Waiting for Daisy

by Peggy Orenstein

  “I’ve been trying to get pregnant for three and a half years,” I deadpanned. “I have no sexual energy.”

  She held my wrists, her hands warm and papery. “Hmm,” she said, frowning. “Small pulse.”

  “Is that bad?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a sign of liver qi stagnation.”

  Qi (pronounced “chee”), she explained, is the vital energy that acupuncturists believe moves through the body along meridians stimulating the organs. When it’s out of whack you get sick, you get infertile, you get a white tongue. In my case, sluggish qi was apparently keeping blood from my uterus, making it difficult to get or stay pregnant. That seemed as plausible as anything else I’d heard.

  “Can you help me?” I asked.

  “You only have one ovary,” she hedged, “so your chances are lower than other people’s, but you got pregnant naturally twice so that’s a good sign.”

  I pushed a little harder. “Do you have any data on your success rates?”

  Dr. Chang pulled out an article from a file on her desk. Published in the jolly-sounding Fertility and Sterility journal, it described a randomized trial of 160 women undergoing IVF. Half had one acupuncture treatment immediately before and after their embryo transfer. Half didn’t. Thirty-four of the first group were pregnant six weeks later versus only 21 of the control group. Impressive, but that didn’t necessarily mean that months— or years—of weekly needlings would affect my odds of getting pregnant naturally. Later I would scour the Internet for something more concrete. Although I found plenty of assertions on acupuncturist’s sites such as “turning back the biological clock is indeed possible,” they offered no scientific proof that this was so. Most referenced the same study Dr. Chang had, similarly extrapolating across the board, claiming that traditional Chinese medicine “increased pregnancy rates by over 50 percent.”

  There’s something about acupuncture that begs one to suspend disbelief. Cancer patients I knew, women who had read every study on an FDA-approved drug before agreeing to take it, willingly downed Chinese herbs without asking what they were or what harm they might do. It didn’t really matter; for most of us the treatments were less about efficacy than mystery, yet another source of that narcotic high of hope. Even in the introduction to Dr. Chang’s own self-published book a former patient admitted, "My husband, the physician, believes that Chinese medicine is only a placebo, but I don’t care [emphasis mine] because it worked for us and we are very, very happy.” I understood that impulse. I felt so broken, my well-being so battered—who was going to give me an Rx for that?

  While I finished reading, Dr. Chang filed a stack of folders. A picture of a woman with a fuzzy-headed newborn accidentally slid out of one. “She was forty years old,” Dr. Chang said before tucking it away. “She tried to get pregnant many times and had multiple miscarriages before she came to me. Just like you. Now she has a baby.”

  Maybe it wasn’t the double-blind evidence I was looking for, but what did I have to lose? Besides (all together now), What if this worked? What if it was the only way I could have a baby?

  “Her husband had a low sperm count,” Dr. Chang added, as she led me back to a small room. “I also strengthened his sperm. It’s very important that your husband come in to see me, too.” I nodded earnestly, wondering how I’d ever convince Steven of that.

  After shucking my shoes, socks, and jeans, I lay down on a massage table under the warming glow of several heat lamps. Dr. Chang pressed tiny needles, the width of a child’s hair, into my shins, on either side of my pelvis, in my forehead, and in the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. Once, when she pushed a needle in too deeply, a shock shot up my leg, but mostly I felt nothing. She placed several more needles along the rims of my ears.

  “Why there?” I asked.

  “In Chinese medicine the ear represents an inverted fetus.”

  Eww. Sorry I asked.

  For free, she slid a final needle into what she called the Happiness Point on the top of my head. Then she told me not to move (Would you if you were a human pin cushion?) and placed a hotel call bell in my hand. “Ring if you need anything,” she said. “Otherwise, rest.”

  I looked around the room as best I could without turning my head. There was a container of multicolored fine-toothed combs, the kind you’d find in a 1950s barbershop, affixed to a mirror on one wall. Underneath, a handwritten sign invited, PLEASE TAKE ONE. I wondered if anyone ever had. I stared out the window at a sliver of sky and listened to the white noise of downtown San Francisco seventeen floors below. The heat lamps felt good on my skin.

  A half hour later Dr. Chang touched my shoulder. “You fell asleep,” she said softly. The needles in my ears had worked free and become tangled in my curls—I guess the founders of Chinese medicine hadn’t reckoned on treating Brillo-headed Jewish girls. She unwound them, then handed me a plastic bottle of coarse-grained brown powder, instructing me to mix three spoonfuls into a cup of hot water twice a day.

  I unscrewed the cap and took a whiff; it smelled like feet.

  Dr. Chang chuckled. “You get used to it,” she said.

  A TV commercial from my childhood flashed through my mind, the one in which the “ancient Chinese secret” of a laundry owner named Mr. Lee was unmasked as Calgon. For all I knew, I was signing on to drink Miracle-Gro. On the other hand, injecting hamster ovaries and nuns’ urine hadn’t done the trick. And at a hundred dollars a crack, Dr. Chang’s treatments were a bargain, cheaper than anything I’d tried since Clomid. Science had done me no favors; maybe pseudoscience could. I made another appointment.

  That night I asked Steven about the combs.

  “It’s a Chinese tradition to give a person something when you take something from them, like money.”

  “She’s already giving me something—her services.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well I’m not Chinese, am I? Don’t ask me.”

  “She wants you to go, too,” I said, tentatively. To my surprise, he was game. He, after all, was jonesing for hope himself. He wanted to believe that if he only did what I asked, he could make me happy, that he could get his wife and his marriage back. At the very least, he would tell me later, he hoped he could turn the appointments into dates together in the city; we could go shopping in Union Square afterward or share our favorite beet and fennel salad at Scala’s Bistro around the corner.

  “I don’t know about taking herbs, though,” he said. “I think that’s a racket. I’m not saying they’re harmful, but I don’t think they’ll get us pregnant. And they taste like dirt.”

  Maybe so, I thought as I wound my arms around him, but honestly, in every relationship, doesn’t one have to eat a little dirt?

  This time we saw the heartbeat, a pale, blurry tic-tac pulsing against the darkness of my belly. There was a heart inside me—someone else’s heart. I was seven weeks pregnant and as terrified as I was awed.

  Dr. Chang nodded when I told her, as if she knew this would happen. “See, only four treatments,” she boasted. She said her herbs would prevent another miscarriage; I decided to forget that I’d heard that one before.

  Eight weeks. Risa’s practice now had its own ultrasound machine. I closed my eyes as she slid the wand across my stomach, the blood pounding in my ears. “Be there,” I silently begged. “Please be there." It was—bigger, stronger, though still little more than a smudge of light.

  “Hello, Kai,” I said, barely above a whisper.

  I careened between East and West, seeking some kind of guarantee from either side. Dr. Chang claimed she could cure the morning sickness that had hit me as virulently as in my first pregnancy. She couldn’t. There were days, after my seventh face-to-face with the toilet bowl, when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore. I prayed for the pregnancy to end, then quickly assured God I was just kidding. Sort of. Risa, meanwhile, ordered me hooked up to an IV and prescribed antinausea drugs. They didn’t help much either, though at least they knocked me out for most of the day. Dr. Chang
warned me to avoid air travel during the first trimester; Risa said it probably made no difference. I wasn’t taking any chances: I postponed magazine assignments, canceled speaking engagements. I kept my fingers crossed, but not my legs, in case, as I’d read somewhere, that cut off circulation to my uterus.

  Nine weeks. Risa squinted at the screen. “I’m not seeing anything,” she said slowly. I began to shake. Steven stroked my arm, steadying. “Don’t jump to conclusions,” she continued. “This isn’t a powerful machine.” It was six o’clock on a Friday afternoon. She touched my knee. “I’m calling the hospital. I’m going to get them to squeeze you in. I’m not letting you wait all weekend like this.”

  “But we saw a heartbeat,” I said to Steven, as we hurried to the car. “It was there. It can’t just go away, can it?”

  It could. When the radiologist told us, I thanked him calmly. Then, as we walked through the hospital lobby, my knees buckled. Steven caught me, kept me from crumpling. I keened. I wailed. I didn’t care that there were people walking by, that an abundantly pregnant girl, no older than sixteen, was gawking at me. Why her, I thought, and not me? I sobbed myself dry. This was not like the first time. It was not even like the second. Anyone can tell you, three strikes and you’re out.

  “I know,” Steven murmured as I wept. “I know it’s hard.” He didn’t tell me it would be all right. He didn’t say that we’d be okay. How could he?

  Monday morning, before the D&C, Risa pressed my hand. “Give this woman some really good drugs,” she told the anesthesiologist. "She’s been through a lot. Too much.” I stared at the ceiling as the vacuum sucked at my womb, willing myself into the tiny holes of the soundproofing. The first time, I’d been in shock. The second, I’d been unconscious. This time I was all there—I was all there, and it hurt.

  I found out later that if the baby had lived, a chromosomal abnormality would’ve left it severely retarded, with a defective heart and ghastly facial and limb deformities. So yes, nature did her job; nature did me a favor. That didn’t make the loss less devastating.

  I also found out that he was indeed a boy. That was something I didn’t want to know.

  Dr. Chang seemed to sense when my faith was flagging, when I wearied of making the weekly haul into the city. On those days she’d already have a picture in hand when I arrived. “See,” she’d say. “She was your age, came to me for a year, and now she has a baby." Once, when another photo “accidentally” slipped out of a file I even saw the patients’ names. The husband was someone I knew; we had been editors at the same magazine in New York in the 1980s when he’d been married to his first wife. I hadn’t seen him in at least fifteen years, didn’t know he’d moved to the Bay Area. I was fairly certain he wouldn’t want me privy to the details of his sperm count. The photos were such a transparent manipulation, yet I fell for it every time. And how different was it, really, than the walls of baby names in the fertility clinics, the burbling infants on their Web sites, the souvenir snapshots of cells, or three-ringed binders overflowing with birth announcements and holiday cheer? Everyone used their successes to woo our aching hearts. Everyone coerced and equivocated—the doctors, the acupuncturists, the Yoga for Fertility instructors. They all dangled something just shy of a promise in front of us, then yanked it out of reach.

  In the four years that I’d been trying to get pregnant, the number of annual IVF attempts had shot up by 78 percent; Americans were spending over 2.7 billion dollars a year pursuing fertility treatments. Bookstores devoted entire sections to volumes implying they could get you pregnant (and that you won’t conceive without them). In one, Six Steps to Increased Fertility, a trio from the Harvard Medical School faculty wrote that infertile women report the same levels of anxiety and depression as cancer patients. (Amateurs, I scoffed—what about those of us who’ve had both?) They also claimed, like Dr. Chang, that stress hampers conception. That, for me, was where this alternative stuff got dodgy; it always seemed to find a way to blame you for your malady, putting the locus of the problem in your head rather than your body as surely as did comments like “Just relax,” “Take a vacation,” or, as one acquaintance suggested, “Why don’t you just take a bottle of wine to bed and enjoy your husband.”

  I recalled best-selling author Louise Hay, who maintained that breast cancer was caused by “deep-seated resentment,” and Yale Medical School professor Bernie Siegel, who claimed, “Happy people generally don’t get sick.” Now, I discovered, Chinese medicine believed that my infertility was due to an “inner psychological frustration about having and raising children.” If that were the case, why were there ever unwanted babies? What’s more, I’d never seen anything blaming men for sperm defects.

  The Harvard docs took pains to say that anxiety is the byproduct, not the cause, of infertility; yet if stress discourages pregnancy, and you’ve let infertility stress you out, what is a girl supposed to think? Especially when the book breathlessly repeats the italicized statistic that their “Mind/Body program has an over 30 percent success rate for conception.” This had to be my fault, didn’t it? My education, my social status, the era in which I lived, had all taught me I could be anything I wanted to be, do anything I wanted to do, be mistress of my fate. Wasn’t the corollary, then, that I also caused my own misfortune?

  People in pain are so vulnerable, such easy marks. We’re desperate for reasons, for a sense of control, even if it means incriminating ourselves. A friend noticed that when referring to the miscarriages I would say I’d had two, plus a partial molar pregnancy. "Why do you differentiate that way?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, although, in truth, I did. Because the first one, the partial molar pregnancy, was due to a sperm abnormality. It had nothing do with my body, my choices, my ambivalence, my age. Because I didn’t blame myself for it. Because it didn’t choke me with guilt.

  I had to admit that despite my fear of becoming one of those people who speaks in a carefully modulated voice, my thermonuclear anxiety was exhausting me. I wasn’t sure I fully bought the stress-infertility connection (Wouldn’t it follow, then, that only happy women got pregnant easily?), but even I could see I needed to ratchet it down a smidge. The acupuncture was one step. The Harvard crew suggested replacing negative thoughts—”I’ll never have a baby”—with positive ones—”I’m doing everything I can to get pregnant.” They also advised daily meditation. So I tried. I did. I set a timer for nine minutes, settled myself into a chair, and concentrated on my breath. After three minutes I opened one eye to check the clock. After six minutes, my back hurt. After seven, I decided a more effective relaxation technique would be vegging out with a can of Pringles in front of the Style Network.

  That October, five months into our treatment, Steven refused to go back to Dr. Chang. It was too expensive, he claimed. Anyway, he didn’t have time; he was spending the fall shooting a new film in Santa Cruz, about an hour south of Berkeley when the traffic is clear (which it never is). He had set up shop in a hotel there, and I would come down to visit on weekends and when I was ovulating. “I can’t make a special trip to the city every week anymore,” he said one afternoon. “I have a life. I have a job. You can keep doing it, but I’m done. It’s enough. Besides, I’m tired of walking by people’s gardens, seeing the dead leaves, and wondering, ‘Is that what I’m eating?’”

  It was once again Indian summer, when Northern California is bleached blond and dry. It hadn’t rained since April; our morning walk through the hills behind Steven’s hotel left our shoes covered in dust. At the trailhead a sign instructed us on how to fend off a mountain lion: stand erect, face forward, make eye contact, speak in a brave voice—and if it does attack, fight back. I wished I could follow that advice in the rest of my life.

  “I saw one yesterday morning," Steven said, casually.

  “Oh my God! A mountain lion? What did you do?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. I watched it for a while, then kept going.”

  That composure, I thought
, was the essential difference between him and me. For the rest of our walk, I waved my arms over my head trying to make myself look larger and more fierce, just in case. If nothing else, it kept the cougars laughing too hard to pounce.

  Afterward we had coffee on a veranda overlooking the sweep of the Santa Cruz mountains. “I’ve made a decision,” Steven said. "I’ll only keep trying to get pregnant if you stop caring.”

  Stop caring? He might as well have told me to stop breathing.

  “I’m tired of putting my life on hold,” he continued. “I’m tired of basing everything on your menstrual cycle. I’m tired of knowing about your menstrual cycle. Your first question when I told you I’d be shooting down here wasn’t to ask about the project, it was about how it would affect your cycle. If that’s what you care about—if it’s all you care about, if you don’t care about what I’m doing—then we’re not having a relationship anymore.”

  “But I can’t just not care,” I said. “And I don’t stand around watching mountain lions. I’m not you.”

  He looked out at the view, shaking his head. “I don’t know how to say it any other way, Peg. leant do this. You’re destroying our marriage. I love you as much as I always have. I feel it all the time when I’m away from you, but then I call to see how you are, to have a laugh and share our day, and you’re not my partner anymore. You pretend to talk about normal things, but I can tell you’re thinking about fertility the whole time. You’re this angry, bitter person fixated on having a baby. And—I’m not saying it’s going to happen—but if someone else came along and cared about me and wanted to hear what I had to say, I’d be vulnerable. I want you to know that. It wouldn’t be one of those things where you could say, ‘We were getting along so well. I have no idea why this happened.’ I’m not threatening you, but I want you to be aware.”

  I wish I could say that Steven’s warning, his pleading, brought me to my senses, made me realize how sorely I’d neglected him. But perversely, it was my very faith in his commitment to our relationship that had allowed me to abuse it. I had convinced myself that we’d survive the damage I was inflicting, that it was reversible, even necessary. I would make it up to him later, after we had a baby. Right now, I needed him to want what I wanted. And if I couldn’t have that, I needed him to do what I wanted. My husband was telling me straight out that as much as he loved me, he wasn’t sure he could stay in our marriage. And my only response was to think, “Now how do I get him to have sex with me?”