The Scenic Route: Chapter 2 of 6
| September 19, 2023Nobody is offering to cook for me. Nobody is offering their sympathy
“T
he good news,” I tell my husband as I take treatment meds for the first time, “is that this is all going to be behind us in, like, five minutes.”
I’m an optimist. If we’re doing treatments, it’s obviously going to work. We’ll have a baby in just a little over two years after we got married. That’s not even really called waiting, right?
Three hours after popping the pills, I begin to feel extremely nauseated. I stand in the bathroom, waiting to vomit.
I’m supposed to up the dose tomorrow and double it two days later.
I can’t do this.
Betzalel knocks on the bathroom door. “You okay in there?”
“Nope,” I manage. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
I don’t vomit that night, but the intense nausea worsens over the next few days. I stop eating any proteins. Just looking at them makes me feel sick.
The only thing I eat is chocolate-covered rice cakes and ginger ale, and even those are hard to get down. At work, Rochy is expecting, and she complains loudly about her nausea to anyone who will listen.
“My neighbor is so nice,” she tells me one day as she munches saltines. “She offered to make me supper once a week till I feel a little more normal.” I ogle her. She’s having her first. Nobody is offering to cook for me. Nobody is offering their sympathy. It’s so lonely, and I’m only a few weeks in.
But this treatment is going to work, I tell myself again and again. Hashem wouldn’t make me go through all this nausea and pain for nothing.
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