The post originally appeared here https://thebelladonnacomedy.com/when-carrie-bradshaw-froze-her-eggs-67bd70b973e2
How Do You Like Your Eggs?
Single New York women have typically preferred their eggs to be baked into a Magnolia Bakery cupcake. Now they’re choosing a much cooler option…
That’s how, one slow afternoon in early September, I found myself alone in my apartment, thinking about Big’s engagement, and staring at the fertility pamphlet Charlotte forced on me at brunch. She thought I should visit Manhattan’s premier fertility clinic to freeze my eggs before, as she said, “it’s too late.”
I was as likely to freeze my eggs as I was to fry eggs. The only thing I had made in my kitchen was a cosmopolitan.
Still, I was in a rut. In the five months since my Big breakup, he had moved to Paris and proposed to someone. I had gone on a dozen dates, had forgettable sex… and lost 10,000 eggs. Hard to see that as sunny side up.
But I wasn’t quite ready to freeze my assets. Maybe Samantha was right: The only injection I needed was “a daily dose of new man.”
I decided new Manolos, not ovaries, were the only pair I cared about at the moment, and went to buy the strappy sandals I’d been eyeing for a month. I ran into a music journalist I once exchanged flirty banter with at a restaurant opening. We made plans to meet at a jazz club on Thursday.
See, I thought, who needs estrogen and frozen eggs when I could have scatting and hot sex?
Thursday night arrived. Three hours with quite possibly the most arrogant man I’d ever dated and I bebopped hot sex right off the menu. There I was, walking home from another bad date, my new Manolos pinching my feet and the lingering pain from Big pinching my heart.
I couldn’t help but wonder… how bad could 10 days of hormone shots really be, after 20 years of pricks?
I made an appointment for the following week with fertility doctor to the stars, Dr. Graham. After a very personal exam from a very impersonal man, I learned my ovarian reserve was healthy.
That was supposed to be good news, but all I could think was what if my ability-to-trust-a-man reserve was empty?
I realized I might be waiting forever if I held off having children until I was in a healthy relationship, so I forked over a deposit equal to 8 pairs of Jimmy Choos and scheduled my start date. I figured, my love life might be scrambled, but my eggs don’t have to be.
A month later my bathroom was full of syringes and hormone vials. It had been 20 years since I took my first shot at love, and now I was cleaning my skin to inject my first shot of follicle stimulating hormone.
There I was about to give myself an injection of 175 international units of Menopur, when what I really needed was a daily shot of Men-who-can-actually-love-me — with an alcohol swab to prevent another Big-fection, and a sharps container to dispose of my past relationship needling.
Ten days later I was back in Dr. Graham’s office. Another day, another invasive ultrasound. My legs might have been wide open, but my heart felt completely closed.
While Dr. Graham recorded my growing follicle size, I had to wonder… was I preserving my reproductive potential, or my romantic potential? Should I be investing so much time and money into oocytes when I had no love IN sight?
What if the only thing that got cryopreserved was my belief in happily ever after?
A few days later I was resting post-retrieval in my Dolce kimono, my eggs out of me and in a freezer, while Miranda warmed up an old Cup Noodles for me she found in my cupboard. I felt a weight lifted — more than just having 16 full follicles emptied from my swollen body.
Then I had a thought… aren’t we all just one of a million follicles waiting to mature, in the giant ovary that is New York? And all it takes is one fertility clinic, seven ultrasound and bloodwork appointments, 20 hormone injections, $15,000, and three fabulous girlfriends to find your one good egg of a man.