Frozen Hope

by Jacqui Cooper

  I think about the emotionally charged teen years ahead. What will our energetic, headstrong kids be like? How will Mario and I deal with the dynamics of three adolescents so close in age? There are so many unknowns and so much uncertainty about the path our lives will take as parents. One thing I’m sure of though – we’re up for it!

  At least they’ll have each other to help them learn to ride their bikes. Just like my sisters and me, there’ll be one on either side holding the third one up.

  17

  Final Thoughts

  HOW I’D LOVE TO TIE off a nice neat ending here, but there’s a tiny postscript to my IVF tale that can’t be ignored.

  We still have an embryo.

  It’s the last one left over from our final antagonist cycle and it remains on ice at City Fertility. The thing is, I wonder about that embryo all the time. I drive past the clinic regularly on my way to the city and every time, I think about what we should do with it. That tiny speck of potential life is unfinished business for me.

  This situation is not uncommon for many IVF patients who are lucky enough to have finished their families. We no longer need embryos for ourselves because we don’t want more children, but there’s a strange emotional attachment, like it’s still a ‘part’ of us. At City Fertility Centre the specialist counsellors see a lot of people who are trying to decide what to do with their embryos. Sometimes it is the first time throughout their whole IVF journey that the person has felt the need to seek professional advice.

  The dilemma presents us with three choices:

  1.Donate the embryo to someone who can’t make their own.

  2.Donate it to science.

  3.Dispose of it.

  I have a friend who had a baby through IVF and then conceived her second child naturally. She didn’t want any more children so she instructed the clinic to destroy the leftover embryos. It was an easy decision for her and her partner and she didn’t give it another thought, so why do I think about it all the time?

  I have a problem with donating it to someone else because I can’t get around the notion that some young person might come up to me in eighteen years’ time and demand to know, ‘Why did you keep those three embryos and give me away?’

  I’m normally so decisive, but I just can’t make up my mind about this. Mario is fine with flushing the last embryo away, but I continue to wrestle with what to do. More and more I find myself wishing that we had used them all up so I didn’t have to worry about it. A nice clean finish to my family would have been so much easier – blinds pulled down and shop shut. Sorted!

  Soon after the twins were born I saw a program on TV about an Australian woman who had an extraordinary twenty-five embryos left over after a single antagonist cycle using donor eggs and sperm. After several failed IVF attempts of her own, she’d travelled to the USA and arranged the cycle that unexpectedly yielded this super-harvest of viable embryos. The woman had one of the embryos transferred and went on to have a beautiful baby girl she named Lexie. She didn’t want to have any more children and the remaining embryos are now referred to as ‘Lexie’s Village’.

  This mum is determined that her daughter should maintain contact with any other children who result from those embryos, because they will be Lexie’s full biological siblings. She’s not selling them, even though couples have approached her with some generous offers. Instead she has instigated a system she calls ‘embryo adoption’ whereby she chooses the people who receive the donated embryos and they in turn must sign a contract where they agree to the stipulation that they will continue to stay in touch with Lexie and her mum. This way Lexie will always have a sense of her real extended family. People are desperate for embryos and Lexie’s mum has this extraordinary power to grant their wish. It’s a very confronting and controversial situation that no-one could have envisaged before IVF.

  All sorts of ethical dilemmas like this arise through IVF, and although mine is seemingly small in comparison, it continues to play upon my mind. I know I will eventually have to make a decision. City Fertility keep the embryos for ten years so there’s still several years to go; maybe as time goes by I will feel clearer about what to do.

  To be brutally honest, my ‘always keep something in reserve’ attitude plays a part in this reluctance to dispose of or donate the embryo. That embryo is a part of my family and if anything happened to Mario, me or the children, there would still be something left of us. It’s morbid, I know, but I can’t ignore the way I feel …

  My struggles to have a family are still fresh in my mind, and I can’t bring myself to sign away something that was so difficult to create.

  Writing this book has put a lot of things into perspective for me. I’m sure that as the years go by I will continue to have insights about the IVF process and the way I handled it. It was one of the most vivid and intense periods of my life and there are memories from that time that will stay with me forever. Old habits die hard, too: a couple of times I’ve caught myself dipping into a TTC website to read a thread or two, and on the rare occasion my phone rings and the caller ID comes up ‘City Fertility’, my heart still thumps like crazy. Even now!

  As I read through these pages, I have to marvel at how a random internet search in 2002 introduced me to my gynaecologist, Ravi Kashyap. Back then I assumed – like most women – that I would have no trouble conceiving a child if and when the time came to start a family. How fortuitous that Ravi just happened to be business partners with an IVF practitioner who specialises in difficult cases like mine. And how lucky am I that Roshan Shamon is not only an outstanding doctor, but also the kind of person who understood my needs as a patient and was willing to go that extra mile to accommodate them whenever possible.

  So, yep, I think it’s fair to say that when it comes to IVF you just can’t shut me up. I’ll happily tell anyone and everyone that it’s the reason my children are here. The tiniest excuse and I’ll blab on about it, to a young mum I meet in the playground or a roomful of middle-aged executives at their Christmas break-up. That’s why I’m so surprised when someone comes up to me and quietly admits that they had their child or children though IVF, as if it’s something they’re ashamed of it. I know that for some it can be a very personal and private journey, but it’s an experience that couldn’t happen without the wonders of science.

  I just don’t get it. Why can’t these people be open about their experience? I’ve always been intensely proud and grateful of how my children were created. Why wouldn’t you want to acknowledge and celebrate the process that helped you to bring your children into this world?

  I can’t help wondering how this might impact on the children. A desire for secrecy and an odd sense of embarrassment about how their children were created cannot be a good thing. IVF babies are becoming more and more common in our society. We need to catch up!

  A staggering one in six Australian couples has problems with fertility and will need some sort of assistance if they want to start a family. Think about that figure next time you’re in a room with a bunch of doting parents.

  Whether you succeed or not, IVF is a hard road. I’ve heard it described as a marathon, with daily monitoring and regular medication that intrudes on every aspect of your life. The reality is that the period of being actively engaged in an IVF cycle is typically about two weeks at the most. The less busy you are during that two weeks the better, but you shouldn’t have to put your whole life on hold. I certainly didn’t. In my experience, it was the gruelling emotional toll of my desperate (and, yes, primal) yearning to have my own child that posed the greatest challenge. I’ve focused on that a lot in my story and I would like to think that you found some things in here that might help you to cope.

  If nothing else, I hope that after reading this book you take away a sense that it’s worth trying, even if the odds are stacked against you. I think back on that visionary coach who singled out a gawky schoolgirl and predicted that she would become a world champion. What’s the chance of that actually happening?
Fastforward more than twenty years to a doctor telling the same girl, now a woman in her late thirties, that she has major challenges to overcome in the fertility department. Several fruitless months on and even more physical issues present themselves, decreasing the odds even further. What’s the point of subjecting yourself to such a soul-destroying quest?

  Well, I have three very good answers for that: Madeline, Thomas and Grace.

  If there is a chance, no matter how slim, grab it with both hands and fully commit to what’s ahead. There are no guarantees, but whatever the outcome you will always know in your heart that you tried. And if you fall at the first, second or even third hurdle, I urge you to stay the course if at all possible. As my own experience shows, IVF isn’t a quick fix; it’s a complex and delicate process that takes patience, dedication and a deep well of hope.

  I sincerely wish you all the luck in the world.

  Jac xxx

  Acknowledgements

  MY HUSBAND AND I WOULD like to express our sincere gratitude and appreciation to City Fertility Centre for giving us something we weren’t sure we would ever have. Their team were so passionate about our dream; they did everything they could to make sure we would one day have a family.

  A very special thanks to Dr Ravi Kashyap for always taking care of me, and to Dr Roshan Shamon for making our dreams come true – he is a great doctor but an even greater person.