I was sitting on the couch in my sweatpants, waiting for the phone to ring while pretending I wasn’t, when I got the call. “I’m so sorry, Annie,” my fertility nurse, Mio, said sympathetically. “Your embryo transfer didn’t work.”
I can’t tell you what Nurse Mio said next, exactly, or how I replied in return. That entire conversation was a blur. A year and a half earlier, after many unsuccessful months of trying to conceive naturally, I’d started in vitro fertilization (IVF), a grueling, needle-filled, multi-step process in which a fertility doctor pumps you or an egg donor full of hormones to create as many eggs as possible, then retrieves and fertilizes them with sperm to create embryos, and finally transfers one or two of those embryos back into your body in the hopes it will result in pregnancy two weeks later. To find out that my first transfer hadn’t worked, after all that, was heartbreaking.
But when Mio emailed me a few hours later with instructions on how to proceed, I finally felt a glimmer of hope. Not because she told me it was all a mistake and the transfer had worked after all (it hadn’t), or because she knew it would work next time (she didn’t), but because she’d given me a timeline: My husband Rahul and I didn’t need to be back at the fertility clinic for another three weeks.
“Sooo,” I asked him through a slew of sniffles. “Jamaica next week?”
Travel has always been my go-to tool for personal growth and healing. I even turned this passion into a career as a travel and wellness writer. So now, it feels only natural to lean on my love of globetrotting to help me through the pain of IVF—and, thankfully, both my career and good insurance have helped me afford to do so.
In the past two years, I’ve endured one failed IUI (artificial insemination), three egg retrievals, two failed embryo transfers, one canceled embryo transfer, and one laparoscopic surgery in which my doctor found endometriosis, not to mention all the months of trying naturally. Yet despite all the disappointments, I remain hopeful, thanks in large part to the therapeutic trips I’ve taken after each setback.
