by Suzy Becker
The blood tests didn’t allay Dr. Penzias’s nonconcern. He ordered another ultrasound and this time he, personally, wanted to do a pelvic exam. The second ultrasound tech identified a “complex cyst” on my left ovary; nothing wrong with my left tube, and she had no problem finding both ovaries. There was a long wait between the ultrasound and Dr. Penzias’s pelvic exam, but once I was dressed, he immediately took us into his office.
“Well, I don’t think it’s cancer, that’s the good news!” Cancer?! He spread out the films. “It’s a complex cyst; complex in the sense we’re seeing solid and fluid. It’s reduced over the two days, you can see the fluid is drying up. I’m thinking it could just be an irregular ovulation. I didn’t feel anything; you’re not exhibiting any other symptoms . . . As long as your levels continue to rise appropriately, I see no reason why we need to scrap this cycle.”
“Are we sure it’s not cancer?” Lorene asked.
“If it’s an irregular ovulation, the body will reabsorb everything. We’ll keep an eye on it.”
I was in my studio when the update nurse called that afternoon. “How’d the meeting go?”
“Okay. Everything’s okay as long as the levels are rising—”
“Unfortunately, they’re not. Your estradiol is at eighty; it should have been one-twenty.”
That was it. End of cycle. Just like that.
Dr. Penzias had a new plan. We would skip trying in December— enjoy the holidays, give the cyst a chance to dry up, and on Day 21 of my next cycle, we would begin a round of Lupron injections, effectively shutting down my ovaries and ceding complete control of my cycle to medicine.
Lorene and I babysat for Henry that night. We went to see the Hugh Grant movie Love Actually afterward. No 9:30 shot to race home for. “You were crying,” Lorene said as we were leaving the parking lot.
“I know. It was the Christmas pageant. The thought of never having a kid in the Christmas pageant.”
She was laughing. “I’m sorry, but did you think you’d have a kid in a church—”
“I’ll tell you what I was also thinking: For once I wasn’t crying about the romance, the thought of never having the big love . . . ” I started to cry again. “I feel like I’ve been this really good sport, having the shots, the tests, smiling instead of wincing . . . What if I turned into the barren-sister-bitch-maniac and kidnapped Henry or sued Meredith for unfit motherhood?”
Lorene rested her head on my arm. “I wish I wasn’t so old, I would have the baby for you.”
I wish I wasn’t so old. “It scared me when he said cancer,” I said. “It’s the first time I really thought about all this stuff I’m putting into my body.”
“I’m putting into your body. Every time I give you a shot, I think about it.”
“One more try.”
“Your insurance would pay for at least two more . . . ”
“One. If I can, if the cyst goes away, I’ll give it one more try.”
The next night we were in the car again on the way home from dinner at our friends’. We turned the radio on; scary futuristic music was playing—it was the BBC’s Instant Guide to IVF. A male narrator was describing the lengths to which some women go to have babies, test-tube babies. More scary music. I looked at Lorene just to make sure I wasn’t the only one hearing it, and she flipped it off.
I woke up with an awful headache the next morning. This headache hung on for three days. By the second, I’d forgotten I had a headache and settled into a bad mood, which I attributed to the last and final round of book proofing. And to the town library’s not getting the roof grant, which I had previously sworn would come as a relief but in reality made me angry about all the pointless work I’d done. And to Seed changing the publication date on its next issue, rendering my holiday cartoon useless. And to the Massachusetts State Supreme Court’s decision to give same-sex couples the right to marry, which, I know, was cause for celebration, but also took the lid off the very vocal opposition and exposed a lot of the so-called support as disappointingly lukewarm.
con • done verb: To forgive an offense
Lorene attributed it to going off hormones cold turkey.
It was December. It was the end of the year in which we had tried to have a baby. While neither of us would admit it out loud, we had stopped believing there would be a baby. I’d like to think we never stopped believing we would be happy without one.
Left to herself, Lorene would have taken time to process the disappointment and grieve the loss of the child we would never have. But she was with me. That kind of time could be my undoing. Instead, she set plans in motion for the construction of our dream studio. Our other life. She brought the carpenter-handyman from a local historic inn over to our barn and the three of us did a walk-through, imagining a porch here, a rope swing and a couple of salvaged doors there.
We would live in Bolton another ten to fifteen years. Then, when I was in my fifties and Lorene in her sixties, we’d sell the house and the cars and join the Peace Corps, as a couple, and spend two years working in some far-flung spot. After that, we’d take a small subset of our stuff out of storage and move to the city, where we would go to more movies and lectures and make young friends. I still had some convincing to do.
With all the money we never spent on college, we’d travel. Our new friends would look after us in our dotage, the way we looked after our old friends in Bolton. There’s no guarantee our child would have looked after us anyway.
Our love would always come first. Our time would be our own. Our late-night dinners, or no dinner at all. Our Sunday mornings. Our weekend getaways. Our spontaneous lunches or middle-of-the-night sky watches. We could be very content being the World’s Best Aunts.
The carpenter-handyman dropped off some drawings. A rope swing? Poor, pitiful childless people. We weren’t ready to give him a deposit yet.
The Monday after Christmas, I pulled out one last fertility stop.
I, contrary to my previous public pronouncements that meditation wasn’t my cup of tea (or maybe was, since I can’t stand tea, either), began meditating. It still wasn’t/was my cup of tea, but I had been persuaded that the benefits did not discriminate.
I signed up for a one-day Kundalini weight-loss workshop at the local nail salon. At the end of the day, I asked the instructor for a meditation. She didn’t have anything specific to fertility or conception, but she was confident the pregnancy and birth meditation, with a couple of tweaks, would work. I secretly meditated for eleven minutes (the suggested minimum) after Lorene and I turned the lights out each night.
JOURNAL: JANUARY 6, 2004
How did someone who can’t draw, has no sense of color or ability to fill a page, get to do a picture book? And the hormones haven’t even started . . .
The Lupron injections started up. I got my period nine days later without any of my usual night-before hyperproductivity or day-of slight bloating—my body was on somebody else’s autopilot.
Since we tried not to plan our lives around my cycles,* the timing was invariably an issue. This year, however, we had lucked out with the Burlington getaway. I felt a twinge as I packed up the car; I allowed myself, for an instant, to wish I was packing up a baby, instead of arriving at the bed and breakfast empty-armed. My failure wouldn’t be lost on the owners, the ones who had sent us off with their best wishes that snowy Sunday a year earlier.
When we returned from the long weekend, the real cycle started. That week, I had to travel to New York and give myself the shots for the first time.
I could have continued to give myself the shots when I got home, but I preferred the small ceremony of Lorene’s and my 9:30 nightlies.
Dr. Franken did my retrieval this time. He had no memory of our first transfer, which was fine (I still had no memory of his real last name), and there was no need to bring up a sad ending when we could all focus on a happy beginning. He collected a very respectable fifteen eggs in his basket. I slept a full five hours afterward, and I was sorer than I
remembered being the first time, but not enough to change our dinner plans.
The transfer was three days later, the same day my first bound copy of I Had Brain Surgery, What’s Your Excuse? was scheduled to land on my doorstep. Fourteen of the fifteen eggs fertilized, but only four developed into embryos.
Lorene didn’t sleep the night before. Her anxiety ratcheted way up after ER; the episode took place in the neonatal intensive care unit. She was anxious about having a baby, having twins, dropping the baby, forgetting the baby . . . I slept like a baby. Whatever will be, will be . . . over. Just please not another ectopic pregnancy.
We met the transfer doctor in the pre-op chamber, a curtained-off cubicle. He was supposedly there to confirm our directives—a transfer of two embryos. Lorene let him know it was our last try. No pressure. He closed the curtain and sat down. “At your age”—he glanced at his chart—“forty-one and a half”—correction, sir, a third—“you really should consider four or five, given the fragmenting.” Ow! I felt that in my ovaries.
Lorene and I were not comfortable with the concept of “reduction,” a euphemism for aborting if we ended up with more than two. (I know, we hadn’t been comfortable with the concept of an IVF eight months earlier, and there we were.)
“The chance of one implantation, let alone two or three—let’s be realistic—is small.” Why are we being realistic all of a sudden?
Lorene now had the doctor talking about his specialty in chromosomally transgendered kids.
He returned to the topic at hand. “We have three good-looking seven-cell embryos, a couple of five—”
“Last time I had eights, two eights,” I interrupted.
“You are talking about the difference of one cell, a day or less of gestation.”
Three sevens. My locker number was 107. Lucky 7.
I looked at Lorene. “You okay with three?”
“I’m okay with three. I’m not okay with triplets, but I’m okay with three.”
“Freeze the rest?”
Lorene let me answer. “No, thanks.”
We’re done.
Outtahere.
This is it for us.
Sayonara and g’bye.
Lorene bent down and kissed me. All the trying would be over when I saw her again.
I wasn’t the least bit sleepy after the transfer, although I was committed to bed rest, looking forward to it, actually. I read my food magazines, got my meditation out of the way.
At 2:00 p.m., Boston IVF called to report that one of the five-cell embryos had fragmented, making it unsuitable for freezing.
A few minutes later, I heard a truck slow down and there was a knock at the door. The book!
Tour de Fetus
A week later—one week down, one week to go until my pregnancy test—I was a nervous wreck. Once again, I was sure I was not pregnant. Once again, Lorene was sure I was. Her certainty was based on my revulsion to olives at dinner. I couldn’t convince her that I had simply eaten too much bluefish and would have found anything revolting. The test would tell.
We killed the last four days at my dad’s, shopping the wholesale craft show at the Philadelphia Convention Center for Lorene’s store, and we were back at Boston IVF, bright and early, for our 7:30 pregnancy test. We had come to know the two women who administered blood tests: the nice one and the one you really wanted to get. I got the nice one. She had me sit up straight and uncross my legs. Then she murmured something about drinking more water as she ran her gloved thumb up and down my veins. She finally finished up about the same time the other nurse dispensed with her third patient. “You’ll hear this afternoon,” the nice nurse called after us.
I was useless all morning. The review of the brain book in the March issue of Oprah’s magazine was just hitting the stands. I checked my Amazon ranking a dozen times over a couple of hours, watching it climb from 65,000 to 25,000 (knowing that anything over 500 really wasn’t worth talking about). I went to the bathroom twice to see if I was bleeding. At 10:30, I called Boston IVF to leave my cell-phone number so I could go out to buy a copy of O magazine.
My rank was up to 5,000 when I got back. Still no bleeding. No word on the pregnancy test. I called Boston IVF to let them know I was home. In another two hours, I switched them back to my cell phone, as I was getting ready to head in to the public broadcasting station to tape a fundraising spot I had written. Two minutes later, my cell phone rang in the kitchen. “Suzy, we have very good news, a very strong positive! We like to see hCG values between fifty and a hundred—yours was one hundred and eleven!”
I was ecstatic, all of a sudden jittery, quite possibly faint. I held on to the soapstone sink, just in case. The woman had instructions for me, but our cell phones always cut out in the house.
“Six week-ultrasound in March?”
“We count from Day 1 of your cycle.” I was already four weeks pregnant!
After the call ended, I was still holding on to the sink, looking at the clock, debating whether I had enough time to stop by Lorene’s shop to tell her in person, and Meredith called. “I’m pregnant!” I blurted out, and heard how it sounded for the first time.
“Yes! Yes! Yes! All right!”
I interrupted, “Can you bring your What to Expect tomorrow? I have to go tell Lorene and get to WGBH.”
Lorene knew as soon as I walked in. She came out from behind the counter, arms outstretched. “I knew it. I told Ruthie, I had a vision in the shower; we’re having a boy! Wait, very strong positive?” Lorene said. “Is it twins?” Now she looked nervous.
“She didn’t say anything about twins, but you can call her. I have to go. They put me down for an ultrasound the morning I leave for book tour.”
“I’ll go buy What to Expect—”
“Meredith’s bringing it.”
Lorene’s face fell. “You told her first?” She went back to her stool and looked into her computer.
“I’m sorry.” I went over behind her. “She called . . . ” There was no acceptable apology, no do-over, no changing the fact, not one single satisfactory explanation.
Lorene was subdued at dinner. The nurse had assured her we weren’t having twins; she was still upset she hadn’t been the first to know.
I lay on my back in our bed. The winter covers felt heavy. I turned them down. Lorene pulled them back up.
I got the news I hardly dared hope for, the news I wanted for how many years, and I feel? Exhausted. “Please,” I started. “This whole time I haven’t let myself get excited, please, let’s be excited now.”
“Sorry.” She hugged me. “Let’s call Steve!”
I felt awful I hadn’t thought of it myself. “What time is it there?”
“Is there a bad time to let him know he’s going to be a father? I don’t think so!” She handed me the phone.
Steve picked up. It was late morning, late for going to work even his time. “You just caught me, what’s up?”
“We’re pregnant!” He let out a shriek to beat all shrieks. Lorene was laughing again. “We’re going to be a family!”
First thing the next morning, I wrote to Mary Ann, our friend the nurse. She wasn’t the fourth, but definitely in the first ten to know.
That Monday, six days after I found out I was officially pregnant, my miscarriage fear kicked in. My mother had had several, but she smoked. I was going to be flying to eighteen cities on a book tour—I see her smoking and I raise her fifty! I consulted my Boston IVF handout.
THE BIGGEST MYTH IN IVF
Embryos can fall out.
If the uterus was like a balloon, this might make sense. Embryos cannot fall out into a pothole, toilet, etc.
I consulted What to Expect.
I consulted Lorene. “You can’t cancel your book tour, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I was pretty sure I could; Workman would understand. “I don’t want you moping around here. I personally don’t think the universe could’ve come up with a better plan. You just need to make sure to eat and rest—you
’re going to major cities, not the Amazon.”
When I told the publicist, she immediately offered to cancel the tour. “If at any point you’re not feeling up to it, you promise to let me know. I’ll make sure you have places to rest, late checkout, I’ll rent you a room for the day if I have to. Do you want me to tell the tour contacts?”
“Please, no.” I had pushed public telling back until after the amniocentesis, whenever that was. The first ultrasound was still a week away. Normal fertile people probably wouldn’t even have taken their pregnancy tests yet.
At the first ultrasound, they were looking for a baby, specifically a heartbeat. The technician put the gel on my abdomen. She prepared us as she started searching around: “I may not be able to find it, and that doesn’t mean anything, they’ll just schedule another ultrasound in a—” We heard it! Over the whoosh, we heard a heartbeat! Next, we saw it! A tiny blinky bulb in the sea of my uterus. “One hundred and twenty-six beats a minute!” We cheered.
I wasn’t just hoping so, I wasn’t just saying so . . . Lorene squeezed my hand so hard. “Ow! I really am going to have a baby!”
“Wow is right!” the technician said.
After the ultrasound, we had our last meeting with Dr. Penzias. “Very healthy, seven weeks gestation—due date, looks like October 26th.” Lorene’s mother’s birthday.
“Thank you for everything,” I said, which didn’t begin to cover it.