The Ghost in My Third Bedroom

An essay about infertility

CHAPTER 1

I’m writing from a hotel room just outside of Duluth, with a white noise machine blaring. I pack it, usually, for the dogs, but tonight I need it for a different reason. The toilet in my hotel room runs every five minutes or so. The shower drips. The AC has an uneven tone to it, like the sound of a wave, except it’s a metal, mechanical sound. Bzzt, it crescendos, Tzzb, it decrescendos. I asked at the front desk about a different room, and before moving all my things, the front desk attendant offered to let me look in another room. “They’re all the same,” she said with a shrug. “With their own problems.” I did check two others out, and both did, indeed, have their own problems, so I stuck with the one at the end of the hall, far from the pool and the sounds of breakfast.

One of my dogs, the oldest, lies on the floor in front of the white noise machine, like you or I might in front of a window. I wonder if the sound is comforting to him, familiar. It normally runs in my house all day and all night. It’s the sound he hears when he sleeps, the sound he hears echoing in my bedroom when I’m not there. My youngest dog is curled in a ball at my feet, snoring. And my middle dog, who passed a few months ago in the middle of chemo, sits in a picture frame on my bedside table.

I’m thinking of a woman who I recently met at a fancy restaurant bar. “It must be glamorous,” she said of my life on the road. Fulfilling, yes. Glamorous, no. “Does it get lonely?” she asked me as she took a sip of her cocktail that had a single slim ice cube in it.

**

At home, in a house I once thought was my forever home, I feel lonely sometimes. There are three bedrooms, specifically chosen for the idea that one day, maybe, I would have a child. In 2023, I wanted a child badly enough that I thought I might try to have one alone. The problem–and it’s a big problem–is that in order for me to have children who don’t share the gene that gave me cancer at 34, I would need to zap out half the embryos. This in and of itself is a problem, sure, but there are two other problems with this: the cost of the test to determine which of those embryos needed to be tossed and the fact that my egg reserves were lower than other women my age.

In 2023, a doctor laid out a piece of paper in front of me and did the math. At the top, she started with all the eggs. Then she narrowed those eggs down to how many embryos I might have, drawing little lines like you might for a family tree. She X-ed some out because it is unlikely that they would all be viable. Then she X-ed out half the embryos again, assuming 50% carried the gene, and in the end, I was left with 1.5 viable embryos, or as she put it, “One or two shots.”

“Now, you might have more than that,” she said, “Or–”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence, “I might not have any.”

“Right,” she said. “But then we could do another round of egg retrieval.”

When I got home, I sat in an empty room that would eventually become my office and imagined it as a nursery. I was 31, and like all things in my life, I didn’t want to wait for a partner or a spouse to do the things I wanted to do. I wanted the baby.

**

When I weighed the decision of whether I would try or not, I found myself in infertility Facebook groups and talking to infertility organizations. I wanted to hear stories of people who had conceived with low odds and people who hadn’t. The people who had been successful called their babies miracles. When I asked them in direct messages if they would do it all over again, they said, “Yes.” The havoc wreaked on their bodies, the rounds and rounds of IVF that made them feel on the edge of insanity, the cost was all worth it. “‘Do it,” they said, hoping their miracle was contagious and would pass onto me.

The other women, the ones who did not conceive, their stories were ones of counting down the embryos until there were zero. Their stories were about rounds of those same difficult treatments, all the hormones going into their body to prepare for a child and then… nothing. Many of them told me they took out loans or accumulated credit card debt for the chance at a child that did not come. These women didn’t want to tell me, “Don’t do it.” They wanted me to have hope. But when I asked them, “Would you do it all over again if you had a choice?” all of them said, “No.”

How do I weigh these two very disparate things? Do I, like optimists, hope to be in the minority? Or, do I hear my doctor inform me that after multiple rounds of egg retrieval my chances of conception are probably below 30% and say, “I’m going for a VERY EXPENSIVE miracle?” I am sure there are other women who would have tried to have a moonshot baby, but I’m a person who has never stepped foot in a casino. I’ve never bought as much as a pull tab, never bet on a single horse. I don’t play the game when I know the odds.

In the fall of that year, my fallopian tubes came out. I entered a clinical trial to see if fallopian tube removal prevents ovarian cancer in a high-risk population.

For months before the surgery, I traveled the country and stopped into every boutique children’s store I saw. At one, in Portland, there were matching outfits for mothers and daughters. I remember the way it felt to see one where both outfits were covered in teeny, tiny strawberries. I have always dressed a bit like Ms. Frizzle and always hoped to have matching leather jackets with a baby–how twee, how silly, how fun.

With a tiny dress in my hand, the tears pooled in my eyes in the store, and the woman who worked the front asked me, “Has it been hard?” She meant conceiving, and I didn’t know how to tell her that it was a different kind of pain. It wasn’t the pain of trying. It was the pain of, “There’s really no point in trying at all.” How do you grieve something you didn’t even try for?

When my fallopian tubes were removed, my ability to conceive naturally was carved out of my body. And for why? To maybe save my life. I remember when I woke up from the surgery, there was a feeling of loss. I hadn’t been greedy, hoping for four or five children. I had just wanted one. I felt her in the room, hanging out like a ghost.

**

My ovaries were still inside of me, but with each year, the eggs diminished. I found myself in a house I bought for a child I likely would never have, in the school district I wanted my kid to be in, by the playground I used to walk to with kids I nannied because it was my favorite one. It has always felt a little bit like it was haunted by a ghost. I changed my dating profile to be as clear as I could about this, with phrases like, “I can’t have kids, but I’d love to meet yours!” Still, I found myself on dates with so many men who wanted children that it baffled me.

I told each of them the truth. I would try. I would. But under circumstances that felt impossible. They needed to be able to afford IVF, or have a benefit for it at work, and I wanted to stay home for the first few years of the child’s life. In this economy, there aren’t many people who fit that bill, and so we often went our separate ways if someone wanted children.

Then, two things happened at the same time.

The first is that I met someone named Devon* and they said to me, “There’s something I haven’t told you, and I feel bad for not telling you.” Sitting across from each other, they confessed, “I think I want to raise a child.”

*Devon uses he and they pronouns, and so you will see both used here.

I felt like a balloon that had been shot with a dart and instantly burst open. I was living in Groundhog Day. Then, it went from I think I want to, to, I want to. It was something I had heard before. Being face to face with a woman who can’t or likely can’t makes people really think about what they want. I don’t blame them. I have been a conduit for more men than I’d like to admit, finally realizing they want children. It is a painful thing to experience, your supposed inability to have children being the reason another person decides, “Yes, this is the beautiful life I want to live.”

When I told Devon the spiel I had given so many times, it now hurts to say, they did not say, “No.” They said a very sensible, “Let me run the numbers.”

The second thing that happened is that I went into chemo-induced menopause, with my ovaries shut down, maybe to restart again, and maybe not.

These two things happened at the same time. Like maybe I was so close to a dream that was always destined to die.

---

CHAPTER 2

I kept dating during my cancer treatment. It was a distraction from the hard things going on, but it also just made me feel normal. I changed how I dated during this time. I swiped left and right not on hotness but based on, “Do I think that this person could handle the cancer?”

Before I gave people my phone number, I told them all I had cancer. Most people with cancer wait longer, but I felt like I wanted to know immediately if this was something they could handle. I expected most of them to tell me that they did not want to go out on a date with me. But the only person who ever told me that was the person I was dating at the time I was diagnosed.

Every date I went on with a person who seemed unafraid of my cancer was one I took seriously. In many ways, this was a deeply unsexy time in my life. I was fatigued. I lost over half my hair. I puffed up all over. I was “toxic” much of the time, meaning no one could kiss me. But every single person who said things like, “Fine by me,” or just simply, “I’m sorry that’s going on. Not a dealbreaker,” was someone I felt drawn to. These were people who could do in sickness. People who can do in sickness are spouse material.

I went on dates with a variety of people during this time, like a man who brought flowers to the first date and then told me he missed me two days later, leaving me baffled. There was a librarian who spent the entire date talking about his fancy, vintage jacket from Japan and telling me about low-calorie swaps for Reese’s. There was a bisexual illustrator who worked in weapons. I had to ask them to repeat where they worked, because I was sure I misheard. Finally I had to admit, “I can’t date someone who illustrates manuals for… war criminals.”

There was a man seven years my junior who I took for pizza in the suburbs. While we waited for it, he wrapped his arms around me and put his chin on my head. He joked that if I lost my hair, he would call me Cailou, and while most people might think this crass, I found it endearing. He didn’t give a shit if I was going to lose my hair. The problem was that our lives were so different, there was no way to join them.

There was a real, actual shaman who I went on seven dates with until I finally said, “Oh my god, why don’t you touch me?” He sent a multiple-page long worded document about why he did not touch me. SEVEN PAGES. I did not read past the first paragraph, which told me all I needed to know to confirm this man was not my husband.

Then, there was a man who was seemingly written into the universe for me. He was a blue-collar communist who managed all aspects of a building at a retirement home. He wanted to move to the country, found the city overwhelming, read constantly, and he drove a truck. He wore flannel and rock t-shirts to every date. He sent me selfies from the roof he was fixing or a thumbs-up next to a boiler or photos of the meals he cooked every single night in a tiny, crappy kitchen. He was sober, but he smoked like a chimney. When I told people about him, they laughed. More than one person said, “That’s your husband.” One friend said, “Is this a fantasy? Did you make this guy up?” I didn’t. He was real. And being beside him felt good.

There was just one problem. On every date I was on with him, I thought about Devon.

**

Devon and I met outside on a patio when it was still technically winter. It was a patio that was open, mostly, year-round at Hai Hai. The patio butted up against the bar on one side, with windows that would open, so I felt safe dining there without a mask during the early days of treatment. The day we met, we weren’t the only people on the patio. It was forty degrees out, and people around town knew that Hai Hai was the place to go. The patio was covered, so there was no snow, while most other patios were waiting to “dry out.”

I was less than a week out of my second chemo, in a precious window where I tried to protect my mouth from things like heavily fried foods (they could cut open my cheeks) or spicy food (it could cause mouth sores). When Devon ordered, he wanted a spiiiicy dish of cauliflower and fried chicken. I didn’t tell them about my mouth, I just said yes. Sitting across from him felt like both a mix of being with someone familiar and someone altogether foreign to me. I couldn’t read them, but conversation flowed. We talked about his father who had cancer–and then my cancer. We were both bisexual, so we talked about that. Operation Metro Surge had just ended, and for both of us, we had given so much of our time to fighting it, we were navigating how to live our lives again. He still had a whistle around his neck, that’s how fresh it was.

At the end of the date, we hugged and went our separate ways. I was composing a text message to them about how I wasn’t sure if they were interested, but if they were, I would like to go on another date. Before I could send it, he had texted me. He said he had forgotten the plant he wanted to give me in his car. He said that he would give it to me next time. That was clear enough for me. I deleted my text.

**

Devon and I didn’t really date the way I was used to. We kind of meshed lives. On our third date, we went to trivia with my friends. On our sixth date, I went over to their friend’s Easter party and participated in the most competitive egg hunt I ever experienced. I took him bowling with my best friend, who usually had harsh things to say about my dates. Instead, here, there were only glowing reviews. I cooked for him and invited his friends over for brunch when the first ramps of the season poked up from the ground. I made them quiche, a crisp of last season’s peaches and blueberries, and bacon from my favorite farmer.

Before we had been dating for a month, my dog died. They came over with flowers, saying goodbye by kissing his forehead. And then he came with me to a wedding seven weeks into dating. I didn’t know how to refer to him, so I just called him “Devon.” The next day, my cat died. I felt like all around me, my life was falling apart. In a hard year, they were a bright spot. I always looked forward to seeing them, always left feeling better than when I arrived.

When it was just us, we watched Married at First Sight Australia, which we started like a prayer on our fifth date. The prayer? Maybe we can stay together long enough to finish this together. I took them with me on restaurant review visits. We watched television in his basement while he bench pressed and squatted multiple hundreds of pounds. In some ways, we moved at a glacial pace, not kissing for many dates–and in others, we moved fast enough that it might throw someone who is afraid of commitment into a panic attack. Our relationship bloomed around things other than the physical. It bloomed around both of us trying to figure out what a life might look like together.

Normally, I dated people with a lot more distance, in bite-sized timestamps, at distinct locations. 90 minutes in a restaurant. Two hours in a coffee shop. An hour at a market. It took a long time for me to let someone into my home. It had been almost two years since someone stayed the night at my house. To date this way was foreign to me, and I was doing it as my life fell apart. It was vulnerable and tender, for this to happen at such a hard time in my life.

I was falling for Devon–and I was worried that the failure of my body would doom it from the outset. Sitting across from them at A Bar of Their Own, tears in both of our eyes as we discussed the potential of breaking up over this whole mess about kids, I felt the pull to be a mother again. It was one of the things I kept feeling since I was diagnosed. All around me, my life was breaking, and still I yearned for a child. Cancer made me want that more. Made me hunger for it more. It was so early for these conversations, but that’s dating in your thirties. Sometimes, you have to get down to brass tax and figure these things out before anyone gets too attached.

After meeting Devon, that desire to be a mom came out of the place I buried it like it was a zombie. I called friends in tears, telling them about how haunted I felt by motherhood. Two offered to give me their embryos after they went through IVF. Another said, “Look, if you want it this badly, you should try.” Someone else said, “Okay, let it out, you have to cry about this.” And a very dear friend said, “You made that decision because you knew how hard the road was.” It was true, but aren’t all hard roads easier to walk with someone else than alone?

In the end, Devon and I broke up for reasons unrelated to children before we finished that season of Married at First Sight. There wasn’t really a question about what was next: we decided to be friends. Dating them during my cancer was one of my biggest bright spots–and getting to deepen my relationship with them as a friend has been a bright spot, too. It wasn’t meant to be like this, but in infertility there is sometimes a window where you realize someone was your last shot to have children. Usually, it’s age, but in this case, it was ability. I left the relationship feeling sure about the death of this dream, with a clock counting down: the clock for when my doctors wanted my ovaries out. “A year,” my doctor said, “Max.” Then, like an afterthought, “The sooner the better.”

Another, different doctor said, “It would probably be best for the uterus to go, too, so we can be done with this cancer nonsense.” The way he said it, “Cancer nonsense,” was so deeply unserious and deathly serious at the same time. The one thing I ever waited for a partner for was delaying my preventative double mastectomy in the hopes that I would be able to find my life partner before cutting off my breasts and reducing my desirability in the dating pool. And now I had cancer. Why? Because of a decision I made based on some imaginary person. I didn’t want to wait on unpromised hopes of having a child with someone I loved and get cancer I could have prevented… again.

There are women who would risk death for their unborn children. There are women who delay cancer treatment for their unborn children. There are women who go into debt for their unborn children. There are women who wreak known havoc on their bodies for a slim-to-none chance at unborn children. This is what we are taught to do as women: put unborn children before yourself.

In June, I decided to do the most unmotherly thing a woman can do. While hooked up to my last chemo drip on June 10th, I made the decision to rip everything out as soon as I could. I didn’t want to do it again. I didn’t want to be here again, with nurses in hazmat suits prepping drugs to kill the cancer cells inside of me. My doctor was right. I was cursed with a bad hand in the genetic lottery. Every day with my reproductive organs is another day in which I could get a different, harder to treat cancer.

I was single. There wasn’t a plan for a “few years for now” where I could hold on. I had to live the way I always do. I had to make a choice on how to live without a partner, instead of waiting for one. It was too high a risk. Everything had to come out.

It was, again, the death of the dream. Like deja vu. Except the first time, I had a list of requirements where maybe I would try, like I left the door open a crack. And this time, the wind–or a ghost–blew the door shut.

My surgery will happen in the winter. When I wake up from surgery, the hope of being a mother will end. They will take it all: the ovaries, the uterus, the cervix. I won’t save my eggs.

CHAPTER 3

I am in a shitty hotel room outside Duluth, with a white noise machine blaring. I am thinking of selling my house, of getting rid of the ghost that haunts it, of selling the house to someone with children. I am thinking of my grief about all of this, about how I thought I laid it to rest and it came back one more time like the roar of a lion. I am thinking of the woman who called my life glamorous, who asked me if I ever feel lonely on the road.

In this hotel room, with my two dogs, I do not feel lonely. Something only those who wanted children and could not have them, or did not have them, know is that one of the best salves for being childfree-not-by-choice is doing things you could not do with a baby in your arms. It’s what I do whenever I feel the grief.

In this hotel room, shivering with an AC I cannot turn off or turn down, I am thinking about the other life I could have lived if I had tried to have children younger or had I gone ahead and tried to birth a moonshot baby. Before I start to cry about it, I pick up my keys, and I drive to a dive bar that no baby should ever enter. Sitting in a bar stool at Kom-on-Inn, drinking Diet Coke, I feel content without a partner, without a child, because the freedom of the road is something you can only do without anything to tether you. And do I hope one day to have a partner to tether me? I do. But where are they? Not here. This is my life that I am living alone, and it’s a good life to live alone.

A man next to me says a little too loudly, “Are you really drinking Diet Coke?” I nod. He drunkenly asks, “Why?” And I tell him the truth, “There’s no one around to tell me what to do.” He laughs, like drunk men do, and I smile a tight-lipped smile and turn my back to him.

With no one to check in on me, with no one to call and say goodnight to, with no family waiting back home, the world cracks open in a beautiful way because of–no, really, because of–my inability to have the thing I once wanted the most. In another life, maybe I’m rocking a baby or reading a picture book and smoothing my daughter’s hair or maybe I’m standing in the kitchen finally eating a snack after a day that was nonstop parenting. And in this world, I am here in this bar with a drunk man yelling questions about Diet Coke at me while I am full of grief.

If it were up to me, I would choose the life with the baby. But the cards were dealt a different way. The drunk man starts yelling questions at someone else. I take out a book at the bar and start to read as the band starts up again. It’s not glamorous, no, but how can you be lonely when there are so many new places and new people on the road?