Not to be

Her due date would have been May 7. She and Nico would have nearly been birthday twins. There would have been years of celebrating the pair of them together, of watching Daddy's little girl dictate the flavor of their joint birthday cakes, the same way Nico took over his big sister's birthday growing up.

This won't be our baby girl.

It took us seven cycles to make her. Our one, unique, perfectly scored female embryo. And that was it. That's all she'll ever be: a beautiful ball of cells, a reason that had made the full seven-cycle hellscape seem like it had been worth it And she's gone, and with it the hope, the light at the end of the tunnel.

I won't be a just-turned-40 kind of mom. I'll be a pushing-41 now, best case. It's so old, so selfish, so unfair to those poor future kids. If it happens at all. If we haven't just lit half a million dollars on fire for funsies.

The two weeks of hoping collapsed into a colossal headache around a normal chaotic workday. Brain implant technology can't wait for hearts to heal, and they don't care about how much sleep the engineers behind them might need to feel like functioning human beings. Instead of breaks to stare at the beautiful, single perfect bundle of cells that it had taken us seven cycles to make, I now get breaks to curl into a heap in vivarium hallways and sob into my facemask when no one is looking, hoping I don't accidentally swipe an eye with a gloved hand and rub Herpes B into my eyes.

Our fertility journey has been a story of swiping defeat from the jaws of victory: getting no-call PGT-A results on 4 of 23 embryos (expected in roughly 1% of tested embryos); seeing inexplicably high arrested development of embryos (up to 90% in one cycle, when the expectation is closer to 50%); taking seven cycles for what our doctor assured us would only need two, tops three. I'd ben thrilled to crawl out the other side at the end of 2024. I don't know why I'd expected the next stage to go any better, why I'd thought we could count on the stats: with a gestational carrier and a top-scored embryo, chances were better than not that we'd have that long-awaited pregnancy. As we've seen in our journey, the medical literature stats don't apply to us.