Every January, a bill arrives from our fertility clinic. A quiet but annual reminder of a decision we haven’t quite made yet. We’ve paid this fee each year since 2019 to keep our embryos frozen, holding them in a weird space of possibility.
I jokingly call it their “NYC rent,” which, in a small way, makes it all feel a little lighter. It feels, in some ways, like an insurance policy. But for what, exactly? I’m 40. The question of whether we’ll have another child feels both far away and immediate.
We went through so much: the surgeries, the waiting, and the hope that led to the two children we’re so fortunate to have now.
Before IVF, we spent three years trying to grow our family. I got pregnant three times, and lost all three pregnancies. All unexplained. After the third loss, I wasn’t willing to keep trying naturally and hope for a different outcome. I knew we needed to level up. Emotionally, medically, all of it. IVF felt less like a choice and more like the only way forward.
My IVF Journey
We decided to meet with Dr. Sheeva Talebien at CCRM Fertility. Right away, I knew she was the one. She carefully explained the process. We met with nurses who outlined all the medications (omg, the medications!) and mapped out day by day how we would move forward.
The medications arrived in a giant box, which felt both exciting and terrifying. Vials, needles, syringes, ice packs. A small and very expensive pharmacy delivered to my apartment door. My husband did every.single.injection. Some nights it felt almost routine. Other nights I cried through it.
For weeks, I went in for early morning monitoring appointments, bloodwork and ultrasounds to track how my follicles were responding. You become fluent in a new language: estrogen levels, follicle counts, trigger shots.
Then came retrieval day. You go under, and when you wake up, the first thing you ask is how many eggs. The number is everything. Ours was 19. I was thrilled. You wait to find out how many are fertilized. Then how many made it to blast.
We did genetic testing on our embryos. Another wait. Another number. By the end of it, we had 9 embryos that were viable. We knew all of their sexes. This was it! We had done it. But then came the part that felt the most fragile of all— choosing one— and hoping she would stick.
IVF on Repeat
We went back for our son a few years later. He’s 3, and currently in the throes of potty training. Two kids, two transfers, and we still have embryos remaining.
When you start the IVF process, you sign all the paperwork. Pages and pages of legal language outlining the hypothetical futures of your children before they are even implanted. What happens if one of you dies, if you divorce, or if circumstances change? I sobbed at the page that asked what should happen if one of us died. You are already so emotionally raw, and now you are asked to plan for the end of things before anything has even begun.
There are limits, too. At a certain point, around age 55, the option to carry those embryos is no longer available, depending on the clinic. Time, as always, moves the conversation forward whether you’re ready or not.
Eventually, the options narrow. You can choose to discard them, which carries a weight that’s difficult to explain. You can donate them, knowing a full sibling of your children might be growing up somewhere else in the world. Or you can donate them to science, a path that feels clinical against something so deeply personal.
So, for now, we continue paying the invoice year after year. Not out of indecision, exactly, but out of a desire to wait until the answer feels clearer.
If it ever does.
