The conversation about fertility—whether you’re thinking about kids in the near future or not—is still plagued by anxiety-inducing messages that keep women up at night picturing a ticking biological clock. Women deserve better—no fear mongering, just facts. So Glamour took the pulse of what women do and don’t know about their reproductive health to bring you the Modern State of Fertility.
My period was several months late, a fact that absolutely had me on edge. But the pregnancy tests kept coming back negative, and my new doctor kept insisting my body was simply reacting to the stress of moving 3,000 miles from California to Alaska. Except I wasn’t stressed. I had planned this move for over a year, and I was pumped to finally be here—the only stress I had was worrying about my missing cycle.
Then one day it started. Only this period was nothing like any period I had ever experienced before. The pain was excruciating, ripping through me like a knife from my pelvic wall all the way up to my rib cage. I couldn’t stand up straight. I started running a fever. And just a few hours in, the waves of agony became so intense that I actually began to vomit from the pain.
Something was definitely wrong. But I couldn’t even peel myself up off the bathroom floor to call for help. I was immobilized, alone, scared, sweating, throwing up, and convinced I was dying. When I was finally able to drag myself to the doctor a few days later, it didn’t feel that he took what I was telling him seriously. Instead he insisted that this too could be normal. A result of stress. “Some women just get bad periods,” he said.
He didn’t seem to hear me when I argued that in over a decade of womanhood, nothing like this had ever happened to me. I was a new patient to him; maybe that made me easy to dismiss. Finally—after several similarly excruciating periods—he ordered an ultrasound. “Your ovaries look like hell,” he said matter-of-factly, staring at the screen. “You need a hysterectomy. We’ll schedule it right away.”
I was 26 years old.
Just a year before, with pain-free periods, I had donated my eggs to two different families. The advertisements for donors were all over our college campus, and after a friend had a positive experience donating, I decided to do it myself. I was the “perfect” donor—the few doctors I saw over the course of donating all claimed both my ovaries and my eggs were in perfect shape. Plus, I was finishing college with loads of student loan debt, so the money was enticing. Two donations netted me $13,000, money that helped me start the first chapter of my adult life. The first couple I donated to conceived twins; I’d helped create a family, which was something I felt really good about.
And then I got sick.
All I’d ever wanted was to be a mother myself, so my first call after hearing the word hysterectomy was to get a second opinion. The second doctor I saw agreed that I needed surgery right away, but she didn’t think a hysterectomy was called for just yet, recommending a more exploratory procedure instead. After two hours of surgery, I woke to a new diagnosis: stage IV endometriosis. Endometrial tissue had invaded my fallopian tubes to the extent that one needed to be removed, and endometriomas (essentially blood-filled cysts) had nearly destroyed my ovaries. Legions of diseased tissue had been found all the way up to my spleen and to my appendix, which was so overtaken by scar tissue that it too had been taken out. The scarring had become so bad that my intestines were literally fused to my uterus.
Endometriosis is a hormone-driven condition. I saw five different doctors after my diagnosis who had access to my records from before and after donating; all agreed I'd likely had an underlying case of endometriosis all along, a mild and undetected form of the disease that had probably been kept in check by the birth control I’d been on since my teens. But donating my eggs—pumping my body full of the hormones needed to retrieve them—had likely caused the condition to spread out of control.
My fertility was no longer perfect. If I wanted to have kids someday—which I still very much did—I needed to make some decisions right away.
I had two choices: freeze my eggs or go through a complete IVF cycle with donor sperm to try for a baby immediately. Even though I was single, I decided to do IVF. Everything in my life suddenly felt uncertain, but the one thing I knew for sure was that I would rather be a single mom than never be a mom at all.
Despite the extent of the disease's progression, I had age on my side. I was young, my eggs hopefully still shining with the bloom of youth inside my mangled ovaries. The odds were good, doctors told me, as I signed away tens of thousands of dollars for the procedure. They seemed so confident, I couldn’t help but embrace their positivity myself. I believed I would get pregnant. So much so that I began telling strangers I was pregnant during the two-week wait of my first cycle. “Sorry, I just need water,” I’d whisper to the waitress as I declined a glass of wine. “I’m pregnant,” I’d say with glee, fully believing the words to be true.
When I found I wasn’t, the devastation was overwhelming.
I went into my second round of IVF far less hopeful, but I still had two frozen embryos—I felt like I had to try. It also failed. My eggs had gone from being rated “excellent quality” when I donated them to other families to “poor quality” just two years later when I wanted them for myself. My eggs, it turned out, weren’t as youthful as doctors hoped; after my two failed IVF cycles, I was told I had the eggs of a woman 10 to 15 years older. I had spent $30,000 on fertility treatments, and I still wasn’t pregnant. I likely never would be.
I was 27 years old. Broke. Heartbroken. And physically beaten down.
While undergoing IVF, the hormones I was injecting into my body seemed to be making my endometriosis worse—my ob-gyn said she’d never seen a case progress as fast as mine. I was incredibly sick, in so much pain I could hardly get out of bed at the end of my second cycle. At one point I even considered filing for disability since making it to work often felt impossible.
Eventually I found an endometriosis expert who helped me get the endometriosis under control. Five abdominal surgeries later, plus countless drugs and attempts at treatment, I was finally healthy. But it cost me—I racked up another $40,000 in medical debt. I was now officially drowning in debt ($70,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for fertility treatments and endometriosis procedures), and I couldn’t dig myself out. So I joined the more than 500,000 Americans who file for bankruptcy every single year because of medical debt. It was humiliating, one more devastation on top of a pile of setbacks that had buried me over the preceding years. But it was also the only way I could possibly see to move forward.
Today I'm a mom to a beautiful little girl through adoption. The way we found each other—just a few years after my last surgery—made me believe this is exactly how my life was meant to turn out. I can’t imagine not being her mom, and I know now that I would go through it all again a thousand times over if it meant finding my way to her.
I don’t regret donating my eggs. Another family was able to have their twins, who would be 11 years old now, and the whole thing led me to my daughter. I could never regret any of that.
I do wish sometimes that I’d been better informed of the risks. The problem is that there is no long-term research on the risks of egg donation—a fact that desperately needs to change. Because the effects of pumping your body full of hormones for an egg retrieval haven’t been widely studied, there was no way for anyone to know I would have reacted the way I did to the hormones. Since I was diagnosed with endometriosis, I’ve spoken with a dozen women who also lost their fertility after donating.
While what happened to me won’t happen to every woman who donates or freezes her eggs, it will happen to some. It’s a possibility we should be talking about more, so every woman can be fully informed about her reproductive future.
Leah Campbell is a writer and editor living in Anchorage, Alaska. She is also author of the book Single Infertile Female and has written extensively on the topics of infertility, adoption and parenting. You can connect with her via Facebook, her website, and Twitter.
