At war with my body (Kylie's story)

The first time I picked up my medications, wrapped in a paper brown bag like a bad consolation prize from the fertility gods, I joked to the physician “It’s like I’m going into battle.”

Oct 24, 2025

Hi friends,

There’s a line in today’s essay that lingers long after you read it: “IVF is war, and the victors are few.”

Kylie’s story isn’t a tidy one. There’s no bow, no happy ending, no pregnancy announcement at the end of the tunnel. It’s an unflinching look at what IVF really feels like once you strip away the hope-filled reels and glossy success stories. It’s about the counting, the waiting, and the quiet question of what it means to live in a body that keeps falling short of what it’s “supposed” to do.

She writes from the middle — that uncertain space between loss and the next try — and somehow finds peace in the smallest things: a run, a coffee, a kiss, a dog in the yard. Survival itself becomes the victory.

If you’ve ever found yourself measuring time in cycles, in betas, in retrievals, or if you’ve ever wondered what resilience really looks like, this one’s for you

x Amy & Kayti

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Kylie’s Story

“Your body is perfect,” an old fling told me once, shortly before the moment of climax.

Four retrievals and two failed transfers later at the female ”geriatric” age of thirty-five, his opinion feels entirely voided by the facts of biology.

If my body couldn’t execute its’ primary function, was it?

I replay those words sometimes when the IVF failures start to blur together. They’ve become a strange kind of solace, a reminder that someone else had considered my body perfect, as something to be worshiped, and not analyzed. Because in IVF, there are so many measurements, so many numbers, and so many ways to be told you’ve fallen short.

“I’m on my third egg retrieval,” Andrea, a woman I (perhaps foolishly) sold leftover meds to on Facebook Marketplace told me. “No embryos on the previous one.”

I didn’t tell her how my second or third egg retrieval went. That I know too well the misery of spending weeks injecting your belly with synthetic drugs, living by the clock, hours spent at the fertility clinic lying on your back, women reaching inside of you, watching on a fuzzy screen, counting specks of your body you pray to be a life some day, all of that to be wasted. I don’t tell her that I know the pain of the blood draws, the needle buried in your skin, to be told later the numbers aren’t where they should be. I don’t tell her about the 1% chance of early ovulation during an egg retrieval, that they can miss retrieving the eggs you dreamed could be your baby one day, by hours. I don’t tell her how I fell into this 1%.

There’s a lot of counting in IVF. You will know such obscure numbers as your AMH, your initial follicle count, your progesterone levels, a whole lexicon of terms that most people never have to understand. You’ll measure time in untraditional ways - hours until the next dose, days until the next appointment, weeks until the next step. You’ll look at the probability of eggs retrieved to fertilized to blast. I won’t even mention the financial costs. IVF math is possibly the worst type of math to endure, far worse than taxes, I’ll attest.

The counting of losses are what really mark you though. They come in many forms - a failed retrieval, a cancelled cycle, a 4pm phone call that collapses your world with the words “your HCG dropped”. These losses you will not want to count ever but they’ll count you.

The first time I picked up my medications, wrapped in a paper brown bag like a bad consolation prize from the fertility gods, I joked to the physician “It’s like I’m going into battle.”

“You are,” he said.

IVF is war and the victors are few and the losses will stack in an invisible battleground known only to your flesh, mind and heart.

“Your body is perfect,” that man had told me. Is it? If I were to count all the evidence from the data to the losses, the statement seems laughable.

And there’s no tutorial for loss, no directions included on the printouts they give you. You can watch videos on how to mix Menopur, how to inject yourself in the belly (it’s the only time you’ll feel kind of cool, like Mark Renton from Trainspotting or a hot doctor on Gray’s Anatomy) but there are none on how to get through another failure.

After my first transfer failed, I told my therapist, “I don’t know how I can bear another one.”

“When people say they can’t bear it,” she said, “they’re already doing just that.”

That was all very nice and stoic in theory but in application, pretty Goddamn useless.

So how do you heal? You don’t, at least not right away. Instead, you crash out, hard. You stop pretending. You binge an entire Netflix series from bed. I recommend Too Much. You delete Instagram. You eat something, anything, it doesn’t matter what it is. You lean on your partner a lot. All of this won’t necessarily make you feel better but it keeps you alive. And that’s the victory. You survive long enough to get to the next appointment, the next day, the next chance.

As I handed over the drugs to Andrea for her to use for her third egg retrieval, I offered her hope instead. Maybe the next one would be different for her. Maybe the next transfer will be different for me. “Hope is the thing with feathers”, Emily Dickinson wrote after all.

And hope is a tenuous, frightening emotion in IVF. The reality of it all, to know intimately the limits of your body, is anything but perfect. But this morning, nearly six weeks after a chemical pregnancy, I went for a long four mile run. Back at home, I warmed my hands with a mug of coffee with pumpkin creamer and kissed my husband good morning, his familiar stubble scratching my face. I watched our dog run through the backyard, smiling. Because I am still here, alive, and awake to a new season, a new cycle, most certainly an imperfect one. The old one is already fading like a bad dream.

I breathe in the start of a new day.

For now, maybe that’s enough.

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