Oh dear lord. But for her age, marital status (and husband's contribution to IVF) and main thrust advice (have babies at 26-29, whereas mine would be early testing, freeze your eggs at 20-22), this could be me. Except I couldn't write so beautifully "overweeningly counting the months", and what an amazing life and career this woman has. My new ambition is to write like Holly Finn when I grow up.
I have updates; I just can't bring myself to write about them right now, so please read this instead. I think it's a very true picture.
What follows is a reprint of a copyrighted newspaper article, so I summarise it rather than reproducing it in full. On the page it is introduced by the bold byline Holly Finn for the WSJ, July 23, 2011, under the headline "My Fertility Crisis", whose standfirst explains that successful fertility treatments are widely talked about while the many stories without happy endings are not. The article, by Holly Finn, author of "The Baby Chase", is in three sections divided by "* * *", and the post also contains two images from it: a chart titled "The Baby Quest" (the rise of fertility treatments, with CDC figures) and a photograph of IVF drugs on a tray (Jason Madara for The Wall Street Journal), plus a day-by-day table headed "The Protocol".
The article in brief: Finn writes that only people who come out of IVF with a baby speak up about it; those it has failed are too crushed to talk, and people in the middle of treatment are unheard too. She sets out her own history — a first IVF workup in November 2008; in 2009 a laparoscopy, two egg retrievals and a cancelled cycle; in 2010 three retrievals, two embryo transfers and a hysteroscopy; in 2011 two retrievals and a transfer to come — eight times under general anaesthesia in two and a half years. She describes giving herself the daily injections at the same time each day, furtively, in her office, restaurants and her car, and notes that as a single woman in her early 40s her chances are conspicuously slim — 6% to 10% for a woman her age according to the American Pregnancy Association, falling with every failed attempt.
She gives the wider numbers: infertility affects about 12% of the reproductive-age population in the United States — 7.3 million women and their partners, or one in seven or eight couples — with a third of cases male-related, a third female-related and a third both or unexplained; a healthy woman's monthly chance of conceiving naturally is 20% to 25% in her 20s, 10% to 15% in her 30s and 5% in her 40s; some four million babies have been born through IVF since 1978, against an overall IVF success rate of around 30%. Private fertility medicine, she writes, is fiercely competitive; she chose her clinic partly for its advertised 55% pregnancy rate, though its overall rate was lower, and her doctor is among the best — but even the best clinics are limited by the age of the eggs. Egg freezing, successful only about 10% of the time a few years earlier and about 80% now, and egg donation have, in her words, revolutionised the field, but cannot solve everything.
She turns to her own guilt: an endometriosis diagnosis, the wrong men, smoking in her 20s, red wine, milk chocolate — and a "guilty glitch": taking the morning-after pill in 1999, which she never told her doctor, torn between feeling she had done nothing wrong and that she had done the right thing at the time. She describes choosing a donor from a cryobank, looking for "soul mates" and settling on a donor, and her doctor telling her she would need IVF to have even a shot at motherhood; a new man she was seeing then said he would like to be involved.
The middle sections cover attitudes to infertility — still in the "Dark Ages" compared with other conditions, which attract sympathy — a dinner-party acquaintance calling her "a baby machine", keeping quiet about treatment at work and revealing only that she was on hormones, the online communities where infertile people gather, the careless remarks of fertile people, the quantifying of progress, well-meant suggestions to adopt, and the feeling of being "less human". She also covers the counting and scheduling of treatment, the 2006 CDC figures, the risk of abnormal gene expression in IVF children and health risks to women from the hormones, her advice to women aged 26 to 34 to start having babies, and the conventional thinking that waits on a husband.
Towards the end she writes about her first ultrasound photograph and the longing in it, a failed procedure in which only two eggs were retrieved and her doctor said time was running out, her doctor asking whether a sane person would bother trying again, and donor eggs, whose first-transfer success rate she puts at 80%. She reflects on what makes a child one's own — spirit, not just genes — on her mother's thumbs, on the "nevers" of her 40s, and on a cream cashmere sweater she bought for a baby and still keeps. The post closes with the author's bio, noting that Ms Finn is communications director for the Skoll Foundation, which supports social entrepreneurs, and links to [Byliner.com] and an Amazon Kindle Single of the piece.
"The Protocol" table summarised: her IVF protocol runs over 54 days, with day-by-day drugs including Doxycycline, Estrace, Cetrotide, Menopur, Gonal-F, Clomid, Dexamethasone, Pregnyl, Medrol, Tetracycline, Endometrin, Lovenox, baby aspirin and Vivelle patches; egg retrieval falls on Day 42, transfer on Day 45 and the pregnancy test on Day 54. The article text also notes the protocol involves some 30 shots, 130 pills and 30 hormone patches over eight weeks, and that she spent nearly $70,000 on fertility treatments and related expenses in the previous year.
