Eight months later, pregnant - again in the fallopian tube. More surgery. After an evaluation, we were told that my tubes weren’t clear (what a surprise) but that an operation could help. By now I knew I was never wearing a bikini again, so what’s another scar? After the procedure, we kept on trying, with no results. Then it was time for a little chemical help. I tried Clomid, a drug that increases the production of eggs from the normal one per month to four or more. The rationale is that the more eggs out there, the better the odds of hitting the jackpot. Finally, after a year and a half of monthly ovaries the size of softballs, another tubal pregnancy that needed surgery. You hit yourself in the head with a phone book enough times and something tells you to stop.

The last stop on the Infertility Highway is in vitro fertilization. IVF is expensive and not covered by insurance, but we scraped together every penny and went for it. To begin, I had to shut down my regular reproductive hormones by giving myself a shot in the thigh every morning for 10 days. It wasn’t too bad, since I used a tiny diabetic needle. Then I moved on to the big guns, Metrodin and Pergonal, to chemically regulate my cycle. These drugs are suspended in sesame oil, so they have to be injected into the big gluteus muscles with a large needle. Now the husband comes into play, reluctantly. Although it was my body on the receiving end of the needle, David had a very hard time making the plunge. We had to do these injections twice a day for 10 days. One side effect: a lot of bruising and a huge lump at the site of each injection. Not a pretty picture, but since actual sex was not part of the process, looks weren’t that important.

The big day came, and the infertility clinic harvested 15 eggs, an operation more unpleasant than it sounds. The eggs were then mixed with my husband’s sperm in a petri dish. For 36 hours we waited to hear that we’d made 11 embryos. The doctor decided that six was the magic number for us and froze the other five. The only really happy part of the whole ordeal was that before the six embryos were placed in my womb, my husband was allowed to look through a microscope and see the tiny cells waiting to go home. Afterward I had to lie in an uncomfortable position: on my stomach, feet much higher than my head, for four hours in a dark room by myself. The nurse said to think positive thoughts - all I could think about was the enormous dent the end of the gurney was putting in the top of my head. The trip home was a sight to behold; suffice it to say I kept my feet higher than my head in the car, too. I stayed in bed for a week and watched afternoon talk shows about multiple births. Another week went by before the blood test.

Ever heard that you can’t be ““a little bit pregnant’’? Wrong. The pregnancy test was positive, but the ““numbers’’ weren’t high enough. The test measures the level of a hormone in the mother’s blood, and the doctors want to see a number around 100. Mine was 54. We spent a horrible week before the next blood test, half pregnant. In the end, the one tenacious embryo out of six slipped away. We had our frozen embryos left over, but only three survived the thaw, and that attempt was unsuccessful.

It took two years to recover from the failure, but after promising my husband that it would be the last attempt, we tried IVF again. The day of the pregnancy test I felt premenstrual and crampy, certain I wasn’t pregnant. I made my husband call for results. ““Does positive mean positive?’’ he said into the phone. Nine months later Jesse was born. When Jesse had his first birthday, I began thinking about the 18 frozen embryos left over from this IVF cycle. I never thought I had a shot of succeeding (my odds were about 11 percent), but we went ahead and had six of the thawed embryos ““put back.’’ (Six others did not survive.) Two weeks later, when I had the pregnancy test, I’d already grown out of my bra, so I knew something was up. Not only was I pregnant, but the hormone level was 412. Our twins, Paul and Samuel, were born nine months later.

I am 42 and my husband is 50. We have three children in diapers - exactly three more than we ever thought we’d have. In Jesse’s preschool class we’re always 15 to 20 years older than the other parents. My silver-haired husband shows his buddies baby pictures and their response is ““Are these your grandkids?’’ Parents in the play group are worried about buying their first house; I’m worried about menopause. Most parents are concerned about saving for college; we’re concerned about being able to feed ourselves when the kids are college age. We’ve already spent their college money to get them. Our bank account is empty, and we’re both going to have to work full time until we’re in our 90s. Of course, we have three of the most wonderful, intelligent, beautiful children on earth, so none of this really matters.

But we still have six frozen embryos. We have only two choices - donate or destroy. As painful as the infertility was, we never considered adoption an alternative. Giving our embryos to another infertile couple would be like giving our children up for adoption. We know this is a very selfish attitude and have struggled mightily with the issue. After all we’ve gone through, the concept of destroying the embryos is hard to imagine.

So we pay our $50 a month storage fee, raise our boys and wonder what we are going to do.