Happy Hour

Last Night’s Drink: Emergen-c

This morning, I saw a little girl playing outside. Running around in her pink pants and LED tennies, giggling about nothing. Certainly not thinking about the way her joints are absorbing the impact of the sidewalk, or the calories she’s burning, or the number of eggs she has in her ovaries, or what she looks like when her face transforms in laughter.

In many ways, I am far, far gone from the innocence and care-freedom of being a little girl. Seeing as how I’m more than 28 and a half, it’s appropriate for me to be so. I’ve never been too concerned with nearing 30 or getting older in general, but after a conversation I had with the egg donor agency that I will, once again, be visiting this year, I’m starting to realize what age really means.

Age doesn’t necessarily mean wisdom, beauty, class or even maturity. Your mind has nothing to do with your age. In fact, some doctors think that you can actually keep your mind young just with good diet and exercise.

Age isn’t there to tell you that you should be at a certain point in your career, or to tell you who your friends, or even your lovers, should be. Age doesn’t define the clothes you wear, the drinks you drink, the music you like or the car you drive. Age is there for one reason alone: to give you an expiration date.

Milk has an expiration date because its contents are constantly changing. It doesn’t just flip a switch and turn sour on the 12th day. From the moment it hits the bottle to its clumpy, cheesy form, things are happening in that plastic quart. Molecules are shifting, sugars are breaking down, things are changing in ways that neither you nor I can see.

Your body is the same way, but at a much slower rate. As you age, DNA is breaking down, tissues are wearing thin, and organs are peaking. Most people in the U.S. will live to see their 70’s, provided that they don’t get hit by a truck or some terrible ailment. By that time, your mind may be your greatest asset, but your body has turned. And not into a fine brie.

All of this sort of hit me yesterday as I sat and talked to Allison, the nurse at Pacific Fertility Center. In the process of donating a second cycle of about 30 eggs to an infertile couple, I asked her (once again) exactly what impact giving away these eggs would have on my own fertility.

“You have enough eggs to go through 10 cycles if you wanted to,” she said. “What you need to worry about more is your age.”

“Once you start to hit your 30s, the quality of your eggs starts to go. That’s when women start to see the most trouble. They could have a ton of eggs, but none of them are of very high quality. That’s why they turn to women like you, in your 20s.”

Never before had I seen age as anything but a number. But, now, I see it as a date stamp on my ovaries.

Still, in my mind, I feel like that little girl playing in the backyard. A little girl that isn’t ready to chug all that milk.