Essays

January 5, 2023

IVF, and the Two Week Wait

Image via @slouisepetersen

Excerpted from Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology by Jenni Quilter.

On infertility message boards, the 2WW —  two-week wait —  is the period of time between ovulation and your next period, which is the time you wait in order to find out if you’re pregnant: if sex, or an IUI (insemination by catheter), or an embryo transfer (the result of IVF) has actually worked. The uncertainty and the waiting are universally understood as a torture. The 2WW is part of a broader reorganization of time, a development of the art of waiting. I had spent that summer waiting: waiting to start, then waiting for my next period, then waiting for retrieval, then waiting for transfer, and now waiting for implantation. It could be that nothing had actually changed. It could be that everything had. Those first few days after transfer, the knowledge that two living creatures were inside me was strong; it colored everything like a kind of light filter. As the days passed, it became a binary: the embryos were dead or alive, and even if they were alive, they might be chromosomally abnormal; statistically speaking, 50 percent of a thirty-five-year-old woman’s eggs are abnormal.

Online, there are many articles about how to bear the seemingly endless stretch of days (television, treating yourself, new cooking techniques, tackling small jobs), but they all seemed to miss what makes the two-week wait particularly unbearable, which is the fact that women suffering fertility issues go through this experience over and over again. In a two-week wait, it is tempting to avoid social occasions where people will ask how you are. You cannot drink. You are unusually risk-averse. As if you were ill, you are strangely deliberate about what to do with your energy. Do you dare jump into that waterhole? What about staying in the sun all day, dehydrated and hungry? The hope that you are pregnant slowly begins to build, like algal bloom in a pond. You inspect your breasts. Are they bigger? Every stomach twinge is interpreted as implantation cramps. You never thought of yourself as a nauseated person, but now you feel butterflies all of the time. It’s hard to organize holidays or plane flights. You are constantly delaying decisions. You try to avoid calculating your due date, and fail. And then at the end of two weeks, you might find out that you weren’t really waiting; you are not pregnant, and you were not really living your life the way you wanted to, and now those two weeks are gone and it’s time to start all over again. You are always postponing your life for another that may never come. This feels like a profoundly discontinuous way of living. It requires a reassessment of how you understand momentum in your life, of how much the future provides some kind of scaffolding for the present.

I had practiced yoga for many years, and thought I knew my body fairly well. I had grown proficient at isolating my awareness to particular parts; I understood, for example, when I stood a certain way, how the ribs on my right side were working in relation to the inward rotation of my left thigh. But this did not help me now. I did not know what was going on inside of me. My body was not speaking to me yet. I felt utterly normal, and was terrified of what that meant. Before IVF, time sluiced through me like a waterfall. Now, I felt more like an old-fashioned water mill. The minutes filled me up, like drops of water in a cup at the end of each paddle. Time moved

so slowly, adding, and adding, and adding — till I brimmed, then over I went again, with a splash.

These feelings are all very real for people who aren’t undergoing IVF, who are simply trying to fall pregnant., as well; which is why O’Brien’s distinction between a (male) discontinuity and (female) continuity of experience appears, on closer inspection, to overlook a set of meaningful complications. There is little room in her argum

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These feelings are all very real for people who aren’t undergoing IVF. Yes, one’s anxiety is certainly heightened by the cost of IVF: a natural pregnancy is prefaced by sex or low-fi insemination with a turkey baster, and an IVF pregnancy is prefaced by appointments, scans, injections, surgery, etc. But the two-week wait only makes more visible the fact that in the first four months, a woman cannot feel the fetus’s movements. She may discern she is pregnant from other symptoms — morning sickness, fatigue, a sensitivity to smell, tender breasts — but all of these can be attributed to hormonal changes rather than to the fetus. The cellular big bang going on inside her is largely undetectable. At that stage, even if she is pregnant, it can also feel like an abstract, even discontinuous idea.

Indeed, this uncertainty could be said to be a fundamental part of living, regardless of gender or pregnancy. There is a remarkable cognitive dissonance between our conception of bodily knowledge — the signals our body has of fatigue, hunger, or desire — and the world of cellular formation and degeneration. We do not know ourselves at a biological level; it is even hard to visualize the blood and flesh below the skin, the way our organs fold into each other, the composition of fat, blood, vein, and muscle. Our love of on-screen physical violence, particularly decapitations, amputations, arterial spray, or disembowelment, is a consequence-free way to remind ourselves of the existence of our insides. Our corporeality is remarkably easy to forget — so easy, in fact, that one senses an evolutionary advantage of some kind to putting aside the knowledge that your heart has beaten fifty times reading this paragraph. Our experience in our bodies is often discontinuous, and that doesn’t have to be a patriarchal thing.

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