Meet Me In The Middle

IVF patients live in the ambiguity of hoping for the best and preparing for the worst, navigating failure and success at every turn. Alli Sim examines life in the in-between.

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Imagine you’re $100,000 in the hole on blackjack at Marina Bay Sands. Would you keep going or cut your losses? What if you finally hit the jackpot? For many who have invested time and their life savings to undergo fertility treatments such as IVF (invitro fertilisation) or IUI (intrauterine insemination), the journey is nothing short of a roller coaster ride backwards in the dark. At these high stakes, and with friends on their second or third child, it’s hard to not make subfertility your entire personality.

The duality of life is ever present for IVF warriors who daily will themselves to focus on the positives while bracing for the soul-crushing odds. To undergo fertility treatments is to live in a multiverse of realities at any given time. It’s where the sweetness of life is blunted by invasive check-ups, mood-swinging medications and bills—only to be soothed by daydreams of one day hearing your child giggle or call you mama.

In the same reality, each hormone injection is a shot of hope, and each egg retrieval procedure sees us counting our proverbial chickadees before they’re hatched, knowing full well of the abysmal attrition rate. There’s ‘girl math’ but perhaps the cruellest of all, IVF math where eggs retrieved during a stimulation don’t always equal to live, mature or fertilised eggs, let alone genetically euploid or ‘normal’ embryos.

During one stimulation cycle, embryologists shared that my batch of half-dozen eggs looked small and grey. Let’s just say if this was quality control Little Farms, they would not make the carton.