The Fear of Infertility

I was lying there on the cold, hard examining table. A stranger came in and before I knew it, I was uncomfortably spreading my legs. He told me it wouldn’t hurt and proceeded to stick a strange contraption up into my body. I was there to find out “if all my parts were as they should be.”

Throughout my struggle with infertility, this was the scariest time. I didn’t know what to expect from the appointment. They could examine me and tell me that they were terribly sorry, but that I would never be able to have a child. Or they could tell me that everything looked good and couldn’t explain why it had been a year and we’d not gotten pregnant. Neither answer seemed particularly appealing.

The table I was lying on was colder and harder than I’d anticipated, the procedure was more uncomfortable than I had thought that it would be, and I was more afraid than I could have imagined. I wished I had asked my husband to come with me; I wished that I hadn’t told him it was just a routine check-up and not something worth missing work for. I wished that I didn’t feel so frightened and alone.

I had not realized how many women struggle with fertility issues until I was faced with it myself. I was twenty-six years old. My husband and I had been married for three years and it had been a year since I’d had a period. I was scared and unable to acknowledge how frightened I really was. I had always envisioned myself as a mom and I now found myself in a place where the harsh reality was that it may never happen.

I’d always had normal cycles when I was a teenager, but after being on birth control pills for almost five years and then going through a period of anorexia, I was left racked with guilt: my inability to function as a normal female was surely a result of something I had done.

I wanted to be able to trust that in the end I’d have the opportunity to bear my own child and hold my baby in my arms. But I also knew I had to brace myself for the possibility that it may never happen. For a long time, I could only refer to the doctor that we were now seeing as “the specialist,” and couldn’t even utter the word “infertility.” I didn’t want to face the fact that being infertile was actually a possibility.