I was sitting on the couch in my sweatpants, waiting for the phone to ring while pretending I wasn’t, when I got the call. “I’m so sorry, Annie,” my fertility nurse, Mio, said sympathetically. “Your embryo transfer didn’t work.”
I can’t tell you what Nurse Mio said next, exactly, or how I replied in return. That entire conversation was a blur. A year and a half earlier, after many unsuccessful months of trying to conceive naturally, I’d started in vitro fertilization (IVF), a grueling, needle-filled, multi-step process in which a fertility doctor pumps you or an egg donor full of hormones to create as many eggs as possible, then retrieves and fertilizes them with sperm to create embryos, and finally transfers one or two of those embryos back into your body in the hopes it will result in pregnancy two weeks later. To find out that my first transfer hadn’t worked, after all that, was heartbreaking.
But when Mio emailed me a few hours later with instructions on how to proceed, I finally felt a glimmer of hope. Not because she told me it was all a mistake and the transfer had worked after all (it hadn’t), or because she knew it would work next time (she didn’t), but because she’d given me a timeline: My husband Rahul and I didn’t need to be back at the fertility clinic for another three weeks.
“Sooo,” I asked him through a slew of sniffles. “Jamaica next week?”
Travel has always been my go-to tool for personal growth and healing. I even turned this passion into a career as a travel and wellness writer. So now, it feels only natural to lean on my love of globetrotting to help me through the pain of IVF—and, thankfully, both my career and good insurance have helped me afford to do so.
In the past two years, I’ve endured one failed IUI (artificial insemination), three egg retrievals, two failed embryo transfers, one canceled embryo transfer, and one laparoscopic surgery in which my doctor found endometriosis, not to mention all the months of trying naturally. Yet despite all the disappointments, I remain hopeful, thanks in large part to the therapeutic trips I’ve taken after each setback.
First there was Curaçao, solo. I touched down there last September, after my first two back-to-back egg retrievals had left me feeling bloated and bruised in every way. Though Rahul and I would've loved to travel together, he couldn’t miss work, and I simply could not wait. The emotional comedown after a retrieval can be brutal, as your body gets filled with extra hormones for weeks leading up to the procedure, and then boom: You wake up from your anesthesia in a hospital bed, and a nurse is there feeding you Teddy Grahams. I needed a dose of nice weather and novelty to lift up my spirits during the withdrawal phase, and Curaçao, with its colorful houses, Dutch Caribbean culture, and location right outside the hurricane belt in the Caribbean Sea, seemed like just the spot.
I rented a small oceanfront Airbnb in Lagún, a remote village on the northwestern tip of the island known for its rugged beaches and bright aqua waters, and spent the first day high on Vitamin D. But then I felt a tickle in my throat, and by the next day, I had a full-blown cold. I spent a couple hours in my Airbnb feeling sorry for myself before I realized I was looking at my cold all wrong. Perhaps it was really my body's ultimate way of healing, of flushing everything out, of truly processing what I’d just gone through. All summer, I’d tried to stay positive and grateful that Rahul and I even had access to IVF at all. But inside, I was hurting and riddled with questions, the kind that are easy to ask but impossible to answer: Why me? Why can so many of my friends get pregnant so easily, but I can’t? How long will I be in this limbo? And, perhaps worst of all: What if this doesn’t work? Away from my apartment in Brooklyn, away from the doctors and the needles and the fluorescent rooms, I was finally able to fully feel my emotions. And then on my last day, with my cold finally out of my system, I washed them away in the sea.
Six months later, when Rahul and I reached Port Antonio, Jamaica, a secluded fishing village on the northeastern coast of the island that we’ve visited for years, I was in need of even more healing. We both were. Losing an embryo feels like losing a future, and so we did the only thing we could do: We embraced the present. We swam in the famously tranquil Blue Lagoon, a deep, spring-fed natural pool that’s surrounded by thick green mangroves. We ate our way through all of our favorite jerk chicken spots, and determined that Piggy’s—a small red shack where chicken breasts, thighs, festival (deep-fried bread typically served with jerk), and an epic homemade hot sauce are the only items on the menu—is still the best. And we enjoyed our little orange Airbnb, which was nestled in the mountains above town and felt like a tropical treehouse sanctuary. It even had a stray cat who hung out with us every morning while we drank our coffee and listened to reggae on the staticky radio.
But it was our conversations with strangers that touched us most. One night, we popped into a roadside bar called Purple Haze, and started chatting with a group of Jamaican women. When they asked us if we had kids, our whole rollercoaster of an IVF story just came spilling out. In a particularly hilarious moment, one of the women asked Rahul if he was sure he was “going deep enough,” but after that, they ultimately came together to remind us that these things take time. That life is a miracle, after all.
On another night, Rahul and I made our way down to Piggy’s for some more jerk and met a local musician, John Pryce, who was sitting outside strumming Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” on his guitar. During my embryo transfer, my doctor had asked me to choose a song to listen to while he was implanting me (a sentence I never thought I’d write), and I’d chosen “Three Little Birds” because of its reassuring lyrics: “Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing is gonna be alright.” When the transfer failed, I thought that song had been ruined for me forever. But then along came John Pryce with a new and better memory to take its place.
I joined him for a cathartic singalong, and now when I think of that song, I think of him, I think of Piggy’s, and mostly, I think of hope.
Our second embryo transfer also failed—a pain even deeper than the first—but I held on to that hope. To reset once again, I made a last-minute plan to travel to Bali, staying at the new Buahan, a Banyan Tree Escape in the jungle north of Ubud. The scenery was spectacular, as evidenced by the one million rice terrace photos on my camera roll, but for me it was the Balinese spiritual purification ceremony that made the trip.
Two Balinese priests guided my group down to a sacred waterfall and asked us to release our canang sari (offerings) into the river, along with an idea that was no longer serving us. In that moment, I thought back to a phrase I’d learned in Hawai‘i, “i ka manawa kūpono,” which translates to “at the right time.” Native Hawaiians believe that timelines are a very Western construct, and the best thing for you will happen to you at the best time. And so, standing there in a peaceful river in Bali, surrounded by bright pink hibiscus and all of the lush greenery, I released my self-imposed timeline and reminded myself to trust the universe.
I know I can't control when or even if I become pregnant. And that uncertainty continues to be incredibly hard. I'm currently going through my third embryo transfer, and I still have no idea if it's going to work. But again and again, my travels have reminded me there's a big, beautiful world out there to comfort me while I wait.