Avalanche (8 page)

I began to wait. “What are my odds—of being pregnant?” was another question I'd asked Dr. Nell on the day of the transfer. Her reply: A Day 5 blastocyst has about a 40 percent chance.
How wonderful, 40 percent!
That night I felt extremely sensual, writhed like a snake, embodied metamorphosis, and avoided pleasuring myself because I feared contractions could disrupt things. The
next morning I had a tiny amount of brown spotting which I'd read was an indicator of implantation. Oh the delight. And then, immediately, tamp down delight. Wait. Wait and see. My friend who subscribed to Chinese medicine strongly advised I cut out cold swims. “The little bean needs a warm nest.” So I did that. I was taking progesterone pessaries morning and night and my breasts swelled, grew sensitive. I hoped and believed I was pregnant. On Day 27 I noticed the slightest discoloration in my urine: a hint of blood. And I collapsed. Howled. Wept. Even though there was no full bleed I sensed my period was imminent. Down, down, down the rathole. The air there was thick and dull. My skin flushed, goose-pimpled. My eyes stang red-raw. My jaw clamped tight. I felt utterly bereft. Alone, alone. You have fucked up your life. The rats of the world scuttled and gnawed. I found it impossible to leave the house.

To make myself feel better I broke a vow and Googled my ex-husband. (A frightening thought: am I a brilliant masochist?) There he was—happy, smiling. In a Facebook photo his new partner sat on the sidelines watching him play cricket. Resentment is a curse. Repulsive: like putting on a soiled garment. Parading around in it.

This didn't happen: I went to a Goddess Weekend where we worked on our inner Ancient Greek. We sharpened our swords and swore revenge. We hacked our way through grief.

All time was measured according to my menstrual cycle. “January” meant nothing to me. Days closest to my “due date” weighed heaviest. By Day 29 I still hadn't had a full bleed. In the morning I did a blood test and then went to spend the day with my sister. She was eight months or so pregnant. We had lunch at an inner-city café that was popular with young families because of its mock-farm design: wooden pens with some real chickens and a well-fed pig. Little Elsie pointed to a rooster on a weather vane and said “Sky Chicken!” I was overwhelmed—by all the children, the Yummy Mummies, by Café Potemkin. Later we watched
The Wizard of Oz
while I gave my sister a foot massage. My phone rang: it was the nurses calling. From the measured tone of voice I could instantly tell the pregnancy test had been negative—as expected. “You can begin another antagonist cycle now if you want to.” When I spoke to the doctor she was gently reassuring: it was good that I had responded well to the egg collection; often it took people two or three tries for
chromosomal reasons. “Sometimes an embryo won't implant because of the chromosomes and there's nothing we can do about that.” My sister consoled me. I tried to be brave because I didn't want to pollute her.

I went to a dance class. A kind of free-form hippie dance class. A woman in face paint smudged me with burning sage at the door. It felt so good to reconnect with my body. During the night I had an orgasm in my sleep. Throughout my treatment I didn't have sex, which made for the longest period of sexual inactivity I'd ever known. Injecting needles each night at 10 p.m. was unsexy; being bloated and hormonally loaded was unsexy; the white goop of progesterone pessaries during the two-week wait was unsexy; explaining I was doing IVF by myself was unsexy;
I
was unsexy. And recalibrating my fine chemical equilibrium was unnerving. Why invite a bull into the china shop? I'd even say a part of me didn't want to bodily introduce any sperm other than my donor's. Foolish. Minimizing. While doing IVF I allowed the world to become a smaller place.

Ways of having approximate sex: feel the heat of a stranger on public transport during peak hour; finger the
downy peaches in the fruit store; call out “Coming!” to the man who brings home delivery to the door.

The baby was born. I attended the birth. Everyone cried with joy. I held the tiny newborn in my arms and smelled her.

How to be an object of pity? My sister has a great answer to this one. “Most people think only about themselves, they don't really care.” Other people's pity is flimsy. Harmless. If it even exists, it passes. Other people's compassion is a boon. So it's self-pity that's the killer.

When I went to the counselor at the clinic she drew me a picture. “This is the grief,” she said, marking the page with an elongated black hole. “The divorce grief, the infertility grief.” She explained that when we were triggered by an event—it could be anything—we returned to the grief. She marked a dot near the black hole and drew a loop between them. She drew lots of dots, lots of small concentric loops. “And then, over time, we find we have fewer triggers.” She marked a dot at a greater distance from the black hole, drew a bigger loop. More dots, four bigger loops containing all the other loops.
“See—it's a butterfly.” I just nodded
. I wanted to take a pin and stick it between my eyes.
Pinned and wriggling on the wall
.

February 2014. Eight eggs were harvested on my third collection. Five of those were mature and were injected with sperm. The lab assistants called on schedule with their morbid countdown.
Please, please develop. You can do it!
I was an embryo cheerleader. I filled those Petri dishes with love. On Day 5, the morning of my transfer, I learned that this time I only had a morula to transfer, not a blastocyst. I'd never heard of a morula before—essentially it is an embryo less developed than a blastocyst but still worth transferring. When I asked the doctor about the difference she said that the pregnancy rate for a morula was 25 percent compared to 40 percent for a blastocyst. My heart fell. Whatever eyes-wide wonder I'd had when first doing a transfer had dissipated and now Charlie's chocolate factory was a factory plain and simple. Efficacious. I didn't enjoy my acupuncture—all those pinpricks—and wondered whether it was worth pursuing. I still had hope the transfer would be successful, I still conducted my inner conversations with the embryo, but my hope wasn't as intense as it had been before. I slept a lot. Snow fell in the
night. I paid visits to my sister and the new baby. One day I was wearing a wraparound dress that she said looked handy for breastfeeding so we did a costume change. She lent me a loose blue dress she had worn up until the birth. “If I wear this dress,” I joked, “maybe it will rub off and I'll get pregnant.” I waited and waited. Come Day 28 there was no sign of bleeding. That shy little hope grew and grew. How kind the nurse was when she took my blood. I held my breath all day waiting for the call. “I'm sorry, it's negative.” I told the nurse I was too wrung out to go straight into another cycle. Wept on the floor.

I had my annual conversation with a woman (mother of two) who was once a close friend. “What's next for you? Forget about babies,” said the friend. “The baby boat has sailed.”
Bitch
: I hadn't breathed a word to her about my treatment.
Wait and see
.

Now I don't care but for a long time I was circumspect about telling people I was doing IVF. Professionally, while there was still a chance I could become pregnant, it wasn't wise. With friends I was careful about who I told. I didn't
want to tell my friend with breast cancer because she had enough on her plate; I didn't want to tell my friends who were new mothers and obsessed with their babies; I didn't want to tell friends who either were at ease not being mothers or those who found themselves childless in circumstances similar to mine; nor did I want to tell my friend who had remained close to my ex-husband. I didn't want to tell people because I thought that unless they were involved in that world themselves they wouldn't want to listen. Or they would only half listen and so diminish my experience. Or they would ask questions that required explanations too complex for conversation. Or they would offer advice based on hearsay and a general theory of positivity. Or I would make them uncomfortable because of my proximity to the abyss.
Hush, keep your voice down, don't mention it by name
.

The following month was a respite. Thank all the gods. I jumped on a plane to Bali and for ten days worked on a commissioned script from a villa overlooking the Sayan Ridge in Ubud. The place was lush, verdant, abundantly fertile. Dense and green. I counted six layered storeys of green from my terrace. Vertical green. Ten thousand
insects. I luxuriated in having someone bring me breakfast each morning. I did yoga and had massages: unashamed, a walking convalescent. Eat, Pray, Love—or “Eat, Pay, Leave,” as the locals say—who cares. It was good. It helped. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

On resuming treatment I noticed that the white cockatoos who habitually roosted on a nearby roof antenna had fallen silent. It drove me crazy that Paul had turned his back and walked off into the so-called sunset while I was left with my pathetic hormone injections. Callous lotus-eater! Faux Buddhist! Fake feminist! Hey Orpheus, turn around! The rats had a field day. I heard myself referring to “my infertility” when talking to my sister. A slip of the tongue. I'd never applied the term to myself before—I wasn't infertile, I was “trying to get pregnant.” To be infertile sounded like something already decided, finalized, irreversible. I had to drag myself back to the nurses. Dread intermingled with hope this time round. I wasn't sure I could withstand another failure. The test of IVF, I came to realize, is to do with both intensity and duration. IVF is durational in the same way a lot of people can sit at a table and stare at a stranger for ten minutes but very few can do it for 700-plus hours. One day after I'd left the
clinic I needed to do some shopping and had my carry bag of drugs with me. Those telltale nylon bags, just big enough for a cold pack: all women doing IVF could spot them a mile away. I bought a dozen eggs. Egg kit, eggs in hand: the moment was absurd. I was slipping. Rally! “You are Team Captain,” I told myself. “Keep it together. It isn't what happens to a person but how they respond that counts. There is hope. It's not over yet. You are Team Captain. Team Captain.” In the evening, after my needle, I practiced a visualization exercise, partially inspired by an engraved medical illustration I'd bought after my lung operation. It's a page cut from a nineteenth-century medical book depicting a bust-sized portrait of a woman, alive, well, fully clothed, her head in three-quarter profile, whose chest is completely open, revealing her lungs and other internal workings. Gruesome and elegant. And hopelessly outmoded by today's medical knowledge. So I pictured my own internal belly workings and saw follicles growing, sprouting out of my ovaries, each follicle a point of light.
Lush, verdant, abundantly fertile
.

And something else about that nineteenth-century engraving: as I was doing IVF it felt like medical science was moving at such a fast pace that whatever the treatment
I was being prescribed it was already on the verge of being surpassed. This made for a substrata anxiety about “keeping up with the latest.”

When I was in Bali a friend—successful in her treatment—had sworn by DHEA. I'd written to my doctor saying that a non-medical friend had recommended something called DHEA as a possible fertility treatment. What was it and did she think it suitable for me at this stage? The doctor replied that DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) was a weak male hormone that can be taken as a tablet three times a day. She said there had been a lot of work looking at DHEA as a way of improving egg quality and ovarian response to stimulation but the studies on the whole showed no improvement and as such there didn't appear to be much benefit in taking it. Still, if I wanted to go ahead she would write me a prescription. Another quandary. I declined.

If anyone says they chose not to have children because the world is already overpopulated, because the world doesn't need any more children, I don't buy it. I also didn't buy it when my friend who has six children said the country
needed more children because “otherwise who is going to pay for our retirement?” If a decision really is made, it's telescopically micro, not macro. For instance, I did believe a different friend who said he'd never wanted to have a child because he thought it unfair—unkind—to inflict consciousness on another being.

One mother said to me, “I don't know how you can choose to be pregnant. Our kids weren't planned. I wouldn't have had the courage.” My response: “With IVF—you have to choose.”

The titanium hook: I only need one and it could be the next one.

I weighed myself down with more hormones. The scan showed nine large follicles. And a blood test revealed that once again my progesterone was high and the possibility of a fresh transfer was thrown in doubt. “I can only advise what I'd do myself,” said the doctor. “If you say you want to go ahead I'll still treat you.” I chose to wait for a frozen transfer, as I'd done before. The run sheet: seven eggs were collected of which six were
mature. Only three fertilized overnight. And by Day 3 of the countdown all three embryos were still going strong, which raised the exciting prospect that for the first time I might be lucky enough to get more than one embryo worthy of being transferred. How eager I was to fan the flame of hope. More than one viable embryo! Blessed bounty! I remember I received the good news when I ducked out of an actors' workshop that I was auditing. Earlier in the day the acting coach—a man—had stopped a 20-something actress midway through her scene. “I can't hear you! Speak up! As a woman you can have a voice, you're not a child or a girl! Listen to this—women are allowed to have more power! Women are more powerful than men because they carry children!” I knew the coach was well-intended but his pep talk made my skin crawl. On Day 5 I called the lab for an update. An assistant said my results weren't ready yet because “we're busy assessing our patients.” How strange: I wasn't sure if she meant the embryos themselves were her patients. Perhaps she did. That afternoon I got a call back: I had one early blastocyst, Grade B, and a morula that wouldn't survive the thaw, and the third embryo had stopped developing altogether on Day 3. So they froze the blastocyst.