I almost didn’t go.
The morning of the appointment, I sat in our flat in Vasant Kunj for forty minutes after my husband left for work, staring at the kitchen ceiling and inventing reasons to cancel. Traffic on the way to the clinic would be terrible. I had a deadline at work. Maybe my period would arrive tomorrow on its own, and we wouldn’t need to do this at all. We’d only been trying for fourteen months. Was that even long enough to count?
It is, by the way. After 12 months of trying without success, six if you’re over 35, most doctors will tell you it’s time to get evaluated. I knew this. I had read it on approximately every fertility website on the English-speaking internet. But knowing something and doing something about it turned out to be very different things.
I went. I want to tell you what actually happened, because before that morning, I had searched “what happens at a first fertility consultation in Delhi” maybe a hundred times and never found anything that felt real. Just brochures. Just success rates. Just smiling stock photos of couples holding hands in sunlit fields.
The waiting room is not what you expect
I arrived twenty minutes early, the way anxious people do. The clinic was in South Delhi clean glass facade, a security guard who barely looked up, and an elevator that opened into a reception area that looked more like a boutique hotel than a hospital. I’d half-expected something clinical and grim. Instead, there was a coffee machine, a water dispenser with cucumber slices floating in it, and three couples already seated, none of them making eye contact with each other or with me.
That was the first thing I wasn’t prepared for. The complete, almost theatrical silence. Everyone in that room was carrying the same private weight, and we all pretended we weren’t there together. A woman near the window was reading something on her phone with the kind of intensity that meant she was reading nothing at all. Her husband was scrolling through LinkedIn. Another couple held hands without looking at each other. Nobody spoke above a whisper.
The receptionist called my name, and I followed her down a corridor that smelled faintly of lavender, deliberate, I’m sure, but appreciated. She handed me a clipboard with a six-page intake form. Every question on it was something I’d already been turning over in my head for months, but seeing them in print, in the official font of medical bureaucracy, made my hands shake a little.
How long have you been trying? Fourteen months.
How regular are your cycles? Mostly. Sometimes a few days late.
Any history of PCOS, endometriosis, fibroids? I don’t know. Maybe? I’d never thought to ask.
Any previous pregnancies? No.
Any surgeries? Appendix, age twelve.
I filled it out twice. I had crossed out the wrong box on a question about my mother’s medical history and didn’t want to hand in a messy form. As if neatness would somehow help.
The consultation itself was slower and stranger than I imagined
Dr. M was probably in her late fifties, grey-streaked hair pulled back, a stethoscope she wasn’t using draped around her neck like a scarf. She didn’t open with small talk. She read my form for what felt like a long time, occasionally making a small humming sound, and then looked up and said, “Tell me, in your own words, what’s been happening.”
I had rehearsed this answer. I had a clean three-sentence version ready. Instead, I started crying within about fifteen seconds, and she handed me a tissue from a box that was clearly placed within reach for exactly this purpose, and said, “Take your time. Nobody comes here for fun.”
That sentence undid me, in a good way. I told her everything. The ovulation tests. The apps. The two-week waits. The Googling. The fights with my husband about whether we should even be doing this. The way I’d started avoiding baby showers. She listened without writing anything down for what must have been ten minutes. Only after I finished did she pick up her pen.
What surprised me about the actual medical part of the consultation was how much of it was conversation, not examination. She asked about my work hours, my sleep, my weight history, whether I’d ever been on hormonal contraception and for how long, my mother’s age at menopause, my periods in my teenage years, whether I’d had any bleeding between cycles, my husband’s general health and habits. She asked about stress in a way that didn’t feel performative.
Then she explained what would come next, and this is the part I really wish someone had told me before I walked in:
The first consultation is mostly diagnostic planning, not treatment.
I’d somehow imagined I would leave with a prescription, or a plan, or a deadline. Instead, I left with a list of tests and the understanding that we wouldn’t have a real “plan” until results came back two to three weeks later. The tests she ordered:
For me: Day 2 hormonal panel (FSH, LH, estradiol, prolactin, TSH, AMH), a transvaginal ultrasound to check ovaries and uterus, a hysterosalpingography (HSG) to check fallopian tubes, vitamin D, fasting insulin, and a thyroid antibody test because of family history. For my husband: a semen analysis, scheduled at a partner lab with specific abstinence instructions.
She drew a small diagram on a notepad, a uterus, two ovaries, two tubes and pointed to where things could go wrong. “We are going to look at all four corners of the room,” she said, “before we decide where to start cleaning.”
I have thought about that sentence at least a hundred times since.
The cost conversation, which nobody warns you about
Before I left, the clinic coordinator walked me through expected costs. The consultation itself was ₹1,500. The diagnostic tests, altogether, would come to roughly ₹15,000–22,000, depending on which lab. If we ended up needing IUI, somewhere between ₹18,000 and ₹30,000 per cycle. If we needed IVF, ₹1.8–2.5 lakh per cycle, with medications adding another ₹50,000–1,20,000 depending on protocol.
She said all of this kindly, without pressure, and gave me a printed estimate to take home. I appreciated the absence of sales-speak. Some clinics, I’d later learn, are aggressive. This one was not.
What I felt walking out
Relief, mostly. Not because I had answers, I didn’t, but because someone had finally taken my fourteen months seriously and treated them like a problem worth investigating. I had spent so long second-guessing whether my situation “counted” that simply being told yes, this is worth looking into, felt like permission to stop apologising for being concerned.
I called my husband from the parking lot and cried again, this time the okay kind of crying. He left work early. We got biryani for lunch. We talked about the tests. We did not talk about babies.
If you are sitting in your own kitchen right now, inventing reasons to cancel an appointment you already booked, I want to say this: go. The first consultation is not the scary part. The first consultation is, weirdly, the part where you finally stop carrying it alone.
For anyone in the city looking, there are several reputable options. I happened to choose mine based on reviews and proximity, but it’s worth shortlisting two or three fertility clinics in Delhi and reading actual patient experiences before deciding. The clinic culture varies more than you’d think. Some are warm; some are factory-like. Pick warm.
That’s it. That’s what it was actually like.
Three weeks later, my reports came back. But that’s a different post.
