The body becomes a project
You learn a new vocabulary fast. Follicle count. Estradiol levels. Trigger shot. Day three baseline. You start saying these words at the dinner table, in the car, in bed before sleep, and somewhere in the repetition your body stops being yours and becomes a site of clinical assessment. The injections are not painful in the way you expected. What's painful is that your husband learns to give them to you, and the tenderness with which he does it, the way he pinches the skin at your abdomen, the way he waits a beat before pushing the plunger, starts to feel less like love and more like protocol. You are grateful. You are also, in some way you can't name yet, lonely.
