I’ve lived in New York for eight years, and I love it here. But for some several reasons, I’ve stayed loyal to a single doctor in my hometown of Dallas, Texas: my OBGYN.
She’s a straight-shooter with an incredible bedside manner that’s cut with a pitch-perfect dry sense of humor. And when you have somebody essentially taking a straw cleaner to your insides, she’s the exact vibe you want in the room.
There’s adults only versions of the “Hang In There!” kitten poster hung throughout the office setting. If you have abnormal cells from said pap smear, hinting at HPV? Don’t borrow trouble until the biopsy comes back. Dense breast tissue? She’s immediately mapping out a 10-year mammogram plan with you. She was also one of the first doctors who ever asked if I wanted to be weighed—and as a straight-sized patient, I thought this was the coolest for my friends who feel patronized by the medical community because of a number on the scale. See why I’m hesitant to find somebody new?
When I met my fiancé, I was 31, and we immediately started talking about freezing my eggs. There’s a lot of complications around this topic for me—my mother died of colon cancer more than a decade ago; my father died just of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis just two weeks ago—and I want to make sure I’m not at risk of passing along those genes to future generations, which means a lot of additional screening for both me and potential eggs is involved.
Last year, when I was in Dallas for my annual check-up, I brought up my desire to freeze my eggs—or more likely, embryos, with my fiancé’s genetic material involved. To be honest, doing it in Texas mostly appealed to me since I already pay the ridiculous Manhattan rent for myself, and I realized the freezer rent for said eggs is way cheaper in the South. But my doctor stopped me immediately. “First of all, everything looks good and you still have time,” she said, lighting up my now 33-year-old, soon-geriatric pregnancy heart. “But I want to touch on something important. You don’t know what rights these eggs or embryos will have in even a year. They might have more rights than a woman one day.”