Let me set the scene.
I am at a family wedding. Indian wedding, so picture six hundred people, ninety-seven aunties, four marquees, a buffet that could feed Phoenix for a week, and one Priya in a sari trying to refill her plate at the dessert station without being intercepted.
I was intercepted.
“Beta,” says Auntie Saroj, who is not my actual auntie but is somehow at every family event since 1998, “how long has it been now?”
“How long has what been, Auntie?”
“You know.”
I did know. I was being mean. I made her say it.
“The baby, beta. Married four years now, no?”
Four years, two months and eleven days, Auntie Saroj. Thank you for keeping count. I was struggling to.
I smiled. I told her we were trying. I went outside and stood next to the parking attendant and smoked a cigarette I didn’t even want because I needed three minutes where nobody was asking about my uterus.
PCOS. Polycystic ovary syndrome. I was diagnosed at 19. My periods came when they felt like it — sometimes three months apart, sometimes twice in one month, sometimes not at all. My weight fluctuated. I had acne well into my twenties. I had a fine moustache that I waxed every two weeks and pretended nobody noticed.
When Ravi and I got married, my gynae said, “It might be harder for you. But it’s not impossible.” She put me on Metformin. She talked about diet. She talked about exercise. She said if nothing happened in a year, we’d look at ovulation induction.
Nothing happened in a year.
Then nothing happened in two.
Then we did six rounds of Clomid. Six. Months of mood swings, hot flushes, the feeling of being a stranger inside my own skin. Two of those rounds I ovulated. The other four, nothing. The two I did ovulate? Nothing happened either.
Then we did Letrozole. Two rounds. Nothing.
Then we did IUI. We’ve done two so far. Both failed.
The maths is starting to get loud. R8,000 here. R12,000 there. R6,000 for scans. R3,500 for bloods. The expensive medical aid covers some of it badly and most of it not at all. My mother-in-law keeps offering us money and I keep refusing it because the day I take money from her is the day she gets to be in the room for every decision we make for the rest of our lives.
Ravi’s mother is fine, by the way. Lovely woman. It’s the offer of the money I can’t accept. There is no free money in a family like ours.
I want to talk about something specific, which is being South African Indian and infertile, because nobody talks about us.
My community is small. Everyone knows everyone. By the time I’m at a family event, every auntie at the function has been briefed on my situation by another auntie, who got it from my mother’s hairdresser, who got it from a woman who saw me at Dis-Chem buying ovulation strips.
The advice I have received from aunties includes:
– “You are too stressed. Stop being stressed.”
– “Eat more dates.”
– “Drink ghee in warm milk. My friend’s daughter did this for one month and conceived twins.”
– “Go to the temple. Pray to Lakshmi.”
– “Go to a different temple. Pray to Saraswati.”
– “Visit this swami in Verulam. He has helped many women.”
– “Stop using the laptop on your lap, it heats up the womb.”
– “Are you sure your husband is, you know, doing it properly?”
That last one was at the wedding. I told her yes, Auntie, he is doing it properly. We’ve been doing it properly for four years.
My mother is trying her best. She brings me dates without saying anything anymore. She has stopped asking. I love her for it. She has also stopped looking at me when babies are around, which I appreciate more than I can say.
I don’t have a tidy ending for you.
We’re starting IVF this winter. We’ve saved most of the money. My brother in Australia is paying for the medication because I finally let him. I cried when I told him we needed help and he said, “Priya, I have been waiting for you to ask,” and that was its own little heartbreak, that he had known the whole time.
I’m scared.
I’m scared of the injections. I’m scared of the egg retrieval. I’m scared of the failure of it, because I have seen now what failure does to me, and I do not know how many more rounds of it I have in me.
But I’m doing it. We’re doing it.
And if Auntie Saroj asks me one more time, I am going to tell her exactly how many millimetres my follicles measured at my last scan. I am going to make her sit down for it. I am going to ruin her dessert.
Priya, Phoenix
Inspired by real journeys — names and details changed.
Priya | Phoenix, KwaZulu-Natal | PCOS | Mid-journey
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