Words of Disbelief: ‘I Can’t Be Infertile’

The hard part, one of the women says, was hearing the words from her doctor: “You need an infertility workup.”

“No, I can’t be infertile,” she thought. “That’s not the way my life is supposed to be.”

But something is obviously keeping her from having a baby. So, her husband has a semen analysis to find out whether his sperm are viable, and she takes her temperature first thing every morning, looking for the half-degree rise that signals ovulation and a one-day window of opportunity for conception.

Sex is scheduled. The postcoital analysis of her cervical mucus follows. The other tests come after that.

There is a sisterhood of infertile women. They find one another in the waiting rooms of fertility centers, in the recovery rooms outside the operating suites where they have had their diagnostic or therapeutic procedures, in the meeting rooms or through the telephone support network of Resolve, an organization for infertile people.

They trade stories of conception failures, miscarriages, diagnoses, reparative surgeries, adoption attempts, drug therapies, crying jags, periods of doubt.

One, whose history of gynecological problems and inability to conceive seems to be related to the DES her own mother took during pregnancy, wonders: “How do I know this (fertility) drug won’t have an effect on the fetus, too?”

Another talks of side effects. Some of the drugs made her gain weight, others caused menopausal-type flushes.

And money: $100 a month for the medicine.

And all of them talk about their marriages. “My husband suffered with me,” one says. “But he got sick of timing sex. I was obsessing about it.”

“You’re having sex when they tell you to have sex,” says another. “You begin to feel you have a whole medical team in the bedroom.”

Their jobs suffer. “How could I tell my boss, ‘You can’t put me on night shift this week--I’m ovulating’?” says one. Then there are the well-meaning friends and family members. The ones who ask and the ones who don’t and the people who give advice: “You’ve got too much stress at work,” or “You’re too tense; just relax and you’ll be OK.”

“I adopted a child. I quit my job. I’m still not pregnant,” one of them says.

“It’s hard to know who to trust,” says a woman whose pregnancies, one after the other, ended in miscarriage. One doctor diagnosed fibroid tumors. Another treated her for progesterone deficit. A third wanted to put her on drugs to encourage ovulation and a fourth found a previously unrecognized infection and a subtle immune system defect. That doctor finally medicated her, with antibiotics and baby aspirin, into a pregnancy that produced a baby.

Sarah, in the Bible, was barren until advanced old age. Rebecca was, too, and then had twins. Rachel watched, envious, as Leah produced son after son before she, finally, bore two. Miracles still happen. Even after years of infertility, some people will suddenly conceive, entirely without medical help and for reasons medicine does not understand.

Today, however, medical specialists understand a great deal.

And in many cases they can, indeed, help the miracles happen.