Day 10: The Waiting Room

I am now taking 250 mg of Levaquin daily. I was supposed to start taking them Tuesday, but we didn't get a reminder from FTC, so I started on Wednesday night. According to the yellow stickers on the side of the bottle, I should "AVOID prolonged or excessive exposure to direct and/or artificial SUNLIGHT," "drink plenty of WATER," and "USE CARE" [sic on the allcaps] when operating machinery while on this medication. I guess this explains why I was so thirsty last night when I went to bed.

Leah went back to the doctor yesterday for more blood work and another ultrasound. Very exciting news. The blood work apparently came back fine, since we never heard from the doctor. The ultrasound revealed ten to fifteen follicles on each ovary, measuring between 10 and 12 millimeters. Leah's ovaries look like blackberries on the ultrasound.

In the past, we've tried to schedule our appointments at FTC in the late afternoons. That way, Leah doesn't have to find a substitute and I can join her and hold her hand through everything. Also, I have Burger Time on my cell phone, and she likes to play it while we wait. Because we're in an in vitro cycle, they have been scheduling our appoitments for early in the morning, and I haven't been able to leave work for a handful of them.

The waiting room at FTC is an interesting place, and Leah and I both have different experiences with them. The waiting room can seat twelve or fifteen people comfortably, even though I've never seen that many people in there at once. Patients can sit on a bench or one of the handful of chairs behind the bench. There's another large flat-panel television against the wall, but none of the seats actually face the screen. There's a large coffee table between the chairs assuring that no one has to come close to anyone else. A collection of anodyne magazines sprawl across the coffee table: People, Time, Businessweek, Good Housekeeping. Right now, about a third of the magazines have Barack Obama on the cover. To find someone reading the magazines is exceedingly rare.

Across from the seats is an enclave gently lit by track lighting with the array of slide-the-bead-along-the-wire toys I remember from my pediatrician's office. There's also a large toy box. This is one of the few places in the entire office that acknowleges the existence of children. Occaisonally a patient will bring one or two of their adorable children in and they'll be more interesting in playing than watching the children's movie on the television, which I think is a good sign about the kinds of parents this process produces.

Sitting the the waiting room at FTC usually reminds me of when I used to ride the bus, or when the few times that I have had the opportunity to take the subway in New York or elsewhere. Everyone is wearing a blank stare into nothing, and no one is talking to one another. Sometimes partners will talk to each other (Leah and I chatter constantly), but there's no cross-conversation, even though everyone knows why everyone else is there.

When Leah looks around the waiting room, she's jealous. She's jealous of the parents who already have kids, and brought them with them. She thinks these parents are being greedy and should be happy with the gifts they already have. She looks at the women who don't have children with them and knows that only 50 percent of them are going to be pregnant once their done, and hopes that she's on the right side of the actuarial table.

I look at the men when they're there. I study their faces for the kind of discomfort and nervousness that I hope I'm hiding. I try and see whether they are annoyed with their wives for roping them into this expensive proposition when there's nothing wrong with them. I look at their bodies and see if there's anything we have in common--if there's some common feature we share.

The women are almost always older than Leah; women who are fighting their biology and making one last stab at having a child of their own. They are frequenly busy and tired-looking. They check their Blackberries or sometimes their Wi-Fi equipped laptops while they wait. The younger women fall into two types. The first look middle class like us, and seem as nervous as we feel. They often bring their mothers or grandmothers to write the large checks that follow. When they walk through the enterance, we look at each other compassionately until they sit down and we ignore one another almost completely.

The other young women come alone and are immediately ushered in to the office proper. They are younger than Leah, probably in their early twenties. They are thin and pretty and usually blond. They come in wearing sweatpants with their university or sorority letters embroidered on their seats. Their hair is tied up in ponytails. It's hard not to think that these women are egg donors. Their apperance is rare but noticed.

When Leah's alone in the waiting room, I wonder how she sits. Is she uncomfortable? Is she watching Harry and the Hendersons or Cheaper By the Dozen 2 on the television? She's not reading the magazines. I like to imagine her calm and confident, pushing up her sleeve for the next blood draw.