Alice and Ritxi Undergo Fertility Treatment and Conceive Twins

Alice Espanet and Ritxi’s fertility treatment turns the desire to have children into a prolonged medical and emotional passage: after seven months of trying to conceive, they made twenty-two visits to a clinic, underwent three unsuccessful insemination cycles, and moved on to in vitro fertilization. The treatment ended in a twin pregnancy, but the account also shows how hope was organized around tests, procedures, competing expectations, and the clinic’s promise that a carefully managed process could deliver a child.

A decision made under pressure

The couple sought help before the year of unsuccessful attempts that they had heard was the point at which alarm should begin. Ritxi felt old and was suffocated by urgency; he was also unaccustomed to losing. After seven fruitless months, the two went to a highly recommended clinic rather than let the pursuit of parenthood stretch on. Their different temperaments shaped the long process that followed. Ritxi was an optimist and a compliant patient, while Alice’s mood shifted between extremes: some days she was on top of the world, others in a pit, and she rarely found a middle ground. She generally spoke little.

The clinic stood beside the road from Erandio to Sopelana, on the right when driving toward the coast. Traffic jams were common there, but parking behind the building was usually available. Its new-looking exterior and spotless glass frontage did little to draw drivers’ attention to the work taking place inside. For Alice and Ritxi, however, the pastel waiting room became the starting point of a two-and-a-half-year pilgrimage. They attended twenty-two times, trying to treat the appointments like excursions and to keep their spirits up.

When Ritxi’s obligations allowed, they took the day off after a consultation and made a meal of the visit. In good weather they drove to Pobeña or the old port at Algorta; in winter they chose Bilbao. They both liked a Michelin-starred restaurant on the Marzana wharf. Alice avoided alcohol and tried to eat cleanly, finding food there suited to her condition as a prospective mother. These outings offered the treatment a rhythm beyond the clinic, though they did not dissolve its uncertainty.

The clinic’s regimen

The account marks the beginning of the process not with a single decisive intervention but with the accumulation of medical work. Blood tests and semen analyses were followed by a karyotype analysis and ultrasounds. Alice took evening primrose oil and folic acid; clinicians monitored hormones identified by opaque abbreviations, including FSH, LT, and HAM. The couple encountered a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, and a hematologist, as well as a hysterosalpingography. The first diagnosis was vague but consequential: low ovarian reserve.

The first treatment involved Gonal and Ovitrelle. Follicles were counted, and the procedure that followed was artificial insemination. The details make the process feel both systematic and intimate: repeated examinations, injections, and measurements, with Alice’s body becoming the site on which the couple’s plan was tested. The narrator, investigating the case later, learns that the clinic’s receptionist remembers the couple’s long treatment, even though Alice’s name has become taboo there. The receptionist cannot say whether Alice should be understood as an ordinary patient; what remains clear is the remembered pattern of emotional extremes.

After three insemination cycles, each involving injections, ultrasounds, and follicle counts, pregnancy had still not occurred. The clinic recommended moving to in vitro fertilization, described as a longer, more expensive, painful, and desperate process in which life is created in a tube. Alice and Ritxi agreed. By then, the narrator observes, they had passed the point of no return: each new stage followed the failed one, and the effort already invested helped carry them deeper into treatment.

Hope, competition, and the market

The waiting room is also presented as a place where patients sit beside one another as companions in a shared ordeal, then become rivals. Each couple watches to see who will arrive first, who will succeed, and who may never get there. The narrator describes this as free competition, an unsettling counterpart to the pastel decor and the treatment’s clinical procedures. Fertility care promises a clean, scientific, effective service, and its advertising suggests a high success rate. The implied bargain is that a person who wants a baby can get one by placing themselves in medical hands—provided they are ready to fight for it.

That promise makes reproduction seem like another need the market can satisfy, even though the narrator places it in a grey area between material and spiritual needs. The language of individual choice sits uneasily alongside the repeated procedures and mounting costs: patients are told that success is possible, but responsibility for pursuing it seems to fall on them. In this setting, perseverance can appear both necessary and compulsory. The competition in the waiting room gives that pressure a human shape, as another patient’s progress can look like one’s own defeat.

The narrator’s later investigation complicates the idea that Alice was simply a standard patient with a standard wish to hold a child of her own. The narrator does not know what conclusion to draw and continues searching rather than treating a possible hidden reluctance as established fact. That uncertainty matters: the account does not confirm that Alice secretly resisted conception, altered her medication, or wanted to escape treatment. Instead, it makes visible the gap between a medical record of procedures and the harder question of what Alice herself wanted. The clinic can record cycles and responses; the narrator cannot recover an unambiguous answer from those facts alone.

The twin pregnancy

The pregnancy was confirmed by a blood test. The narrator imagines the couple’s happiness as cautious, assigning the happiness to Ritxi and the caution to Alice, but presents that emotional division as an interpretation rather than a witnessed fact. Following the patients’ wishes, the clinic had transferred two embryos and frozen three more. The embryos were graded category B, a quality associated with a medium probability of a twin pregnancy. The account’s emphasis on the word medium catches a difference in attitude: that level of uncertainty did not suit Ritxi.

The clinicians explained the risks of multiple pregnancy, including preeclampsia, restricted growth, premature birth, and cesarean delivery. Even with those risks laid out, both Alice and Ritxi wanted two embryos transferred. They had, in the narrator’s image, two wild cards up their sleeve. A few days later, an ultrasound showed that both embryos were developing. The transition from an abstract probability to two viable embryos gave the treatment its decisive result: after months of appointments and three failed inseminations, their plan had produced a twin pregnancy.

The account does not present that outcome as a simple victory. Its language holds the couple’s success beside the medical hazards of a multiple pregnancy and the unresolved question of Alice’s own relation to motherhood. The clinic can confirm that two embryos are developing; it cannot settle what the process meant to her. The episode therefore ends with a concrete achievement and a remaining uncertainty, a contrast that shadows the promise of fertility treatment throughout the narrative.