself right into being alone.
She had thought back often to that day since they broke up.
At the time, she reassured herself that it wasn’t the right order of things, and she wanted everything to be perfect to set them up for success and happiness.
But in retrospect, she saw how she might have burst his bubble.
Her reticence read to him as rejection. She didn’t tell him she was scared, she told him he was silly.
And in that misunderstanding, she had squandered their chance at forever.
Iris wished she had explained to Ben that she needed more reassurance that he wanted to marry her without the pregnancy, not only because of it.
That he would love her in a way that was solid, with a foundation that would last, that the family they were building together would be strong enough to withstand the anxiety, fear, and loneliness that had hounded her since childhood.
If she had been as impulsive as he, as free with her words and her love and her trust, would they be happily married today?
Maybe the leap of faith would’ve saved the pregnancy, signaled to the universe that they were all in—as if Nature cared.
Maybe they’d have tried again and had one or two children thereafter.
Would she have gotten the home and family she wanted?
Or would she have called his bluff? Said yes that night only for him to get cold feet on the colder steps of the courthouse, just like he did last winter?
Or would they be unhappily married, as she’d feared?
And she’d be wedded but unloved, stuck with his resentment and second-guessing.
Who’s to say he wouldn’t have stopped “feeling it” after she was saddled with his kid?
No, Iris couldn’t have counted on Ben to build a family with. He was still the man who changed his mind about her.
She never made up hers.
The subway car screeched to a halt, and Iris peered out the dirty window to find she had missed her stop.