Waiting For You

Chapter 5: Starting Line

Chapter 5: Starting Line

Amelia

We get to the fertility clinic with only two minutes to spare. I'm feeling very anxious and jittery. I don't know if it's the nerves or all of the caffeine I've been drinking. Should I be drinking less coffee, if I'm going to get knocked up in the near future?

It's probably a question I should be asking.

My list of questions is growing so quickly with every passing day. It's a good thing I'm writing it all down in my phone.

Sam is quiet in the seat next to me, although his knee hasn't stopped moving up and down since we sat down. I'm not expecting to be called in for a little while. We've only been signed in for a couple minutes, and today the waiting room is a lot busier than it was last month. At one point I see Dr. Cho walking by behind the receptionist's desk. He gives us a little wave.

A few more minutes tick by and two women in their thirties walk in. They look around and one of them makes eye contact with me. I smile as she approaches.

"Do you mind?" she asks in a hushed voice, gesturing next to me. She's got a really cute pixie cut and thick glasses.

"Oh, sorry," I whisper back.

There are only two seats left. One is on my left and the other one is on Sam's right, so we both move up one and the women sit down next to each other.

"I'm Vivian," the woman with the pixie cut says.

"Lia," I reply.

"I'm Tara," the other woman says, taking Vivian's hand. She's got curly brown hair and a round face. I don't want to just assume, but I quickly notice she has a small baby bump. Tara probably notices me looking, because she grins and puts her free hand on her belly.

"We graduate from the clinic today. Our next appointment will be with the midwife," she whispers.

"Oh! Congratulations!" I exclaim, perhaps a little too loudly. Sam chuckles next to me.

"Thanks," Tara grins.

"This is my husband Sam," I say quickly.

"Hey," Sam adds, looking up from his hands, which he has wrung together in his lap.

"Hi," both women smile politely at him.

"How far along are you?" I figure it's not impolite to ask, since they brought it up first.

"Thirteen weeks," Tara answers.

"That's amazing," I smile, and I hope it's genuine enough.

"We've had two unsuccessful cycles before, so it's definitely been a long time coming." Vivian squeezes Tara's hand. I can tell this is something they've been wanting for so long because I'm exactly where they were when they first started this whole process.

I'm happy for them, knowing firsthand how difficult it is to want something so bad and pour so much energy into making it happen. I also feel a pang of jealousy, and that makes me feel like a horrible, selfish human being.

There's silence for a while. I think Vivian might be trying to decide if she wants to say something or not. She looks at her partner, and then back at us.

"Is this your first visit?" she asks finally.

"We had our first consult last month, now it's the fun part," I tell her.

"Oh, well good luck, I'm sure everything will go smoothly," Tara smiles.

Dr. Cho calls us into the same exam room we were in last time, so our conversation with Tara and Vivian is cut short. Sam goes first and I follow after him into the room. Dr. Cho closes the door behind us and asks us to sit down.

I thought we'd covered more or less everything already during our previous visit, but I realize as the conversation starts that there's still a lot left to talk about.

A lot of fertility clinics don't really cater to LGBT couples. We've seen it while researching online and talking to other couple on forums. Now we're seeing it firsthand once again in the form of legalities.

Right now, the way they've got everything written down in the document, once we sign our signatures, Sam will give up all parental rights to me as an egg donor. That's not what we want. We both want our names on the baby's birth certificate. We're both going to be the parents of this baby.

Or babies, because we haven't decided yet how many embryos we want to implant. That's another thing we have to really talk about, but it will also depend on the number of eggs they manage to fertilize.

It's not a difficult problem to solve, the parental rights I mean. They'll make the edits to the paperwork and send out another copy for us to sign. It should all be resolved by the time we return for our next appointment on the 22nd, but it's still a tedious extra step that cis couples don't have to deal with.

I think back to what Sam said on our first visit here. Maybe one day our journey will help another couple like us, and that thought makes me feel a little less bitter.

After that incredibly stressful conversation, we go over the plan for the next eleven days, as well as the details of the IVF injections and the egg retrieval process.

Everything is fairly straightforward.

The trigger shot has to be injected 36 hours before the procedure, so around 11:30 on Thursday. We both have to go in at seven o'clock on Friday morning for ultrasounds. They'll want to see how Sam's follicles are developing, and they want to check me out too, as if they haven't prodded us enough already. He can't eat or drink the night before the procedure. He'll go under anesthesia on Saturday at 9:30. They suck out all of the eggs and then we get to go home. Meanwhile, they'll be fertilizing all of our eggs with our donor sperm. Just a few days after that, I will get knocked up (hopefully!).

Sam is then asked to change into a gown for some more poking and prodding. They do an ultrasound and take some blood.

He gets to start on hormones today. Twelve days from now we come back here for the egg retrieval procedure. In two weeks, I might be pregnant.

This is all happening so dang fast! I'm so excited!