Emillio Mesa Was 17 When He Learned to Give His Mother Her IVF Hormone Shots, and Her Second Round Brought Twins She Later Lost

Most high school seniors spend their last year worrying about college letters and graduation plans. Emillio Mesa spent his learning how to give his mother intramuscular hormone injections. He was 17, his stepfather was working in Mexico, and his mother had decided she wanted another baby through IVF.

In a first-person essay for Newsweek published Oct. 23, Mesa, now a writer in Orlando, Florida, described becoming his mother’s partner through two rounds of treatment in New York. The second round worked. She became pregnant with twins, and about four months after his high school graduation, she lost the pregnancy.

A Teenager at the Fertility Appointments

Mesa wrote that his mother asked him to support her while her husband was away. That meant going to appointments with her, learning to give the shots, and keeping track of her cycle and her dosages. She told him he could even pick the baby’s name.

IVF runs on that kind of bookkeeping. The National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus guide breaks the process into five steps: fertility medicines to stimulate the ovaries, egg retrieval, fertilization in a lab, embryo culture and embryo transfer. Progesterone is usually taken daily as shots or pills after the transfer, and if a pregnancy takes hold, it can continue for weeks. The guide notes that repeated injections can bruise, and that the medicines can bring bloating, mood swings and headaches.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine explains on its patient fact sheet why those shots matter. IVF medications can reduce how much progesterone the ovaries make on their own, and supplements, by intramuscular injection or vaginally, help the uterine lining grow so an embryo can implant. The society says pregnancy rates are much higher in IVF cycles that include it.

For most couples, a partner handles the needle. In the Mesa household, it was a teenage son.

A First Round That Took a Toll

The first cycle did not produce a pregnancy. Mesa wrote that his mother suffered migraines, mood swings, severe acne and lumps on her hips during treatment. He begged her to stop, or to think about adoption instead.

She waited four weeks and tried again. His college acceptance letter arrived the day before the procedure.

Families who have followed other IVF journeys on Parent Diaries, from the Gwinnett County teacher who went through several egg retrievals before becoming a mom at 41 to the mom whose last embryo transfer brought a surprise on the ultrasound, will recognize the pattern: one failed cycle rarely ends the effort when someone wants a child badly enough.

Twins at Graduation, Then a Loss

The second round brought a twin pregnancy. At Mesa’s high school graduation in June, his mother was about a month along.

Twins are not unusual after IVF. MedlinePlus says transferring more than one embryo raises the chance of twins or more, and that multiple pregnancies carry a higher risk of premature birth and low birth weight. In 2013 data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 41.1% of infants conceived through assisted reproduction were born in multiple-birth deliveries, compared with about 3.5% of all U.S. infants.

About four months after graduation, Mesa’s mother lost the pregnancy. In the essay, he recalled her saying that the physical pain was something she could handle, but the loss was not.

Pregnancy loss is more common than many families realize. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development says early pregnancy loss happens in about 10% of confirmed pregnancies, citing the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and that the true figure is hard to pin down because some losses happen before a pregnancy is ever confirmed. Losses after 20 weeks are classified as stillbirth.

The Sibling Who Never Arrived

No baby followed. The essay’s headline says Mesa hoped helping his mother get pregnant would set him free, and he wrote that he came out about five years later, at 22. He did not name his mother, his stepfather or the clinic, and he did not say what year the treatment took place.

What the essay does make plain is how much of the weight landed on a 17-year-old. MedlinePlus lists emotional stress among the main costs of IVF, alongside the time, the money and the physical demands, and notes that many people going through it experience stress and depression. Mesa’s account shows that stress moving sideways through a family, onto the child who was keeping the dosage chart.

He wrote that his mother had once told him he could name the baby. He never got the chance. The name he might have chosen is one more thing the family lost along with the twins.

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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: Svendlindenberg – CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons