What happened next was extraordinary.
One by one people spontaneously came to the front of the room and spoke, almost evangelically, about what they had been through. A woman in her thirties who said she’d never been able to sustain a relationship and she finally understood why. A man who said he’d decided to do it when he woke up on his kitchen floor after yet another night’s drinking and now had the strength to turn his life around. A woman who said she had done a lot of therapy and had initially been very cynical but had to admit it was the most amazing experience she had ever had in her life. And even a female Buddhist monk who said that it was the closest she’d got to enlightenment in years. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. This was either the best-executed marketing campaign I had ever seen or I was witnessing something that was real. If it was real, I wanted some of what they had just had.
I didn’t sign up that evening. With our debt already out of control as a result of so many rounds of IVF (and that trip to the Point), I wasn’t sure that I could justify the cost. It sounded good but would it help me get pregnant? Did I honestly think that my childhood could have anything to do with my infertility thirty years later? I wasn’t sure, but the evening, and particularly the testimonies from those people who had just completed the process, kept playing over in my mind. So, a few weeks before I was due to finish work, I phoned and booked myself on to the course starting on 1 April. Day One of my sabbatical.
As per usual, we’re late setting off. Peter’s pushing ninety on the speedometer and I’ve got my feet up on the dashboard and am painting my toenails. I’ve been told to arrive by 9.30 a.m. At twenty-five minutes past, I ring to say I’m going to be a bit late. The Irishwoman who answers the phone says, rather tersely, that they’ll be starting the first session at 10 a.m. on the dot. At 9.59 we swing into the driveway of the country house where the course is taking place. Peter takes my case out of the boot, hurriedly kisses me goodbye, and then leaves me on the doorstep for a week in the company of strangers.
There are sixteen of us on the course. We file into a large room at the back of the house overlooking the garden. Sixteen chairs are laid out in a semicircle, each bearing a folder with a name on it. I find my folder and sit down with relief. When the group has settled, the first thing we are asked to do is go round the circle and tell everyone what we are feeling at that moment.
When it’s my turn I say: ‘I’m just feeling pleased that I managed to get here on time.’
Everyone laughs.
Later that afternoon I have a one-to-one session with the man who is going to be my personal tutor for the week. He looks like Colin Firth. It’s a bit distracting.
‘So, Jessica,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t answer honestly this morning when we asked you all to say how you were feeling.’
‘Didn’t I?’ I say. ‘I mean, it was an honest answer but perhaps not the only answer.’
‘I think you’re someone who feels like you’ve got to protect yourself and your real feelings from other people. Look at your body language now, for example; it says a lot.’
I realise that my legs are not only crossed away from him but round the side of my chair, and that my left hand is holding my right shoulder, bringing my arm into a v-shape across my chest. A bit of a giveaway really.
We carry on talking. He has obviously read the pre-course questionnaire I completed, thoroughly, and acknowledges how hard the last six years must have been. I bat it away lightly, nowhere near ready to go there.
Towards the end of our session, he says: ‘Before we finish, Jessica, I need to ask you to chose another name which you’re going to be known by this week.’
I look at him, bemused. ‘Another name?’
‘Having read your questionnaire, I do have a couple of suggestions.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘How about “Inadequate”?’
‘Inadequate?’ I say incredulously.
‘It seems to fit.’
‘Does it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Are you seriously suggesting that I go round with the word “Inadequate” pinned to my chest for the week?’ I ask. ‘I just couldn’t. I just really couldn’t.’
I can sense the panic in my voice.
‘Well I do have some others,’ he says. ‘But, having met you, I’m not sure they’re right.’
He tells me what they are and slowly, reluctantly, I agree that of all the choices he has presented, ‘Inadequate’ most closely resonates with my relationship with the world and how I feel about being unable to have a baby. He asks me to give him the badge I am wearing which says ‘Jessica’, pulls out the piece of white card with my name on it, turns it over, and writes ‘Inadequate’ on the other side. Then he slips it back into its plastic case, the right way up, so my new name is hidden.
Relieved, I put it back on.
Amongst other things, we had been told to bring to the course a picture of ourselves as a child, aged five or six. For the last session of the afternoon we are all asked to produce it. I have bought a school photograph of me with shoulder-length baby-blonde hair, wearing a bright yellow polo-neck jumper, a navy blue corduroy dress and a hairband made out of American Indian beads. I can’t help thinking that if I had fallen pregnant when Peter and I first started trying to conceive, our child might be around this age now.
We all sit down holding our photographs and are asked to put them on the floor in front of us. The room settles into silence.
‘Welcome back everyone,’ the Course Director says. ‘I hope you’ve had a good afternoon settling in.’
There is a murmur of assent.
‘Earlier today in the session with your tutor each of you was given a new name,’ she continues. ‘We’d now like you to take off your badge, turn the card over to reveal it and then put it back on. After that, we will go round the circle and we want you to introduce yourself using your new name by saying, “I am ______”.’
I can hear my heart thumping through my chest. I hardly know these people and haven’t even had the opportunity to tell most of them my real name yet. The embarrassment is excruciating. I glance round and see that everyone is doing what they’ve been told, so I start to fumble with my own badge, wondering why the hell I’m putting myself through this. But there’s no going back now. One by one, just as we’ve been told, we all formally introduce ourselves for the first time that day.
‘I am I Don’t Matter.’
‘I am Unworthy.’
‘I am Anxious.’
‘I am On the Other Hand.’
‘I am Fraud.’
‘I am In My Bubble.’
‘I am Let Down.’
‘I am Alone and Lost.’
‘I am Abandoned.’
‘I am Not Good Enough.’
‘I am Dismissed.’
‘I am Fixer.’
‘I am Lonely.’
‘I am Controlled.’
‘I am Unimportant.’
And:
‘I am Inadequate.’
I look around the circle at my fellow participants, realising for the first time that every one of us has come to the course carrying a profound sense of pain. I don’t know anything about these people or their lives, but I am not alone.
The Course Director then asks us to kneel down on the floor and crouch over our photographs.
‘Get down close,’ she urges. ‘Look into your eyes in the photograph and think about your name. Ask yourself why this child, so innocent and so beautiful, got to feel like that.’
Out of the corner of my eye I can see people crouching down. I start to hear sobbing on my left and my right. But I can’t move, frozen with fear of what might happen if I get down close and look into the eyes of my five-year-old self. So I sit back, holding on to tears, knowing that whatever happens over the next seven days it’s going to be important in my journey to have a child.
The Infertility Diaries Part XIX
&
nbsp; On the final day of the Hoffman Process, our tutor asked us to think back to the day we all met and try to remember the first impressions we had of each other and whether they had changed. The woman who sat next to me throughout the process turned to me and said: ‘The first time I saw you, you seemed like a mother to me. You still do.’ Everyone immediately agreed. And, for the first time in a long time, I actually believed it could be true.
THOUGHTS ON THERAPY
Now for a fertility fact. Fertility clinics – however high their success rates – are crap at the psychological stuff. Well that’s my experience anyway. When you receive your glossy brochure/photocopied sheets of A4 about the clinic, you’ll generally find a (small) section on ‘counselling’. It’s usually just a few sentences about the emotional impact of fertility treatment, and if you’re lucky you might be offered a counselling session. But in all my years of going through this, I haven’t yet found a clinic or consultant that has ever proactively encouraged us to take up that session or asked what we’re doing to sort out our minds.
At our first clinic we did ask if we could have one. The staff looked as if they’d never been asked before, but with a bit of faffing an appointment was eventually arranged. As nice as the lady who saw us was, let’s just say she wasn’t prepared for me and my neuroses. When I told her about my paranoia that the clinic was going to mix up my eggs with someone else’s sperm, I could see her thinking: this woman has some serious issues. Absolutely right, and one session wasn’t even going to scratch the surface.
Whether or not the Hoffman Process could have any direct impact on my next round of treatment, I’m sure it’s been important. During the first few days we were not allowed to talk to each other about the things one would usually talk about with strangers. So, for once, I didn’t tell anyone what my job was or whether or not I had children, and nobody asked. One of the peculiar things about this was that it made me realise how much I use my work to validate myself, particularly in the context of not being a mother. It helped me to discover who I was beyond work and, crucially, beyond my infertility. Gradually, I came to realise that all the negative feelings I have about my life, particularly in the context of my inability to have a child, do not accurately represent me, or, in fact, what other people think of me. It took away a lot of shame.
I now firmly believe that everybody needs therapy every now and again (the time to worry is when you find yourself in it for the rest of your life). We all have our shit. And if your shit’s infertility, you’re going to need it more than most.
The Infertility Diaries Part XX
My friend Ella gave me a great piece of advice today. She says it’s all about the number forty-three. If you haven’t had children by then you can basically get on with the rest of your life and stop thinking about it. It’s quite a liberating and exciting thought. I’ve got three years left and, if it doesn’t work out, after that I can go off and become an astronaut. Or something.
MR T
I am now halfway through my sabbatical. It’s amazing what can happen in six weeks. We’ve had a royal wedding; Osama bin Laden’s been killed; and Bruce Forsyth has finally been knighted. As for me, I’m ready to start my first round of IVF with Mr Taranissi. It’s been a long time coming, and I’m feeling a mixture of excitement and trepidation.
In IVF there are essentially two treatment types: the long protocol and the short protocol. The long protocol involves down-regulating your body before stimulation starts, and the short protocol works with your natural cycle. Up until now I have always had the long one, but the short protocol is often considered to be better for older women (which, at forty, I am now classed as being) and this is what Mr Taranissi has prescribed in my case. It also has the added benefit of taking slightly less time – around a month from beginning to end – and I have worked out a schedule for my sabbatical which means I will be able to complete my treatment a few weeks before I’m due back at work.
I have been told by the clinic that I will need to come in for a blood test on either the first or second day of my period. It started yesterday afternoon and, as it’s a sunny Sunday morning, I decide to walk to the clinic. Peter is away working so I’m on my own.
After a thirty-minute stroll I arrive at Upper Wimpole Street. As I go into the reception room I catch a glimpse of Mr Taranissi (fondly known by staff and patients as ‘Mr T’) in the hallway in blue scrubs. This man may be making a lot of money, but you have to admire anyone who is prepared to work seven days a week to make so many women’s dreams come true.
I wait in line for the form on which all blood tests at the clinic are prescribed. The blood is taken at another building around the corner, and throughout the day there is a constant stream of women going from one building to the other with their distinctive yellow slips fluttering in the breeze. When I reach the blood-test building I find the door open, and am confronted by what can only be described as a sea of women. I can’t quite believe that they are all Taranissi’s patients, but they seem to be holding yellow forms like mine so they must be. It’s like some sort of surreal baby-making factory. I feel a woman who has come in behind me squeeze past and pick up a laminated ticket from the counter. Then another woman does the same. There is clearly a protocol, which I’m about to learn. I reach over and take a ticket myself. Number 73!
A woman comes out from the back and calls: ‘Numbers 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25, please come through.’
I’m going to be in for a wait.
I hadn’t quite realised the importance of this blood test until I’d rung the clinic to let them know I was planning to start treatment on my next cycle. It had been several months since I had my initial consultation and tests, and it was only when I rang that they said that they would need to check my FSH (or to give it its proper name: follicle stimulating hormone) to confirm that I could start. When I asked why, they said that Mr Taranissi will generally only let you start treatment if your FSH is under 10, because it is a strong indicator of the quality of your eggs and the likelihood of success. I hadn’t even contemplated the possibility that there might be a situation where I wouldn’t be able to start when I wanted to. This had never happened at my previous clinics. But like many aspects of the fertility process, knowledge reveals itself to you slowly.
After a three-hour wait for the results, the phone rings. It appears my FSH is fine, but another hormone, oestradiol, is on the high side. I am told to come back the following day for a further blood test and another nail-biting wait. The next day my oestradiol has increased. This essentially means that one follicle is starting to out-strip all the others, as it would on a natural cycle with a view to producing one egg. I am told that Mr Taranissi says I need to come back next month and go through the process again.
This is not a good moment. In fact, it’s a really bad one. It is almost a year since my last round of IVF, and I have planned for my sabbatical and this cycle with meticulous precision. I am due back at work in six weeks and, although I have always known that the treatment might not be successful, I had never contemplated that I might not be able to start at all. But I can also see the sense of it. Here is a clinic that isn’t going to put me through treatment if they don’t think I stand the best chance of success. That’s got to be a good thing. It also defies any cynicism that Mr Taranissi is just after our money. So I do my best to make a positive out of a negative, and we go on lastminute.com and book a cheap holiday to Madrid for a week of tapas, cerveza and the Prado.
Price would be proud.
One month later: the moment my period starts we’re back at the clinic. FSH fine. Oestradiol still behaving badly. A decision is made to give me a down-regulation injection for a few days to bring it under control. I’m anxious that again things are not going to plan, but I’m assured it’s completely normal and that my oestradiol levels will soon be stable and I’ll be ready to start. Just to prove that nothing is ever simple where my body is concerned, a few days later it has quintupled. Yes, that’s right. Gone up five fli
pping times. So now they put me into full down-regulation mode, trying to bring on a period as quickly as possible so we can start all over again. It feels as if my body’s screaming: ‘WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING TO ME?’ And, just to prove what it’s talking about, two weeks later when my oestradiol has finally been beaten into submission and my system shut down, I have a scan and there’s an enormous cyst in one of my ovaries.
Ovarian cyst – two words that would have any woman running screaming to the Internet. Apparently, though, the majority of them are benign and self-combust naturally. The doctor who scans me doesn’t seem at all perturbed, but I do feel sorry for my body and what I am putting it through. Again.
Later the same evening, five weeks behind my carefully planned schedule, I finally get the call I’ve been waiting for. Mr Taranissi has confirmed that he’s happy for me to start treatment. I am told to come in for a hysteroscopy in two days’ time, after which they will start stimulation. I haven’t had one of these before as it’s not something that is routinely done during fertility treatment, but of course, with this as with everything else, Mr T is different. The procedure is performed under general anaesthetic and involves an investigation of my uterus to make sure everything is looking normal and to work out the best place to put our embryos back. In my case it also involves the aspiration of a certain cyst.
The day of the procedure marks a new chapter in my fertility journey. It’s the day I get to go to the basement. For some time now, I’ve been aware of the stairs that lead to the lower ground floor of the clinic that only a select few of the women in the waiting room get to descend. It’s the inner sanctum of the fertility process, the place where eggs are collected and embryos are transferred. And also where hysteroscopies happen. My moment has arrived.
The Pursuit of Motherhood Page 12