One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (20 page)

On Sunday (Day 10), left ovary was ahead. We went to Meredith and Jonathan’s for dinner carrying a cake tin full of injection paraphernalia. The extra bottles we needed to mix a new batch of Gonal-f wouldn’t fit in the free purse-size carrier. Lorene also believed we should be bringing dinner for, not accepting dinner from, the six-months-pregnant people. I promised I would make them dinner if we were ever lucky enough to be in that boat.

After we did the dishes, Meredith got on her computer in the living room and Jonathan went up to clean out the litter box, leaving us the privacy of the kitchen. Lorene opened the cake tin. “Shit!” We’d brought all of the equipment and none of the instructions. “Never mind, I think I remember,” she said. She filled the syringe full of sterile water and inserted it into the Gonal-f bottle. “Nothing’s coming out . . . Nothing’s coming out. There’s too much pressure, NOTHING’S COMING OUT!”

“Try pulling the plunger back.” She did and the sterile water squirted all over.

“Shit! Look, it
was
going in! I should’ve never listened to you.”

I shot back, “Don’t blame me, I thought you were asking for help.”

Lorene lowered her voice and said, “I don’t want to have this conversation in front of other people,” just as Meredith walked in. I laughed at the timing. “Don’t laugh at me!” Lorene said. She slammed her keys on the floor and left the house.

Meredith helped me put everything back into the cake tin. Lorene and I drove home in silence. A few miles from home, I managed an “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too.” She was sobbing, sorrier than I was, as if it was all her fault.

When we are angry, our tendency is to punish the other person, but when we do, there is only an escalation of the suffering. Instead send a gift. Offer what is needed.

—T
HICH
N
HAT
H
ANH

We found another bottle of sterile water in the kit at home. Lorene took her time (we were already late) and mixed up the new batch. The shot hurt; we had run out of new spots.

“Thank you,” I said, and went to my studio to work. Lorene went to sleep.

The next morning, we dragged ourselves out of bed for another ultrasound. There was no real reason for Lorene to come with me, but there was never any question, even after a bad night, that she would. We were in this together.

Right ovary had tied up the score. Updated instructions: One more dose of Gonal-f, then Pregnyl, the ovulation-stimulating hormone, the next night.

We were in the chute: IUI Thursday. A pressure in my lower abdomen, something like having to go to the bathroom, had been building.

Lorene went back to bed when we got home. She was still in bed at dinnertime.

I made her come down to eat and she went back up as soon as we finished. The next morning she woke up, got out of bed, showered, and got dressed as if she hadn’t stayed in bed all day the day before, and there was no further mention made of it.

Thursday’s IUI, two vials, was routine. My ovaries had deflated and the red Pregnyl needle patch was gone by Friday. I harbored a hope that
this
was the cycle; Lorene must have, too, but the hope was too tired to mention.

I woke up with my period on the first of April. I lay quietly in bed waiting for Lorene to wake up so I could tell her. “Is this an April Fools’ joke?”
Ba-dum-bum.

We skipped April; we had the trip to California. Lorene and I spent two days in Hope Springs at a desert motel that had been converted to a laid-back spa. I watched her float on a blue raft in the hottest pool, my breasts (which still insisted I was pregnant) spilling out of the top of my bathing suit.

I was determined not to feel disappointed in Hope Springs. I felt at peace, the wind riffling through the palm trees. The landscape was so unfamiliar, it did not invite the ruminations on relocation that could undercut the peace of vacationing in a place closer to home. I had a pile of good books, CDs, my wife, and we were going to see our friends the next day . . . I wasn’t wanting for anything, no excepts.

Jane and David met us outside of Joshua Tree at a wonderfully funky inn. They’d driven down from Berkeley. After drinks and dinner, we went back to our own adobe casitas. I gave Lorene the lamp side of the bed and fell asleep on my back in minutes. A couple hours later, I awoke in the same position, staring up at the ceiling, my head buzzing long enough for me to recall the feeling, and then I had a seizure. Just a small one. The first one I’d had since my surgery four years earlier.

There were the snuffly breaths after it was over, then the thick tongue. Lorene was sitting up on her elbows observing me. “Your right hand was waving, your elbow bent—the bed was shaking.”

It was a few minutes before I could talk. “It’s not supposed to happen.” This is the one goddamn surgical benefit I was promised.

“It scares me. I don’t want you trying to get pregnant again until we know.”

“Until we know what?”

“Why you had a seizure. I don’t want you giving birth—” She was crying. “I don’t want to lose you.”

I held her. I had been told that thirty percent of the time, seizures are of “unspecified origin.” Neurologists cannot determine what causes them after months or years of ruling out every god-awful neurological disease on the books. I didn’t have time. “We’ll call Dr. Finn when we get back.”
Maybe something was different. Maybe it’s why I can’t get pregnant.
I flipped the TV on and watched, dozing off and on, until the sun came up.

Dr. Finn, my neurosurgeon, wasn’t the least bit concerned about my seizure. As his nurse explained, “Seizures will be your Achilles’ heel— the warning signal you need to slow down and rest.”
On vacation? And what were they before the brain surgery? Never mind.

The seizure seemed a long time ago, or California is a long ways away, anyway; Lorene and I resumed our lives, went back to trying to get pregnant, planning Meredith’s baby shower and another bike-a-thon.