“Maybe next month, sweetie,” my husband whispered, holding my hand while I shook from the hormone injections I had just given myself. I believed him for three years. I believed him through fourteen months of fertility testing, hormone injections, and two failed IUI cycles.

I believed him while we spent nineteen thousand dollars of our hard-earned savings.

I believed him because he went to every single appointment with me. He sat with the other husbands in those quiet, sterile waiting rooms. He held my hand after every single negative pregnancy test.

He said those words thirty-six times. I counted them.

I need to back up for a second. I am not a writer. I am a pharmacy technician at a local hospital in Columbus, Ohio. I count pills, I deal with insurance companies that do not want to pay for medicine, and I know how the medical system works.

My husband, Mark, works in commercial roofing. We have been married for five years. When we met, he already had a ten-year-old son from his first marriage, Tyler. I loved Tyler like my own, but I wanted to experience motherhood myself. I wanted us to have a child together. Mark always nodded and said he wanted that too.

We started trying for a baby in June 2022. By the winter of 2023, nothing had happened. That was when the worry started setting in.

If you have ever gone through fertility treatments, you know about the blue bag. It is a small, insulated zipper pouch with gel ice packs. You use it to transport your hormone injections. I carried that blue bag to work every single day. I kept it in the employee refrigerator behind the staff lunchboxes.

I used to run to the employee restroom during my fifteen-minute breaks.

I would lock myself in the stall, wipe down the small plastic shelf with rubbing alcohol, and pinch the skin on my thigh. The needles were small, but after months of doing it, my skin was bruised a dull, greenish-yellow.

Every night, Mark would help me prepare the medication. He would sit on the edge of our bed, carefully checking the dosage on the syringes. He looked so concerned. He looked like a man who was sharing my pain.

Then came the IUI cycles. The first one failed in October. The second one failed in December, right before Christmas.

We spent nineteen thousand dollars out of pocket. We did not have that kind of money lying around. We saved it by driving our old Chevy Impala until the rust ate through the passenger door. We clipped coupons. We did not go out to eat, not even for our anniversary.

Our clinic was located in a large medical complex near Westerville. It was a beautiful, modern building with large glass windows and gray stone siding. The fertility clinic was on the fourth floor.