Stick a Needle in my Ear

The desperation of infertility

I have reached the point of desperation in my infertility saga where I’m now paying $80/hour to have a guy named Gary stick needles in my ear. 

As I lie on the crinkly white paper on his treatment table with pillows supporting my head and knees, Gary, my acupuncturist, inserts long needles in my wrists, belly, shins, elbow-pit, and the tops of my feet. This treatment pattern is designed to reduce my anxiety, he explains, as he stabs five more needles into the cartilage of each of my ear lobes. My anxiety isn’t buying it as I tense my whole body and wince with each poke. I’m trying hard not to give in to my fear, though; this is supposed to be a zen experience. 

Once the needles have been placed and I’m lying on the table looking like a dog that got quilled by a porcupine, Gary positions a heat lamp over my feet, switches on a white noise machine, and closes the door, leaving me alone to relax for an hour. This is the best and the worst part: lying immobilized in an empty room with zero distractions, my brain running its hamster wheel as I close my eyes and try to focus on my breath. I hear the sound of cars on the wet road outside, and dogs barking on the first floor (which seems weird because it’s a gym). I start planning the next three months of my life and then remind myself that I’m supposed to be meditating, or whatever you’re supposed to do while the needles do their thing. I let my eyes grow heavy and drift into a glorious state of half-sleep, like waking up Saturday morning and glancing at the clock and rolling back over because you don’t have any reason to get up. 

I have no idea what the needles do, actually. Gary checked my pulse and explained to me with his gentle voice in language I’ll call clinical-woo something about cleansing my liver and spleen, and it was both too technical and too out-there for me to grasp. Do I really need to know how it works or why, I wondered? Or can I just show up and get poked every week, and in doing so, my body will figure out how to get pregnant and stay pregnant?

My acupuncture experiment feels like yet another indignity on the road to having-a-baby-at-all-costs. It’s a physical and financial sacrifice in pursuit of a dream that will determine the course of my life: will I get to be a mom, and someday a grandma? Will my children share my DNA? Or will I exhaust my options and spend the next 40 years alone with my husband and dogs?

If I’m being honest, an $80 a week massage would be a much nicer way to get my body to relax. But I don’t have $80 a week for a massage, and I’m trying to justify acupuncture as yet another necessary fertility treatment that’s not covered by insurance. I never would have considered it if not for a friend I respect telling me it helped her, and I’m lucky enough that Gary is the husband of another friend I trust. I remember when I first became friends with Gary’s wife Marissa, Gary had been away for four years studying Chinese medicine in New York. When he graduated, he opened his practice in our small rural town, bringing Eastern treatments to northern New Hampshire. By all counts, I’m lucky to have him here, and I have the utmost respect for his training and expertise, even if I don’t understand it. Gary is a talented and industrious guy: according to his website, he worked as a mechanic on Navy submarines in Hawaii, then moved to Colorado to become a blacksmith and iron forger, and then to New Hampshire where he built timber-frame houses. He’s also a drummer in several local bands. I figure if Gary can forge iron and turn trees into houses and troubleshoot the nuclear reactor on a sub and keep a sick beat on a drum kit, he’s exactly the kind of person I trust to distill thousands of years of Oriental wisdom into a treatment plan for my ailing uterus. 

In what seems like an eternity and a nanosecond, Gary knocks on the door to signal that my time is up. He pulls the needles out of my body, and I’m grateful that from my prone position I can’t actually see this happening. He turns off the white noise machine and the heat lamp and hands me my socks. I sit up and pull my loose sweatshirt and sweatpants down over my forearms and calves and put my socks back on. I steady myself against a wave of dizziness before sliding off the table onto the footstool and the carpeted floor. I shuffle out to the reception area to put another $80 on my credit card and schedule for next week. How many sessions will it take, I wonder? And how much do I invest in this before I move on?

That’s the thing about wanting a baby: it’s a dream that is priceless. And for those of us who aren’t lucky enough to get one the free and fun way, none of the remaining options are cheap or easy. A few rounds of fertility treatments could pay for a new car. The same is true of adoption or egg donation, and both of those processes take months or years to complete while grieving the loss of a genetic connection with one’s offspring. There are no quick fixes; no easy solutions. Just one hard, painful, desperate sacrifice after another, with no guarantee of success. 

I know only this: if a miracle happens and a year from now I’m holding my baby in my arms, it will all be worth it.