"It will have to do."
This is the line that keeps coming back to me from The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Taoist sci fi novel about dreams and reality. A man realizes his dreams come true in real life, yet he know no individual should hold this power over the world. He asks a psychiatrist to cure him, to stop his dreams, but instead the psychiatrist hypnotizes the dreamer in hopes of bringing his own vision for the world to life. It all goes horribly wrong, of course, because no one can control their subconscious or their dreams, and because what each of us imagines might be best for ourselves is not always best for the entire world. Towards the end, when another character asks the man why he couldn’t have dreamt a better reality than the one they’re in, all he can say is, “It will have to do.”
I think this to myself all the time now, it will have to do. For two months I have been trying to get pregnant on purpose as a single woman. This involves lots of timing and testing and best guesses, and I can only ever do what seems best at the moment. Whatever happens, it will have to do.
When my first round of testing was completed in early June, there was a pause in appointments because I was waiting for approval from insurance. I saw that if I waited, I would miss an ovulation window, and this felt like a big miss. If I got pregnant in June the baby would be born in Pisces season, a dream! The sperm company I planned on using offered home insemination, where they ship vials of sperm in a tank of liquid nitrogen to your house and you inject it yourself. I wasn’t sure I should do it, the odds of success were low and it costs thousands of dollars. I read so many reddit threads about it (sometimes it did work!). I pulled tarot cards about it and looked up the card meanings in 78 Degrees of Wisdom. Even though one of the cards looked pretty clearly like a loss of wealth, another card was linked to crafty Odysseus, cunning and wily Odysseus. I liked the idea of being captain in the adventure of my life, even if I made a lot of mistakes. And wouldn’t it be so cool if I got pregnant on the first shot, all by myself? I loved that narrative. Plus my parents offered to help with the costs, a boon which cannot be understated, so I placed the order and started tracking for an LH surge. Having a tank of liquid nitrogen in the house did make me feel like I was doing a cool science experiment, even though I was nervous that I estimated the timing wrong. After injecting the sperm, I had to wait two weeks to see if my period came or not. I took up praying the rosary to keep my mind occupied. A mantra is mind protection, and I wanted to protect myself from anything that wasn’t hope. When my period came, I was surprised at how disappointed I felt. I knew that it might not work, but knowing did not protect me from feeling sad about it. Oh well, at least I knew the next steps: report day 1 of my cycle to the doctor’s office and being the next round of tests.
Blood draw and ultrasound on day 4. Letrozole twice a day for five days. Blood draw and ultrasound again on day 12. A few hours later, instructions to inject Ovidrel. Unlike the semen, which goes in how you think it would, Ovidrel involves a needle and requires me to stab myself. I psyched myself up for an hour, pointedly not thinking of all the times I have fainted in doctor’s offices when a needle went into me, watched three instructional videos, rehearsed the motions of the process three times, and in the end still had to surrender and let my roommate do it because I could not get past the mental barrier of piercing my own flesh. It was embarrassing. The next day I went in to the clinic for the IUI. I checked in and waited about 30 minutes. They called my cell phone while I was in the waiting room and asked if I’d gone to the andrology lab first. No? No one told me to do that?? So a nurse walked me through the maze of hospital hallways to a locked room where I showed my ID and confirmed the vial number. Then I had to wait another 45 minutes for it to thaw. Almost two hours past my appointment time, another nurse let me in to the lab where the procedure would happen. It was all women, and they were cheery about their job. When listing the potential risks, the nurse told me this could result in pregnancy and we both laughed. It was over in 15 minutes, ten of which I was just lying on a table in the room by myself imagining what was going on in my body. Again, I had to wait two weeks to see if it worked. I felt very hopeful. I was hopped up on hormones! The doctor put the sperm directly in my uterus! It was on 7/11, which seems like a lucky date! It was a full moon!
13 days later, on the new moon, another period started. Is this the outcome I would have dreamed up? No, but it will have to do, and I can keep trying.