Authors: Elisabeth Rohm
I tried to pay attention because I
didn't want to fail.
I couldn't fail. I wanted to get this right the first time, like an A+ student. I would do every single thing he said to doâif I could only pay attention!
Next, we were off to the lab. Ron and I were both tested for a whole slew of diseases and infections. Then, we were given an individualized calendar that listed every single thing we had to do each day. I felt dizzy and Ron looked overwhelmed as the nurse explained the calendar. First, I would begin taking birth control pills. This was the initial step, to make my cycle completely regular. Next, I would begin to take Lupron to prevent premature ovulation during the IVF cycle. This would keep my body from releasing the eggs that we wanted to retain so they could be extracted and fertilized in the lab.
I also received prescriptions for Follistim, Menopur, HCG, progesterone suppositories, and prenatal vitamins. While I could hardly keep them all straight, I was incredibly focused. These were the medications that would help to make my eggs mature enough to be fertilized, and then help to sustain and nourish a pregnancy once it began, and I was damn well
not
going to mess this up. The process had begun. It was my
pre
-prenatal visit. The first actual prenatal visit was just a matter of time, I decided.
On our next visit, we had to deal with the financial aspects of IVFâto the tune of $20,000 a pop if your insurance doesn't cover itâand most insurance doesn't. Not exactly the change in your pocket. We sat down with an exquisitely beautiful woman who looked like Halle Berry, and she explained all the options and packages available. One of the packages included three tries. Not exactly a three-for-one sale; more like buying IVF tries in bulk at a discount. If it didn't work the first time (but it would, but it would work!), we would have two more tries available to us, prepaid. IVF often doesn't work the first time, so this seemed like a sensible insurance policy. Ron said, “Let's pay for three.”
I nodded, even as I vowed silently to myself that we
would not need those last two tries.
As I watched Ron talk to the woman, I realized that it had been a long time since someone really took charge over my health like this. It made me feel safe, like a vulnerable child being sheltered by her parents. I thought,
This is what family does.
I remembered buying health insurance for my mother when I was on
Law & Order,
taking care of her health, and now someone was taking care of mine. It was nice. He was being fatherly, in preparation for the real fatherhood we both hoped was in his future. I felt like I could finally exhale.
Next, we were back in the clinic, where the nurse explained in great detail how to take the various drugs that would help me conceive a baby. First, I would start the Lupron, then the Follistim, and Menopur. The Follistim was made of follicle-stimulating hormone, and although this was the very hormone I had too much of, that signaled the accelerated aging of my eggs, I would receive measured doses of this hormone after being on Lupron for a few weeks in order to help stimulate the follicles to develop into mature eggs, ready to welcome in that one successful sperm cell. The Menopur, the nurse explained, was a gonadotropin, a reproductive hormone that helps to
induce the development of multiple eggs, so I would have as many good eggs as possible when Dr. Sahakian was ready to extract them.
It all sounded like science fiction to me. It wasn't exactly a complicated process, but Ron and I are both perfectionists, and the idea that Ron would be administering all these injections into my ass every morning was both humiliating and intimidating. We understood that I would begin the Lupron that day. They gave me the subcutaneous injection and showed Ron how to do it. They showed us when to start the additional medications and how to adjust the dosages. It was all spelled out in the calendar; they handed us our guidebook in this foreign land.
After the appointment was over, it was nearly dinnertime, so Ron and I drove home together, had a glass of wine, and discussed what we'd learned. We pored over the calendar and I was filled with hope.
“Do you want to start thinking about baby names?” I asked Ron.
“Isn't that jumping the gun?” he said doubtfully.
“No, it's optimistic,” I said.
“Let's just wait a little longer,” he said. He gave me a look. I could see it in his eyes. He didn't want to be disappointed. He was afraid to hope too much, but I wasn't afraid. I wanted to drown in hope. Every time I saw a woman carrying a baby, I hoped. Every time I saw a tricycle, or a tiny coat in a store, or a little girl with a shiny pair of little shoes, I hoped. I watched for babies. I thought about babies. I lived and breathed babies, hoping that baby energy would infuse my body and make it produce one of its own, out of sheer longing.
Every morning, I would bare my ass to Ron and he would grab my cellulite and shove in the needle. It wasn't sexy, but it was necessary. Ron was the shot master. I never gave them to myself. I had a hard enough time not fainting. When I was a kid, I had to get shots for my severe allergies. My mother and the nurse both had to hold my hands and cover my eyes during those shots. I'm one of those people who
faints when I have blood drawn, so I dreaded every single morning, but Ron took care of it all. I told him he had to know all the details because I just couldn't. I didn't even want to look at those little needles. I told him, “You figure it all out, and I'll just whistle my happy tune and try not to faint.”
When the doctor said to do acupuncture because some studies show it improves pregnancy rates and it would be good for stress relief, I did acupuncture (eyes closed). When the doctor said to take vitamins, I took vitamins. When the doctor said to stay positive and relaxed, damn it if I wasn't going to be as goddamn fucking positive as humanly possible. I would get stressed out trying to figure out how not to get stressed out. All the while, I was secretly a nervous wreck, never wanting to say the words, “What if it doesn't work?” or to even think that it might not work. I bit my tongue. I cleared my mind. I focused on a baby. I would not admit there was any chance a baby was not part of my future.
When it came time to start the Follistim and the Menopur, suddenly Ron and I had doubts that we remembered what we were supposed to do. We examined the calendar again, then arranged a conference call with the nurse on July 24, on speaker phone. She reviewed the whole procedure again. The next day, Ron called back and had her walk him through it all a few more times, just so he could be absolutely sure he was doing everything according to procedure.
“I just don't want to do anything wrong,” he said. “I feel like it's all up to me.”
“It's up to your hands and my ass,” I said. We both laughed, a little grimly. It wasn't romantic, but it was real. We were really doing this.
Ron and I talked about how we would minimize our stress. We decided we would eat whatever we wanted, sleep as much as we wanted, get massages, meditate, all of that. In an effort to relax, I excavated my hippie childhood, chanting and burning incense, cooking
organic food, doing yoga every day. Our house began to resemble an ashram. The aroma of Nag Champa was always wafting through the air in those days. I tried to channel Lisa Kudrow's character, Phoebe, on
Friends.
I wanted to be the carefree, careless, mindless hippie chick who popped out babies like it was nothing.
Yet, immersing ourselves in the IVF process was like stepping into another world and trying to live there and relax, all the while knowing that the whole reason we were in this alternative universe in the first place was because my body didn't work.
I tried not to think about that part. I didn't like how medicalized and abnormal it all felt. It was humbling, as Ron treated me like a child who needed her injection, rather than a lover. I was thrusting my ass in the air, not for pleasure but for pain, taking my medicine. I was more like the grand experiment. I was a pioneer, and I felt like I was the only one in the world who had to endure it.
I still longed for the romantic dream that I could have passionate sex that would result in a baby. But most of me lived in the moment. In some ways, IVF makes you feel like you are already pregnant because you are going through such a process and being so careful with yourselfâbut of course, you aren't pregnant, and you are also acutely aware of this fact. Yet, now that I was taking action, my sorrow seemed further away, my dashed dreams not quite so shattered.
With every visit to the clinic, I walked in feeling heavy with the burden of what we were doing. I would walk in slowly, feeling the floor beneath my feet, the space around me, the height of the ceiling, the proximity of the walls. I would smell the clinic, I would smile at the nurses. My reasoning became warped. I began to tell myself things like,
Be really nice to all the nurses because they are in charge of the future of your baby. If they like you, they will give you the special treatment. They'll be more careful. They'll sprinkle fairy dust on your embryos to make them come alive.
This became our pattern: on the days we had morning appointments, we would go off in our own directions in our own cars afterward, to digest and think about what we had just learned, to ask ourselves,
Is this really happening?
Those morning appointments felt like breakfast. We were fed a big plate of medical information that would, if we were lucky, if everything went as planned, if all the stars were aligned and technology didn't fail us, change our lives. Gee, Doc, does a banana come with that? I'll pass on the coffee because I'm assuming I'm already pregnant and I'm not going to be able to drink coffee anymore. Do you have any herbal tea?
On the days when we had afternoon appointments, we would both go out and get our work done first, then meet at home and drive together to the clinic. Afterward, we would go home together, make dinner, and talk it all over. We would consider what the doctor said, ask each other questions, or just sit together in quiet wonderment. I would suggest more baby names, and finally, Ron relented and began to suggest his own. We sifted through hundreds of names and could never agree.
Dr. Sahakian had warned me that the fertility drugs might have some side effects, and I had friends who turned into crazy weepy maniacs on the IVF drugs. It threw them completely out of whack. Basically, you are jacking your body up on hormones, so your highs will feel higher and your lows will feel lower. But for some reason, I felt
fantastic
on the fertility drugs. Energetic, positive, really good. Those fertility drugs were like happy pills to me. I'm not sure which of those shots, suppositories, or pills was doing it for me, but I felt better on than off of the fertility drugs. When I finally went off them, I remember thinking,
There goes my ecstasy!
But I was no paragon of self-control. I felt ecstatic, but I was also emotional, and a little bit volatile. I wasn't depressed but sometimes I would fly off the handle for no reason, my emotions ricocheting off
the wooden beam rafters of our Venice loft like a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing off the concrete floor, zipping past the golden retriever, and crashing through a window.
One day, I really lost it. It's always my job to walk the dog. This is obviously not a big deal. However, Ron
never
walks the dog. I remember one day, Ron made some innocent comment about how the dog needed his walk, and that was all I needed to trigger me. “How many times do I have to walk this dog!” I screamed. “Can't you see I'm trying to get pregnant here? I can't handle
everything!”
Ron just looked at me like I was a crazy person, then he laughed. I guess it was pretty ridiculous. There I was, red-faced and furious, thinking,
I guess when this relationship crashes and burns, he's going to regret paying $20,000 for this baby!
when all Ron was thinking was,
There go the hormones.
I think he might have even walked the dog that day.
Through all of this, Ron was steady and dependable, especially when I got emotional. One of his great qualities is that he gets over things quickly. I'll stay tortured about an argument for a week, going over it again and again in my mind. He processes things quickly and moves on. One of the best things I learned from Ron is that a fight isn't the same as breaking up. This wasn't an easy time for us, mostly because I would pick fights. Whenever we would get into a big blowup, my first thought was,
I guess this relationship must be over, right?
Ron taught me that an argument does not signify the catastrophic end of our entire relationship. He taught me how to fight fair and put arguments into perspective. Sometimes, I think I was testing himâturning over the apple cart, just to see what would happen, to see how long he would put up with me. Ron has the attitude that a fight is just a fight, it's probably ridiculous, and when it's over, it's over. It can take me a long time to forgive and forget. Ron was patient with me. He really
hung in there. During vulnerable times, it's easy to fall prey to that inner monologue we always have going on in our heads that convinces us how wronged we are. Thank goodness nobody could hear mine.
I'm sure Ron also felt the immense pressure we were under to succeed because we had spent such a large sum of money on this gamble, and he had absolutely no control over the results. It was strange to be so let down and also so hopeful at the same time, but we persevered. Every time I got another shot, I imagined that we were rolling the dice, just like everyone else doing IVF all over the world, powerless to control the result. It felt like those shots contained a magic potion. If it was swirled together in just the right way and injected into me with a needle, I would have a baby. If it was swirled together in the wrong direction, if the angle of the needle was wrong, or we injected at the wrong time of day, or I was in the wrong mood at the moment of injection, then that baby would evaporate into the ether.