“You want me to throw an ice pack in there?” asked the cashier.
“Why not?” I said. “Go crazy.”
None of the medication required refrigeration unless you were going to store it for an extended time, and so long as you didn’t do anything brilliant like rest it on a radiator. But at this juncture, I would take anything I didn’t have to pay for. Do you want me to throw a patty of petrified horse shit in there? Sure, why not? You only live once.
I went straight home, put the bag on my kitchen counter, tossed the ice pack in the freezer, and threw on a dress. It was New Year’s Eve. I was putting the “new year, new you” diets to shame. I would start the year as a grown-up card-carrying member of my gender, as someone who makes proactive health decisions and cowers before the reality of the future, as woman-shaped flesh wad.
The next day, I decided to familiarize myself with the drugs. I stood in my kitchen across from the bag, staring at it. But when I got up the nerve to peer inside, there were no drugs. Just the syringes, the needles and a portable toxic waste container for disposing of them. I touched the bottom of the paper, thinking vaguely of trapdoors. I could feel the anger spread across my skin. The cashier had forgotten to put my entire order of medication in the bag. Naturally, such a thing had never happened with a five-dollar prescription but of course it had with the fifteen-hundred-dollar one.
I had all of New Year’s Day to stew and pace. I called when the pharmacy opened the following day, displaying a kind of barely contained rage for which I expected to be rewarded. Anything short of murder warranted a gold star. But their records showed I had picked up the medication. I explained the difference between paying for something and leaving with it. I was not trying to swindle them. I don’t need the extra needles for my side gig as a methadone addict. I barely wanted these needles. I threatened to take pictures of the empty bag. Still, they maintained the drugs were in there.
“There’s nothing here,” I said. “There was only an ice pack and I put it in—”
There are moments in life when one literally stops in one’s tracks. Usually you have to see a wild animal or a celebrity you thought was dead.
“Will you please hold?”
I opened my freezer and removed the foil pack. For the first time, I noticed a seam at the top. I ripped it open. Inside was a packet of ice the size of a playing card and boxes of medication stickered with the words HUMAN HORMONE. DO NOT FREEZE.
The reality of what I had done took no time to sink in. I, who only four nights prior had registered the wasted cab fare to Chelsea, had just destroyed fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of medication by tossing it into the freezer like a bag of peas.
One wonders what I would do with an actual child.
The pharmacy had neglected to sticker the foil pouch itself and kindly agreed to send me new drugs. My case was easy to make. Improperly labeling medication is not an offense I came up with. Still, how could two of these misunderstandings have occurred in forty-eight hours? Has anyone’s ambivalence ever run so deep? Before we hung up, I asked the pharmacist how many functioning adults had ever done what I did. He pretended to scan his memory. The answer was none. I was the “hot coffee” case of the reproductive-medicine world. Next time you think to yourself, “What kind of idiot doesn’t understand that coffee is hot?” know that the answer is: This kind.
* * *
In order to freeze your eggs, you must give yourself two different types of shots, one in the morning and one in the evening, always within an hour of the time you gave yourself the first shot. This is as elaborate as it sounds. Especially compared with every other medication I’d ever taken, for which I needed only a working esophagus. My boyfriend offered to do the injections for me.
“It’ll be a good bonding experience,” he said, afflicted as he is with a fondness for the bright side.
“It’s not like I have to take them in the ass,” I reasoned.
“I’m not even touching that rationale,” he said and backed off.
Some of the shots burn, others bruise, all of them force you to abandon your squeamishness around needles. The margin of error is significant. One day I didn’t mix in all the saline. Another day I managed to go through all the steps and somehow wound up with an unused needle, which is a bit like winding up with extra IKEA dresser parts, but slightly worse because you’re injecting the dresser into your body. Another day I sliced my finger open removing the sheath from a mixing needle. It was such a precise cut, it took a second to get comfortable with its existence before bleeding all over the place. Freezing your eggs is essentially a cheap way to become a registered nurse. But by the time you know what you’re doing, you don’t need to do it anymore.
Meanwhile, I went into the fertility center every day to get reacquainted with the wand. One morning, as I lay back and put my feet in the stirrups, I announced that it was the darnedest thing—the hormones were having zero effect on me. No tears, no mood swings, no irrational behavior. Finally, I was excelling at something. Then the doctor on duty turned off the lights as I was in the middle of reading from a list of questions. I cleared my throat.
“Can you just ask me during the exam?”
Perhaps I have mentioned that the exam entails a wand being shoved into your body. Not the ideal time for a Q&A.
“But
