Trying and failing to freeze embryos is a thing I’ve been doing as of late. I’m 2 cycles completed, 29 eggs retrieved, and 0 viable embryos. It turns out egg count can be an extremely poor indicator of IVF success. My third and final cycle is next month. Final because that’s what health insurance has agreed to cover. So, last chance for me to not worry about delaying having a kid for another couple of years. I’d really love that for my husband and me, particularly because at the moment, we are happily occupied with friends, community, hobbies, travel, love, equanimity. But where will our heads be in a year or two?

On one hand, I don’t like regrets; I have very few. On the other, I fucking hate living in fear. My worst decisions, my most shameful moments, have been motivated by panic, doubt, and worry. I will not to alter my life before I’m ready simply because time might be running out. Of course, with this mindset comes the chance of actually being out of time, which I’m quite cognizant of. But I don’t have it in me to act on my insecurities. I want to want to have a kid, and that hasn’t happened yet.

Eugène Delacroix, *Women of Algiers in their Apartment*, 1834

And that’s why I’ve let science take the wheel, allowing teams of highly capable, kind, and talented physicians to play god with my waning cache of eggs. With it comes with round-the-clock poking, prodding, measuring, and injecting, along with early-ass morning doctor appointments and blasphemous amounts of pain, discomfort, and confinement as both ovaries swell to two to three times their fucking normal size before being removed transvaginally with a needle that’s upwards of a foot long. All this misery and no guaranteed outcome. Drives me to the brink.

There’s a wonderfully melodramatic Fuseli painting called The Nightmare that perfectly illustrates my feelings on this topic. It’s a piece I first learned about in college. Since then, for the past two decades I’ve made it a point to visit museums all over the world to enjoy many of the artworks I studied as a student in person. So during a visit to Detroit this past Memorial Day weekend, I made a trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum to check out The Nightmare, which has been a part of DIA’s collection since the 1960s.

A quick word on the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum. It’s a fucking gem of a museum with a massive, significant collection. Established in 1885, both the collection and building itself are on par with the likes of the Met in New York City and National Gallery in London. Where DIA shines brightest, though, eclipsing its stodgy contemporaries, is in its curation, which is exceptional—fresh, lively, and relevant. Pure Michigan. I cannot recommend paying a visit to DIA enough.

Anyhow, The Nightmare. Henry Fuseli. Failed eggs, failed embryos, failed body. Stress, pain, struggle, needles. Looking at the painting, yes, that is me draped over the bed after my nightly subcutaneous injections, woozy from mustering the courage required to administer my various ovulation stimulation medicines at the right time and temperature, knowing I have to be up at 6am to make it to the doctor’s office by 7:30am so the highly capable, kind, and talented physicians playing god can draw blood again, stick a wand up my vagina again.

Sitting atop my sprawling unconscious woe-is-me recumbency, what appears to be a rather unsightly-looking incubus is in fact my ovaries personified—swollen, heavy, demonic. And emerging from the folds of the curtain is the painting’s namesake, the mare. Its sinister head poking through like the droves of needles piercing my abdominal flesh, precisely 2-3 fingers from my belly button on the left and right-hand sides.

It’s all so stupid. I know in my heart of hearts that trying to freeze embryos isn’t a waste of time or money; it only feels that way because it hasn’t worked, because of bad luck, because of poor egg or sperm quality or who knows what else that there’s little to no control over. Science can only command the body so much before ceding to genetics. At least I'll have tried. At least I’ll be able to look back on this moment, and know that I did what I could while staying true to myself. No regrets in the here and now.

On Regret, Needles, & Nightmares

Bleedin’ Christ