Positive Thinking

I wish I could say that I'm optimistic about this donor egg cycle, but I just can't let myself go there. My pregnancy test is in 4 weeks, and I've started to prepare for the worst; only a fool would count on a positive.

To be honest, I'm loaded with fear and vulnerability, and I'm doing everything I can to protect myself against rosy thinking. I never let myself fantasize about baby names or and imagine what it'll be like to post a photo of a little one on my Facebook page because things so rarely end up the way you hope. Of course I know that this cycle can work, but so allowing myself get giddy about it is just not something I can do.

My donor's egg retrieval is tentatively scheduled for June 7, which - in IVF terms - is considered Day 14 of a pregnancy. By those same calculations, 13 days before retrieval is Day 1 of a pregnancy, which - incidentally - is today.

Yes, I know it's a twisted logic, and not at all based in reality, but by a certain fantasy yardstick, today I'm one day pregnant.

I realize it's a nutty thing to think, but a small part of me occasionally succumbs to false hope, and I imagine what it would be like to announce it to the world. I know I can hardly anticipate a positive outcome since the odds are not great, and my result can easily fall on the side I don't want.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not a huge fan of positive thinking because I just don't see the point; I know too much about all the things that can go wrong at every step of the process, and the reality is that anything can happen.

But try as I might to suppress the optimism, there are brief moments where I can't help but think happy, hopeful, giggly thoughts. A positive is possible, after all, and a positive in 27 days means that I'm one day pregnant today.

Still, it's a crazy mindset, and there's no way I'm going to let myself imagine that!!!

Plagiarizing Frankenstein

I could have written Frankenstein.

If we're talking about the story of someone who is overwhelmed by grief, who can't accept life's fate, who wants so desperately to defy the limitations of our bodies that the only escape is to create a human composite made of other people's body parts, then yes, I could have written Frankenstein.



Like the eponymous Victor Frankenstein, I'm doing everything I can to bring an unnaturally conceived person into this world: a brand new life spliced together from other people's body parts by combining painstakingly selected pieces in order to create my very own monster.

Two centuries ago, this was a horror story. Some argue it was the original tale of science fiction. Today it's science fact.

There are those who don't like science facts, however, and many of them strongly oppose egg donor in vitro. They see the procedure as a severe encroachment on the laws of nature and an ungodly experimentation on human life.

They're not entirely wrong.

I'm aware that donor egg IVF is some freaky shit. I recently got pretty skeeved out myself after reading an article about how donor egg babies are more strongly linked to pre-eclampsia - a condition that was essentially described as the uterus rejecting a foreign body that it doesn't recognize as its own.

I read "foreign body" as "Frankensteinian monster."

All of which brings to mind the last time I read Frankenstein during a college course on The Gothic Imagination where the professor drove home an essential question:

In the book, the monster is actually a loving, emotional, and vulnerable being, whereas Victor himself is an arrogant man who ignores the grotesqueness of his scientific interventions because he's too much of a self-absorbed coward to accept the limitations of the human body's vulnerabilities. If this is the case, then who is the real monster? The creature or Victor?

Or, since we're plagiarizing: my baby or me?

But before we demonize me or Vic too quickly, it bears keeping in mind that most medical procedures were once thought creepy and weird. The first organ transplants were over 100 years ago, and I don't imagine those went over too well. Isn't it possible that donor egg in vitro won't always be met with the same cocked heads and scrunched faces that I get today?

Either way, I'm doing it. My donor's egg retrieval is in 3½ weeks, and my embryo transfer is in four. In 5½ weeks, I'll have my first pregnancy test, and at that point we'll know if there's a little monster in the works.

Copyright laws be damned.