AN APOLOGY

Dear front-desk person at the fertility clinic,

I’m sorry I was rude toward you on Sunday morning. You see, it was 9 a.m., and already a transvaginal wand had been probing around my desolate uterus. And now, you won’t allow me to make an appointment for a follicular scan on Monday, because Monday is a holiday, and I am frustrated because certain steps need to be taken on certain days, and my ovaries don’t celebrate Labor Day.

I tried to tell you in a nice way that when I was on the phone with the nurse a few days ago, she specifically instructed me to make an appointment for the morning of Labor Day, because I will be out of town the day before. But then you looked at me with a withering stare that said, “Your travel plans are not my problem,” and I may have lost my temper with you a bit. Or went totally berserk, it’s hard to say.

I must admit, your attitude was less than stellar, but going into work to deal with sad, desperate infertiles is probably not your favorite thing to do on a Sunday morning. And you are not alone. The rest of your staff, for the most part, is equally brusque, checked out or clueless.

I’ve been called the wrong name by a doctor I’ve never seen before while laying on my back in a surgical suite, bare vag to the sky, in order to have dye pumped through my fallopian tubes. I’ve had a plebotomist complain to me about her kids while drawing my blood. I’ve been confused by the patient coordinator, barked at by your finance department, overwhelmed by handouts, and forced to ask the nurse exactly when to have “timed relations” while sitting in my office cubicle on the phone.

For all this, I’m paying your clinic hundreds of dollars. And we’re only just beginning.

We were hoping for answers, but instead I got a prescription for a breast-cancer drug that’s being prescribed off-label, because your employer can’t really figure out what’s wrong with us. And standing before you, begging you to schedule me an appointment to have my follicles checked, is not something I ever, in a million years, imagined myself doing. Yet there I was.

So you’ll have to forgive me that I lost my temper. If you had let me schedule the appointment, I could rest assured that everything would be on track for Philip to shoot me up with a syringe full of hormones in 11 days. That is all I want in life right now. ALL. I. WANT. And you were standing in my way. So I got upset.

But I recognize that you were just trying to do your job, and my infertility is not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. There’s no one to be mad at, so I got mad at you, which isn’t fair. I apologize. I promise it won’t happen again. At least not as long as someone else is manning the front desk the next time I come in.

Sincerely,

Erika