The average egg-freezing cycle produces between eight and fifteen eggs.
You do the math.
* * *
But first, the drugs.
The hormones alone can cost up to two thousand dollars. When I unleashed this information on my therapist, she told me she had another patient who had just undergone the process and had leftover medication. I was delighted. Especially given how much therapy costs. I had always assumed that if I bought mass quantities of drugs on the black market, they would be recreational in nature, but here we were. My therapist—our therapist—introduced us over e-mail and we arranged a time for me to come pick up the stuff.
The woman was an Indian lawyer who lived in an apartment in Chelsea, a large doormanned co-op with aggressive lobby art and confounding elevator buttons. The interior of her apartment could only be described as palatial. No wonder she was giving away drugs like candy. When I stepped inside, I was asked to remove my shoes and handed a pair of “guest slippers.” In my house, I only have “guest hotel shampoos.” She had changed into leggings and a T-shirt after a long day of deploying her expensive education. We stood on either side of her kitchen island.
“So, how long have you lived here?” I asked.
“About three years,” she said. “I know it doesn’t look like it.”
“No, no,” I said, “it definitely looks like it.”
Visible through her open bedroom door was a large flat-screen television. The Bachelor was on.
“I moved in after my divorce.”
“Oh,” I said. “Cool.”
It’s hard enough to make small talk with a stranger without knowing you have the same therapist. There’s a subtle jockeying for sanest. What you’re both really thinking is: What are you in for?
“So you need three boxes of the Menopur and two of the Follistim, right?”
The top half of her body was obscured by the open refrigerator door as she stood on her tippy-toes.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
“You’re aware that I’m selling these, right?”
“No,” I said, “I was not aware of that.”
“It’s at least a thousand dollars’ worth of medication.” She stated the facts.
“That’s why I was so grateful,” I said, trying to laugh it off. “This is awkward.”
“I couldn’t figure out why you were being so nice about it,” she mused.
“Nice” didn’t begin to describe it. In our e-mails, I had referred to her as a “lifesaver” and a “saint.” I told her she was “doing her good deed for the year.” I was in for a financially and physically arduous ride, and the idea that a stranger with a heart of platinum would be so generous had renewed my faith in the capacity of women to support each other.
Later that evening, I went back and examined our correspondence. Sure enough, she had clearly listed prices next to the name of each medication. The numbers were unmistakable. The issue was, she had left the dollar signs off. That’s how many boxes of drugs there are—it takes real time to type the dollar signs. Because I had never done this before, I assumed all those numbers were milligrams or micrograms or marbles. But the e-mails were not the point. Why would I assume a total stranger would part with such expensive items for free?
I wanted so badly to find just one loophole of ease, my subconscious made it so. I immediately began making justifications to myself about how I was right and she was wrong. She had found something incongruous about my appreciation and had ample opportunities to clarify the situation before I was standing in her kitchen. Not to mention the fact that these drugs had been in her possession for almost a year and would expire in a month, which meant she needed to find a buyer pronto. Selling them online would be illegal. If I knew that, she definitely knew that. Would she rather consign them to the dumpster or donate them to a clinic than give them to me? Absolutely she would.
I explained that if I was going to pay full price for nearly expired drugs, I might as well just be an upstanding citizen about it and go through a pharmacy.
“Well,” she said and shrugged. “Good luck with it.”
No negotiation. Case closed. She wasn’t doing it to be spiteful. She wasn’t even annoyed, as I surely would have been if the slipper were on the other foot. She was doing it because it was time to draw a line in the sand. She had gone through two rounds of egg freezing with negligible results. Her husband had left her for a younger woman. She was forty-four, spent her days thinking about fairness on behalf of other people, and she felt owed. And she was owed. Just as every woman who smiles through a lifetime of complicated biology and double standards is owed. But tonight, I was going to be the one to pay her.
On the television in the bedroom, a tearful girl told the camera how much she regretted “putting herself out there.” I wondered if I should tell my therapist about this incident or if this woman would beat me to it.
* * *
Only the Upper West Side, a neighborhood that caters to the yet-to-be-born and the on-their-way-out, would be host to a pharmacy that specializes in both fertility meds and compression socks. I stood in line, eyeing bars of Reagan-era soap and a stunning variety of pastel candies. I tried to imagine the woman who had spent the past nine decades figuring out exactly which flavor of pastel candy she liked the best. When it was my turn, I relinquished my credit card to a cashier, who had to pry it from my fingers. As money had apparently ceased to have any meaning, I selected a couple of overpriced hair clips while he filled a supermarket bag. A few customers cast sympathetic looks in my direction. What would have to be so
