Second Place: Buying Time
The third day of injections, just after seven in the morning, I’m perched on the edge of an uncomfortable chair, tapping my boot against the tile, when suddenly the sterile artificiality of the waiting room becomes stifling. I notice the stiff, plastic orchids on the coffee table, white petals stained with pink bowing demurely as if bending under frost. Indistinct pop music emanates from speakers disguised as tree stumps. They would look surprisingly realistic but for the fact their thick, veiny bark is lacquered and shiny. An odd ceiling fixture diffuses the harsh fluorescent light into thin waves around the gray room of the fertility clinic, and it’s this unnecessary touch that unsettles me the most—false comforts to put us at ease while we wait and worry and wonder if by interfering with the cadences of life we are working with nature or against it.
Despite the soothing décor that looks like it came straight from the spa, everyone in the room, all women ranging from their late twenties to early forties, looks tired and vaguely annoyed. Sleep-deprived, smelling of rubbing alcohol, and otherwise drained from the constant prick of needles, I do too. Already my body feels swollen, bloated with hormones and concern. As I try to remember which arm had blood drawn most recently so that I can offer the other to the nurse for testing, I wonder, in the tense silence, what has brought them all here. Are they stimulating their ovaries to freeze their eggs before cancer treatment? Are they experiencing difficulty conceiving and now preparing for IVF? Or, are they like me—simply trying to buy more time?
*
A fixation on the passage of time has tormented me ever since I was a precocious seven or eight, when I first realized everyone, including myself, would eventually die. The memory is distinct—I was lying in my twin bed under the covers, thinking about how I was surrounded by darkness and that one day, all there would be is darkness. I wondered what became of the soul—how could existence simply evaporate in an instant? When I one day died, what would become of this very thought? Would it merely—cease?
Gripped by a suffocating fear, I rolled out of bed and looked for my dad in the other room, partly because I couldn’t be alone and partly because all of a sudden, I needed to make sure he was still there. He was snoring loudly, like a diesel truck choking up black smoke as it roars past you on the highway. I was relieved to find a sign of life. Shaking him awake, I said, “I can’t sleep.” He sat up, nodded sleepily to me.
He flicked on the dim shower light in the bathroom. From the cabinet under the sink, he retrieved a bright blue bottle of milk of magnesia and, eyeing the dosage line, poured out the cloudy, pink liquid into a plastic cup. “My stomach doesn’t hurt—I just can’t sleep,” I said, shuffling between my feet, cold against the marble floor.
“It’s the same thing,” he replied with a shrug, and I believed him because I was young and I believed everything my dad said. “It’s all just stomach acid.” The medicine was slightly sweet, but mostly tasted like chalk.
I lingered after I handed back the cup. “I don’t want to die,” I blurted out.
“You won’t. By the time you’re older, they’ll invent something,” my dad replied. It was quick as a canned response, but I accepted it without question.
“What about you?” I asked, feeling the panic rise in me again.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m always seventeen. I’ll live forever.” Although I was more skeptical this time and could tell he was placating me, I was satisfied with the answer. It was easier to believe him than to contemplate the alternative—an ending. I drifted into sleep under this belief that somehow, we would all live forever.
To this day, he likes to repeat that he doesn’t age—he’s forever frozen in time at seventeen, but he is in actuality a full forty years older than I am. And as we both age, every time I even contemplate an eventual ending, something deep inside of me breaks.
*
If there’s one milestone that stirs up whispers of egg freezing among women in New York, it’s turning thirty, but it wasn’t until I turned thirty-two, the same age my mom was when she brought me into this world, that I heeded my friends’ advice and truly considered it. Then, I was unmarried and single, living alone in a rent-stabilized studio in Brooklyn, working as a senior software engineer at a tech company. By thirty-two, my mom was married, employed as a VP at a bank, residing in downtown Manhattan with my dad in a one-bedroom condo they owned, and preparing to move into a house in the suburbs of New Jersey. Enumerated, the details of the contrast made me feel ashamed I was so behind in life progress, and although marriage is no longer a woman’s default life goal, if I wanted to have children one day, I couldn’t deny the ticking of the biological clock. This remained true even if the commonly accepted belief that I, as an Asian woman, wouldn’t show signs of aging until at least fifty deluded me into acting younger than I was.
At the first consultation, scheduled shortly after I turned thirty-three, a doctor I found online leaned back in her chair, folded her hands in her lap, and asked in a calm yet assertive voice how she could help. Likely in her late thirties or early forties, she looked crisp, professional, with a severe chestnut-brown bob that highlighted her hollowing cheeks. A corkboard hanging over her desk was pinned with pastel thank-you cards from past patients. Through crystal-clear glass windows, the downtown Brooklyn loomed behind her.
“I’m thinking about freezing my eggs,” I said, nervous, uncertain. Despite the articles I’d read and the fact my company was now offering reimbursement for fertility treatments, I was still on the fence. It was difficult to concretely imagine harvesting biological material from my ovaries, to imagine a part of myself existing outside of the body. Did I even want kids? I couldn’t yet picture myself in motherhood—caring for another living creature when I could barely assemble dinner for myself every night. Mechanically, she ran through a list of standard health questions until she said, “And are you single? Married?”
“I have a boyfriend,” I said, though boyfriend was not a term I had used to describe him before. I felt this was the simplest way to refer to him, the longtime friend I was now dating.
“And do you want to have children with him?”
“I think that’s the question, isn’t it? I’m not sure.”
Despite having a boyfriend I loved, our romantic relationship was in its infancy, and I wasn’t sure if we would eventually marry. I didn’t want to pressure him. After all, what relationship thrives under the duress of expediting childbearing? What I needed was more time to decide, and a backup plan in case it didn’t work out. I still felt vibrant with youth and health and vitality, but I believed once you hit your thirties, not only were you required to stretch before exercise and apply liberal amounts of anti-aging eye cream, you also had to start making intentional decisions and contingency plans. If he wasn’t the one, starting over could leave me out of time.
“I see,” the doctor replied with a no-nonsense neutrality. Turning to her computer, she called up a slide deck to explain the process: I would inject myself with hormones for ten-twelve days and come in for monitoring about every other day. The hormones stimulated the ovaries to mature more eggs than usual. Once the eggs were matured and released from their follicles, I’d endure a minor surgical procedure to retrieve them. “Based on your age and your follicle count, you can probably expect sixteen-eighteen eggs. You have some time,” she added, tilting her head slightly, “think it over and let us know.”
I listened as attentively as I could, but at the mention of needles, I started reeling. I couldn’t fathom the hand steadiness and lack of squeamishness required to give myself repeated shots in the stomach. More trivially, as I considered the cost of the process afterward, I was upset I’d need to sacrifice exercise and limit my caffeine intake for two weeks. I mourned for not being able to do things the natural way, for not having simply met “the one” young and starting a family immediately. I was angry at the injustice of being a woman and needing to be concerned with the biological clock at all. Why was it that in addition to the everyday burden of being a woman, we also had to put our bodies through so much mental and physical toil in the name of childbearing?
But bemoaning the state of womanhood would not halt the march of time. It would not help me personally make the right call. The doctor was right—I had some time, but not a lot. Once ripples of layoffs began in the tech industry, I decided, despite my reservations and fears, speed was essential. What was a sacrifice of two weeks in comparison to a chance of having more time? I scheduled the cycle for early February, praying I wouldn’t lose my job (and therefore my fertility benefits) before then.
*
Mostly I found it difficult to imagine rising to the occasion of parenthood because in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, at thirty years old, lonely, depressed, I moved back home with my own parents. At the time, even though everyone in the city I knew was doing the same, I felt embarrassed by my decision to return. I didn’t have my own nuclear family to hunker down with. I had friends, but no one close enough to consider forming a pod. Going home felt like admitting I couldn’t make it on my own, but after I held out for five months, living utterly alone and only seeing a handful of people when we were all masked and outdoors, I simply couldn’t do it any longer.
In July, my dad drove his Subaru into the city and picked me up in Brooklyn. We both donned N95 masks as I packed two bags into the trunk. We didn’t say much as we headed for New Jersey. I was relieved and grateful to see my parents finally, but also ashamed that once again, I needed my dad to come to my rescue, that I still needed rescuing. It occurred to me as I gazed out the window, watching the highway barriers blur by, one day he wouldn’t be able to.
My dad was seventy then, though he didn’t and still doesn’t look his age. His hair is speckled with gray, but predominantly dark and full. The skin on his face is barely wrinkled, and he maintains a fearless, can-do attitude toward everything—this, I think, is his secret to staying young. He routinely returns home with mysterious scabs on his legs and arms because he’s been out doing chores he shouldn’t—climbing ladders to clean the gutters, chopping up old trees in the yard, turning fallen branches into mulch with a woodchipper. “You have to tell us when you’re doing these things,” my mom will chide him, examining his wounds, her voice full of concern. “It could get infected!” Imagining himself invincible, my dad will shake his head and dismiss our pleas that he visit a doctor.
For months, at home, working remotely from the desk I used in high school, I let myself follow a schedule my parents dictated. They cooked dinner and sometimes lunch, and I cleaned up around the house, much like I did as a kid. We mostly stayed inside out of caution, except for the one day a week we made a trip to Wegmans, where my dad regularly bought what he called “sins”—glazed cinnamon rolls, flaky croissants, fresh apple turnovers. “What’s life without a little sin?” he’d say whenever I shook my head and questioned his additions to the cart.
I didn’t realize at the time, but during that phase of the pandemic, he must have reached an inflection point in his life, realizing he could deprive himself of treats to follow the doctor’s orders to eat healthily and exercise, or he could choose to enjoy whatever time he had left. We passed the days watching the rising and falling density of infections on a heat map, and I could tell from his conservatism about leaving the house he was worried even if he wasn’t showing outward signs of panic. Indulging in sins was what kept him sane. Meanwhile, sleeping in my old twin bed, surrounded by the trophies and artwork of my childhood, I felt like I was living in a time capsule—a place where time didn’t really pass, so I could indulge in the fantasy that time had in fact frozen.
*
When day one of my period arrived, I called the fertility clinic. Monitoring started the next morning. After a brief stint in the waiting room, I was moved along the factory line of women—a nurse took my blood, my doctor performed an ultrasound, and then I was home within twenty minutes. My fertility, the fate of future unborn children all procedurally rote to the staff.
That night, alone in my apartment, heart pounding, I inhaled deeply as I swabbed my stomach with an alcohol wipe ahead of the first shot. I had dialed the Gonal pen until the window showed the correct dosage. I had added the solvent with a mixing needle to the vials of Menopur powder before drawing the liquid up into a syringe and attaching the injection needle. But now the needles and I were in a standoff. As I sat on my couch, casually hyperventilating, whole body vibrating with trepidation, I didn’t think I could go through with it.
But this was it—this was my chance. If I backed out now, I’d waste thousands of dollars, more if I counted the time lost. I pinched a section of stomach fat tightly between my fingers and held my breath. I had to be brave—only I could do this for myself. I positioned the first needle against the flesh. It felt like a pinprick. A tiny droplet of blood formed. I held it steady there for a moment, scared of pain, scared of my body. Steeling myself to continue, I guided the thin needle in slowly and was shocked when I saw it was entirely inside my stomach. I had been pinching the roll of fat so tightly, I couldn’t feel anything else. Once I depressed the plunger to deliver the medicine, I slowly removed the needle from my body. There was a pinhole puncture where it had been, slightly pink and tender, but otherwise fine. It was over. I had done it. With a sigh of relief, I twisted the needle off the injection pen and celebrated the small victory that was managing to give myself a shot without passing out.
For nine more days, I repeated the process, giving myself up to three shots a day by the end of the cycle. My body felt sluggish and bloated and like I was at constant risk of leaking mysterious fluids whenever I went for a walk. Giving myself injections wasn’t as painful as I’d feared, but I was so exhausted and irritable I didn’t want anyone, not even my boyfriend, to see me, though I did make him the exception.
Only once did I mess up. One night, when my boyfriend was over, I had drawn up the medication into the syringe, but despite tapping for several minutes, the bubble fixed to the top of the chamber wouldn’t disappear. I was tired and anxious about giving myself a shot in front of him, not wanting to reduce myself to mere biology, so I went ahead and inserted it into my stomach anyway. When I removed it, the syringe was full of bright crimson.
“Crap,” I muttered under my breath. A glob of blood formed around the injection site, which now stung like I was being attacked repeatedly by a wasp. Panicking, I hastened to apply pressure with a tissue, my boyfriend watching from a respectful distance, alarm in his eyes. I held the tissue there, breathing deeply to calm my nerves, to brush away the worry that I’d botched the dosage and had irrevocably altered the course of the cycle. When the bleeding finally subsided, my boyfriend folded his arms around me. “That was intense,” I said, blinking back tears. As he comforted me, tracing an invisible line down my back with his finger, I sensed a shift in his demeanor. It was as though, seeing the intensity of the process, he realized just how determined I was to secure my own future. It was as though he saw finally, as much as we as urban New York millennials pretended we had all the time in the world to decide on our futures, our lives—our relationship—were serious.
*
In the process of installing a password manager on my parents’ computers the weekend before I begin the egg freezing cycle, I notice a folder on my dad’s computer titled “reverse aging.” I don’t bother clicking on it—I know it contains the research my dad, a lifelong learner and self-proclaimed YouTube scientist, has been collecting about ways to reverse the aging process. His obsession with it is the first real acknowledgment he’s made that he himself is actually aging. Going through the contents would only remind me neither of us can really play any longer into the illusion he’ll live forever.
He's become an ardent supporter of Dr. David Sinclair of Harvard, who studies reverse aging and has been taking metformin as a supplement since his thirties, and, who despite being in his fifties, purportedly has the biological age of a thirty-something. After my dad discovered my mom was taking metformin to treat her Type II diabetes, my dad started too, without telling her. And after she complained to him about her dwindling supply, he took to ordering the supplement through a doctor online. “You should start taking it now, too,” he says to me at dinner. He’s already started promoting metformin to his siblings and friends, telling them it’s the cure for aging.
“Maybe you should go to your actual doctor,” I reply.
“You know your dad—he doesn’t listen,” my mom says. “My doctor told me to cut down from four to two metformin a day, but your dad says I should double it.”
“Regular doctors only care about treating symptoms. These doctors are different—they prevent aging because aging is what causes sickness.” I shrug and roll my eyes at him, because I’ve become skeptical about most things he says, but I can’t help but wonder if he’s onto something or if he’s just trying to comfort himself about aging by asserting some semblance of control.
“His hair’s been looking darker! In the back—can you tell?” my mom asks.
“You know me, always seventeen,” he repeats, which makes me smile even though the joke is stale.
When I look, I’m surprised but pleased that it does. Like anyone, I want to believe there’s a way to reverse time, or even just stop it. I want to believe in the famed Fountain of Youth that Ponce de Leon once searched the world for. I want to have all the time in the world with my parents because I know, however lucky I am and have been to have had them for this long, it will never be enough.
*
The morning of egg retrieval, awash in anxiety and anticipation, I rock gently back and forth on a chair in the waiting room of the fertility clinic. Because monitoring hours are over, there’s only a pair of women—sisters, I think—waiting with me. The one wearing the oversized sweater shuffles off to the recovery room to change and the other squeezes her hand, wishes her luck, and says she’ll be there when it’s done. I’m struck by a pang of regret and loneliness. Feigning bravery, not wanting to burden anyone else, and compelled to prove to myself I could do this alone, I decided to check in by myself, but now I’m doubting my choice. Watching the other women’s display of solidarity, I realize there are certain times in your life, no matter how old you are, no matter how stupid and childish it feels, you’ll just want your parents to sit with you and say everything will be okay.
I comfort myself with the thought that at least my own sister will pick me up. Although my boyfriend offered to do the honors, it feels more fitting to have him sit this one out—this act is an assertion of female independence.
In the recovery room, a nurse hands me a gown and anti-slip socks and tells me to undress behind the curtain. I wince when the anesthesiologist jams a needle into the crook of my arm, and he assures me, with a grin, that it’ll be the most pain I feel all day. Soon enough, I’m in the procedure room, lying down on the bed. The anesthesiologist secures a mask with a tube over my nose and mouth.
“You’re going to feel like you’ve had two drinks,” he says.
“I’ve only ever had one at a time,” I say, which is true because I don’t like to drink. I hear him laughing as I drift into sleep, and the next thing I know, I’m in the recovery room again, listening to the pulse rate monitor beside me beep.
“You’re done,” the nurse says, gently, wrapping a Velcro cuff around my arm to take my blood pressure.
“Already?” I shake off the wooziness and the room slowly comes into focus. Aside from light cramping and cold feet, it feels like nothing happened while I was out. When the nurse returns with a heat pack, she tells me the news: They were able to retrieve nine eggs.
“Nine?” I repeat. I try not to fixate, but egg freezing is a numbers game.
“Is something wrong?” she asks when I’ve been quiet for a few minutes.
“I’m just processing the number.”
“Eight to ten is average,” she says, comfortingly, and I fight the urge to retort that I’m anything but average. It’s half the number of eggs I wanted and what my doctor predicted, but nine is still decent—a lucky number in Chinese culture, as my dad later tells me. For a moment, as I apply the heat pack and spoon bland applesauce into my mouth, I think about the significance of what I’ve just done and feel a swell of emotion as I wipe a tear from my eye: I’m proud of myself for having the courage to go through with the process and taking this step for my future. Whatever happens next in my career or with my boyfriend or in my family, that is nine chances, nine ways I have taken control of the unpredictable direction of life, nine possibilities that have given me the probabilistic gift of more time.
-Tracy Lum
Tracy Lum is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work has appeared in Polygon, Bustle, and Shenandoah Literary Magazine, among others. Her essay “An American Name” was featured as a Notable in the Best American Essays 2022. She is currently working on a multigenerational family drama that begins in New York’s Chinatown in the 1950s and explores the role of rumors and secrets in the Asian diaspora over the subsequent generations.