Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-five
Iris checked the time again. She awaited the courier from King’s Pharmacy with her first batch of fertility medicine to inject.
She wiped down her dining table for the second time so the area was as clean as possible.
Based on how often a dog hair found its way into her cooking, she wasn’t confident that these were entirely sterile conditions.
Hugo sensed her uneasiness and whined for attention.
The buzzer rang, making her jump in her seat. Hugo barked. She fumbled to mute the television and rushed to answer at the intercom.
She was expecting a doggy bag of medication, what she received at the door was an entire box of supplies.
She placed the cardboard package on the table and carefully cut it open.
The first, jarring item was the special red “biohazard” trash receptacle.
She had never seen one outside a hospital, and it was unsettling to see one contaminating her dining table.
Her first thought was Is this medication dangerous to me?
Then she realized the container was to protect other people from her refuse. The biohazard was Iris.
Iris laid out the rest of the package’s contents.
There were alcohol prep pads, gauze pads, multiple syringes, multiple needle heads that required sorting—the “mixing needle” and “injection needle” had different lengths and gauges—and one “Redi-ject” syringe like an EpiPen that needed to be refrigerated.
And a small army of glass vials of clear fluid medication.
Iris took a deep breath. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but she thought it would be more prefabricated than this. This was a full-on science experiment. And all she could recall from her last meeting with Nurse Dani was her perky encouragement at the end: “It’s totally easy!”
It did not look totally easy.
She pulled up Dani’s emailed instructions and read every line aloud to herself as she went through it:
“Take four Menopur vials once daily.” Was it really four? Four seemed like a lot of medication. Or hormones. Or whatever she was about to inject into her body. It suddenly seemed bad that she didn’t know which.
“To dilute the Menopur with the saline solution…” She had to dilute them, as in, the vials weren’t already at the correct concentrations? Iris groaned. But she remembered back in high school AP bio, she had been good at titration. That was only, what? Twenty years ago .
While titrating the medication and saline solution, she chased the last drop of medication around the bottom of the vial, her needle like an anteater’s silvery tongue.
She questioned if a single missed drop would make a difference.
Then she thought about just how expensive each vial of medication was and estimated the price per drop. She kept at it until she got it.
Three more vials to go.
Hugo started chomping on his plush toy, making it squeak repeatedly.
“Hugo, please! I’m trying to focus.”
He got in one last squeak for good measure, then settled down to tear the squeaker out.
At last she had the medication mixed and sucked into syringes and the needle heads changed.
She pinched a few inches of belly below her navel, the way the nurse had shown her, and wiped the intended spot with an alcohol pad.
It smelled like hospital. She then delicately picked up the first syringe and held it over the area.
Iris didn’t think of herself as squeamish about needles, but she had never injected herself with anything, and her mind revolted at the thought of piercing her own skin.
Just count and do it. One, two, three—
The needle sank into her flesh with eerie ease, as though her skin provided no barrier at all. Had she known that the boundary between her insides and the world was so thin, she would’ve been more careful.
She depressed the syringe to release the medication, waited a second, and withdrew the needle. A moment later, the burning started. Like a bee sting, a warming, itchy pain spread underneath the skin. She fought the urge to claw at the spot.
And that was only the first injection.
New doubts and questions infiltrated her thoughts.
Would this even work? Was it safe and healthy to do?
Would she ever find someone who wanted to have a baby with her, much less a baby this way?
Would being pregnant make her love her body?
Would her body be a safe place for a child to grow? Would a baby make her feel better?
Nearly all her postpubescent life, she had taken medication to keep herself from getting pregnant, or technically, to trick her body into thinking she was already pregnant.
Now she was overdosing her body with hormones to release lots of eggs for fertilization in order to freeze them unfertilized.
She wore the perfume to trick people into finding her attractive.
She injected hormones to trick her body into being more fertile.
Could there really be no consequences to tricking nature?
Iris wondered, how much can we fool our bodies before they make fools of us?