By Gabrielle Frackman, Photo: Anna Malgina/Stocksy United, Women's Health, April 28, 2022
I followed a nurse into an exam room at a fertility clinic in New York. As a psychologist in her mid-thirties who provides mental health care to women throughout the transitions of their reproductive life cycle—many of whom are pregnant or trying to conceive—I’ve been acutely aware of my dwindling fertility and long deliberated about freezing my eggs. After losing a year to COVID, I decided to finally go through with it.
“Waist down,” the nurse said, meaning, undress from the waist down. It didn’t even warrant a full sentence. It floated over her shoulder on her way out the door. Waist down. Two words can undo a person.
Later, I found myself exposed but for a flimsy sheet, waiting for my doctor, the woman with whom I’d done my intake two weeks before. I was in for routine monitoring, including blood work and a vaginal ultrasound.
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