‘So, I read somewhere that you shouldn’t start trying to conceive until you’ve been off birth control for a while,’ I said to the gynaecologist. ‘How long should I be off the Pill before I start?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t wait if I were you. You don’t have much time,’ she said snidely.
Ouch. I looked up from my note pad, where I’d been scribbling notes from our conversation, like ‘get a mammogram’ and ‘start taking pre-natal vitamins’. I’d been in the woman’s office for about 10 minutes and it felt like she was being… well, kind of a bitch.
‘Excuse me?’ I said. I felt like I’d gone to buy lipstick at a cosmetics counter and been offered plastic surgery.
‘You’re almost 41. You don’t have time to wait,’ she said again with a grim look in her eyes. I still wanted to know whether trying to conceive immediately after stopping the Pill could raise the chance of birth defects. (I later learned that that’s patently false – a woman’s fertility is often higher right after she goes off birth control.) But her comment was said with such finality, such disdain – and no actual medical facts to accompany it – that I just took my mammogram script and high-tailed it out of there.
I didn’t heed her advice. I suppose I was still fixated on the ‘first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a carriage’ thing – and I waited half a year until the month of my wedding to have unprotected sex. Lo and behold, a week or two after the nuptials, I discovered I was pregnant. Huzzah! I wanted to throw the positive pregnancy test in that smug gynaecologist’s face and say: ‘Who you callin’ old now, girl?'
But before I could make it to a doctor (a different one), I miscarried. Then I got pregnant again, then miscarried again. Over the next three and a half years, I moved from natural conception to assisted reproduction and IVF, and subsequently learned everything I never wanted to know about pregnancy, miscarriage, age and fertility. Alas, it was too late for me. Sure, I’d gained all this knowledge about the speed of fertility decline but, at 43, I was getting too old to have a baby.
It’s too painful to wonder what would have happened if that first gynaecologist had sat me down calmly and opened up some informative graphics to show how women’s fertility drastically declines with age – beginning at around 32, more rapidly after 37, then precipitously at 40.