“I was going to be the new Johnny Appleseed, spreading my DNA across this great city and hoping to grow something wonderful…”
The process isn’t the easiest thing to lie your way through, but wave $8000 in front of most 22-year-old females trying to make it in the big city, and suddenly her mental and physical health history will become Disney clean.
Do you drink?
Lots of water.
Have you ever done drugs?
Never.
Medications?
The only thing I’m swallowing is a woman’s multi-vitamin every morning.
Exercise?
Oh, you bet.
Smarts?
I’m in college now so that means I’ve got a genius IQ.
What about your family?
No one even has acne and everyone’s still kickin’.
Hair color?
Blonde?
That last question stuck with me for a while. I’ve dyed my hair blonde since the sixth grade, with an occasional venture to black or red or brown that usually leads to turning my hair yellow from bleaching it too many times. I dye my hair from home, and my whimsical decisions have led to emergency trips to overpriced salons where they dye the parts of my hair that didn’t break off back to a natural hue. If I let my hair grow out naturally, I honestly couldn’t say what color it would be. Maybe brown, maybe a dark blonde. The egg people were willing to accept me as a blonde and I hope that’s true because what they are hoping to get from my eggs is as close a match to the infertile recipient as possible.
The whole thing strikes me as a little strange. I know I wouldn’t want a complete stranger’s eggs put inside me in an effort to create a child. I especially would be suspicious of receiving eggs from a stranger I’ll never meet, and whose eggs were chosen by a group of people primarily after my money. But people do it, and I’m thrilled they do because I’m flat broke and $8000 could change everything for me and my new life in New York City.
I moved to New York from Atlanta, my hometown, in 2003. I first went to college for two years in Alabama, but decided Alabama was a little too Southern for me, and that I wanted to study film production. A series of events led me, and my best friend, to a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. My first order of business once I got to New York was to get a job, and my second was to find a film school. Lacking hundreds of thousands of dollars to drop on NYU, I settled on a City University of New York (CUNY) school, Brooklyn College. I was told Brooklyn College was dubbed, “The poor man’s Harvard.” I believe that to be a strong exaggeration, because they let me in. Perhaps Brooklyn College is the less intelligent and poor man’s Harvard. Auburn University, my first college, hadn’t even asked for my SAT scores. I am not actually sure if Auburn rejects applicants. They didn’t even make me do a college entrance essay. I do know that fertility clinics reject egg donors, often ask for SAT scores, and make you write an essay on why you want to be a donor, passive aggressively forcing you to pretend your uterus isn’t a whore, and that your heart is in the right place. The essay I wrote for the clinic felt just like writing a college entrance essay. Perhaps I should contact my old guidance counselor and ask her what she thinks of my compelling metaphor comparing my eggs to a future utopian society where everybody shares everything. The egg donation process was just like college applications, except with more time spent with my feet in stirrups.
I loved Brooklyn College. Their film school was great. New York was great. I even got a great job cocktailing in the lobby lounge at The Ritz-Carlton. The money at the Ritz was good, but I decided I needed money to buy my own video camera and equipment. I felt if I could just make my own films, my genius would be discovered immediately and stardom and fortune would be mine by 25. I had it all planned out. I would start my inevitable journey towards Spielbergdom by making a documentary about a small indie-metal band on tour. I would sell my eggs, quit my job, buy equipment, and spend the summer touring with the band, filming their ever-fascinating and original movie. The five band members and their roadie would do behind the scenes band stuff NO other band has ever done before, and I would be the toast of Sundance. I would never have to wait tables again, and somehow, unexplained, I would also lose the fifteen pounds I have been meaning to drop since fifth grade.
The band said yes, I gave my notice, and the fertility clinic found a match for me, hopefully not too naturally blonde. I found myself cautiously window shopping throughout the city, wandering through the aisles of H&M making a mental list of all the great clothes I was about to have. I tried to not get too excited.
After the fertility clinic found my match, things moved quickly. They gave me birth control pills to line my cycle up with the recipient’s. Once our cycles were in line, they started me on an intense hormone regimen designed to mature a large number of eggs at the same time. For two weeks I would self-administer the hormones via a shot in my stomach. I couldn’t believe they were handing me a bag of needles and pricey fertility treatments and entrusting me to do everything correctly. They looked very serious as they went over the instructions. I faded in and out, trying to concentrate on what they were saying (it seemed important), but also starting to wonder what would happen if I messed up. Would they notice? I suppose they would. I’m supposed to be really smart, that’s why they want my eggs, so I better make them think I am capable of listening to instructions. Maybe they sensed I was more of a visual learner because next they did a demonstration.
“I can’t have sex for the next two weeks ‘cause if I get pregnant I could have a litter!” I announced to my roommate when I got home. The “pregnant with a litter” was the only piece of information that really stuck with me.
“No way!” my roommate Elisabeth mused. “That would be so weird.”
“Yea…and they would be sooooo pissed.”
Who knows how many thousands of dollars would be blown if I failed my mission. The recipient couple had to pay the clinic for the medications and procedure, the $8000 for me, plus take out a health insurance policy in case anything happened to me during the process. I don’t know how much the couple had to pay overall, but the fertility clinic had a really nice waiting room; it appeared they came up with some fairly large fees. Elisabeth, then working at a veterinarian office, insisted she give me the shots.
“I do this kind of stuff all the time on dogs,” she said, as she flicked the needle with her fingers, trying to get rid of any air bubbles.
For two weeks I watched on an ultrasound as my little eggs grew bigger and eventually, I got so bloated that if I sat down too fast my growing eggs would make me yelp and jump back up. I would go to the clinic every couple days and have my vagina prodded with some phallic object as they tracked the process of my eggs.
“You have a beautiful uterus,” one of the nurses told me. I bet you say that to all the girls. At least I can tell potential mates my uterus is a winner. That is, if all the shots I gave myself didn’t somehow render me infertile.
Occasionally I would let myself think about the reality of what I was doing and wonder if there were any long-term side effects. My Google search came up with nothing, and I went on to wonder if my future husband would frown upon the possibility of my DNA inhabiting Earth. I knew that I would never know if the procedure was a success or not. I liked that I would never know; it kept it from being too real.
By the morning of the egg removal procedure, I couldn’t wait to get the little suckers out of me. It was weird to know somewhere in the same building was an excited and nervous woman who was potentially about to get pregnant with one of my eggs. The clinic was careful to never schedule donors and recipients to come in at the same time. We were never supposed to meet, see each other, or know each other’s identities. The day of the procedure was the only time both donor and recipient are in the building at the same time. To keep us separate, I was brought into a different wing of the building. I waited in a new waiting room, until it was time. They brought me into an operating room, I put my feet in the stirrups one last time, and with the help of an anesthesiologist, I drifted off to sleep.
When I woke up I didn’t know where I was. Once I came to, a nurse took me into a conference room, told me the procedure went well, that they sucked out about 13 eggs. She told me to take it easy for a few days, expect some light bleeding, don’t have sex, and come back in a week for a follow-up. Having spotted my check in front of her, I stopped listening to the nurse’s aftercare instructions and began planning all the places I’d go in my new H&M clothes. The nurse finally handed me a check for $8000, saying something about taxes that I ignored, and I went downstairs to meet Elisabeth and show her my awesome check. I went to work that night.
“Catherine, are you a stripper?” my sister Laura asked when I came to Atlanta with all my new film equipment.
“No,” I laughed. “I make a lot of money cocktailing.” More like vagina-ing. I opted to not tell any of my siblings in fear it would get back to my parents. I can’t say for certain, but I don’t think my conservative, Christian parents would be cool with experimental forms of income involving my uterus. At least I’m not selling the exterior, I told myself. But my parents never seemed to share my glass is half-full perspective when justifying my life choices. My teenage years had been ritually defended by my case isn’t worst-case rhetoric. “At least I’m not pregnant! At least I’m not on drugs! At least I’m alive!” My parents, unmoved, preferred a higher standard than mine, one of staying off the evening news.
I kept up my cocktailing charade as I took off to make the tour documentary. The singer of the band got sick two weeks in and we packed it in and went home. It was just as well; I hadn’t taken a sound or editing class yet at film school.
Just like that, the whole egg experience was over. I don’t even have to try to not think about it. I really don’t. Occasionally, if I see a little white baby with blonde ringlets and blue eyes, I’ll do the math in my head to see if, timeline-wise, this could be my DNA in three-dimensional form. I wonder the psychological implications of my offspring learning they exist because someone needed to buy camera equipment.
A year later I got a nice letter from the IRS informing me that I owed them $3000 of the $8000 I made. At the time I had just finished film school and was $30,000 in debt. The $3000 the IRS felt belonged to them was just another drop in the bucket that wasn’t going to be paid any time soon unless I actually did take up stripping. Unfortunately, my moral compass doesn’t stretch that far and as always, I found myself waiting tables again, paying my debts off one Jager Bomb at a time, reminiscing about the good ol’ days when my feet were in stirrups, my uterus full of hyper-stimulated eggs, and my head full of $8000 dreams.
Comments (2)
See all