In Vitro Fertility Goddess

Maybe they had guides showing them from room to room. ‘And here is the room where it all happens and that's the stirrup chair. What, the guy in the white coat? He's the embryologist. You wanna photo with him? Sure, wait till he brings the blastocyst up on screen…'

Actually I had it wrong. An IVF tourist is someone undergoing IVF who chooses to do it in a vacation spot. Greece is one of the more popular ones if the marketing can be believed. Here you can have it all, apparently - embryo transfers, ultrasounds, ruins, and sun and sea all in the one package.

And who can resist an IVF clinic in a quaint stone village? Or a donkey ride up a cobbled alley before the Egg Extraction?

How about a set of worry beads to help you through the two week wait? Getting your pregnancy test result at a taverna with a jug of ouzo handy in case it's negative? There are so many plusses you can hardly stand it.

Right. But where do you go to organize this? My travel agent? Or do you buy the plane tickets direct from the IVF clinic? Hmm, this is all a bit unusual.

How about the accommodation - is it attached to the IVF clinic, part of the same complex? ‘Oh you'll be staying in the luxury Hellenic Fertility Villas, breakfast buffet and blood tests included.'‘Great but what about the ultrasounds?'

‘For them to be included you'll have to upgrade to our Deluxe Infertility Package which also includes donkey transfers to and from the clinic.'

Then of course you have to start packing - so much to take. Bathers, pessaries, pads, sun cream, what if you forget something crucial? It's not as if you can pop home for it. It's bad enough packing for normal holidays but IVF ones - well.

And of course the airline is one of those budget ones with one kilo of hand baggage and ten kilos of check-in between you. So you have to discard almost all of your clothes as the IVF ice box with all the preliminary drugs that you received weighs more that the hand baggage limit on Aristotle Air.

You'd forgotten what it was like getting through airports these days with all the security measures and what should be a simple three and a half hour flight (they forgot to mention the ten hour transit in Athens) turns into almost a twenty-four hour ordeal.

By the time you reach the villa you're exhausted, shattered. But you have a week to recover before the egg retrieval and you realize you're going to need it. Now if only that rooster that seems to have stationed itself beneath your window (it's 3am) will shut up.

The next day you'd kill for one of those greek coffees that the entire population of the island sits sipping in the cafes, but coffee's not part of the IVF diet. So you head to the beach, having first injected yourself in the thigh with a follicle stimulating hormone.

You get so sunburnt you can barely move and spend the next few days leaving trails of skin and syringe packets throughout the villa. Though every now and then you must drag yourself to the little surgery down the alley to have blood tests administered by a surly woman.   

All of this, combined with the relentless consumption of greek salad (fried foods are a no-no in the pre-conception diet), the smell of souvlaki wafting in from the taverna on a nightly basis, are giving you nightmares about calamari. Though this could well be the as-yet un-researched effect of a foreign diet when combined with Gonal-F.

The donkey sent to fetch you for the egg extraction looks as regretful as you feel. How did you let the travel agent talk you into this? Your partner is practically estranged. He's gone off on his own donkey as he's still cranky about you berating him for being carried home unconscious from the taverna last night. He said someone spiked his ouzo but it's obvious he drank till he passed out.

The smell of souvlaki must have taken up residence in your nostrils as the clinic, the only building on the island with working air-con, smells of it too. Surely they can't be chargrilling sheep out in one of the back rooms as that could be the only other explanation?

The doctor has the same manner as your doctor at home but there is something express-lane about this place. Maybe it was the crowd of sunburnt sweaty foreign couples in the waiting room, some of whom obviously hadn't opted for the donkey package and looked as if they'd been hiking for hours in the blazing sun to get here.

The injection of the anaesthetic gives you the first rush of relaxation since you arrived.

When you wake up in recovery the smell of souvlaki has gone and you are told it was a good harvest. They are optimistic but they don't know about your partner's ouzo sperm.

Surely they'll be too drunk to swim properly.

The only taxi on the island is here to take you back to the villa, a relief until it starts to move. Every cobblestone is felt in your uterus, it's the most excruciating car ride ever.

The next few days pass in a haze of boredom. You've already read the couple of books you brought, having imagined an entirely different holiday scenario involving floaty summery dresses and romantic beach walks and dusky tans. A German woman departing from the next villa recognizes the desperation in your eyes as your partner departs to partake in yet another dangerous beach sport and hands you a used fashion magazine. The anxiety of watching him suspended at the end of a dodgy-looking parachute attached to a boat driven by Kostas is more than your fragile mind can take so you accept it gratefully.

It occurs to you that under normal circumstances if this were a holiday without IVF you'd probably have broken up with your partner by now but you're bound by whatever's happening in the lab on the hill. It also occurs to you after turning a few pages that German fashion is an oxymoron.

The dejected donkey is waiting to take you to the embryo transfer. Tomorrow it'll be waiting to take you to the boat transfer to the airport or the trip home. It's the one thing you'll miss about this place and sadly at the moment you feel it understands you more than your partner does. You take a photo of it on the off chance that one day you'll have a child to show it to.

The boat comes in, bearing a bunch of tired but hopeful couples. Amongst those waiting for the boat you recognize some couples from the clinic. They look stricken. Actually they look in dire need of a holiday.

Jodi Panayotov author of In Vitro Fertility Goddess »