Bringing in Finn (10 page)

“Sara?” she asked. “How are you?” I dropped back from the group and waved my hand to Amanda to indicate that I would catch up. I pressed the phone into my ear and covered my other ear with my free hand, trying to hear Lisa's voice over the din. The connection was staticky and cut in and out. Lisa took me through a symptom inventory.

“Does the pain feeling sharp-shooting or consistent?”

“Consistent.”

“Intense or low-grade?”

“Medium.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, the area around my lower-right abdomen feels hot,” I said, pressing my palm over the skin. My ovary felt like a furnace.

“You're at the peak of your cycle,” Lisa said. “Your symptoms are normal for a stim cycle. We won't know until you come in, but I don't think you've hyperstimulated. Have you taken some aspirin or Tylenol?”

I had not. I'd wanted to make sure I could feel what my body was doing. “Call if it gets any worse, honey,” Lisa said. “The best thing you can do now is to take it easy.”

I was glad that Lisa could not see me through the phone. I'd had to pick up my pace so as not to lose the group. I kept an eye fixed on the bobbing image of Amanda's orange dress in the crowd ahead, moving into a half-run every time I thought I was about to lose them. I didn't know what Lisa had made of the background noise (I hadn't told her I was in New York City), but I doubted walking seventeen blocks to a club to go dancing at eleven o'clock at night was what she had in mind when she said “take it easy.”

The line outside the club snaked around two blocks, but someone had called ahead to get on the VIP list, so we were ushered right into the club's velvet mouth. Inside were dance floors, a lounge area, and three bars. I was sober, having had only a few sips of wine at the restaurant. Bodies pressed against me from all sides: men in suits and hipster sportswear, women in short dresses and ultra-high heels. I cupped my hand over my low abdomen and tried not to get jostled.

As we waited in line at the bar, I asked around for some aspirin. Gen, a striking woman who worked with Amanda in London, offered me a travel pack of Tylenol from her purse. “I heard Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were here last week,” a woman next to us gushed to her friend.

“Who cares?” Gen whispered to me, nodding in their direction. She hailed a bartender with a hundred-dollar bill. “As if that's a reason to come here. Get your own life.” I laughed. I gave her
some money for the champagne she was buying for the bride-to-be and ordered a club soda for myself. I took the pills, swallowing the water in large, urgent gulps.

I found our group toward the left side of the dance floor and looked around for a place nearby where I could rest. “You okay?” Amanda mouthed, waving to me from the throng. I nodded yes. Gen passed around champagne glasses and we toasted Amanda's upcoming celebration. “And here's to Sara getting knocked up this week!” Amanda's college roommate added as a PS toast, yelling it out, her voice carrying over the thumping beat. I spit the last of my water onto the floor. Gen saw me and held up her glass. “Nice,” she said.

The pain in my abdomen had subsided. Either the Tylenol had kicked in or my ovary had settled. I felt an impulse to dance. I laid my glass on a table in the lounge and joined the swirl of the crowd. The music was so loud, the lyrics were inaudible. All I could hear was the pulse of the bass and the rush of blood in my ears. A new song emerged, a popular summer anthem. The crowd responded and began to chant the chorus. We moved as a group, snakelike, to the center of the pulsing floor. Raising our arms, we danced for Amanda's marriage, her happiness, her future, stomping our feet, laughing, encircling her as a tribe.

 

Back in Chicago,
I took the rest of the Follistim and the HCG hormone and Bill and I had sex. I propped my legs up on the wall over our headboard and tried to visualize being pregnant. Sunrays streamed through our wall of windows. It was the one room we'd never quite decorated as we'd worked systematically through the main house, doing improvement projects as our budget allowed. Our bedroom was therefore an eclectic hodgepodge of traditional European pieces mixed with an Asian wedding cabinet we'd found on Portobello Road and a neutral rug. A framed oil painting of a small
village in the South of France hung over our bed. The sheets and duvet, tangled underneath me, were all white, my favorite. It was a happy room, spacious and not too rigidly defined. I willed myself to feel open to possibility, but still, my visualization felt halfhearted.

I didn't know if I was having a hard time envisioning pregnancy because stim hadn't worked or if I just didn't believe stim was going to work for us at all. After each cycle, when my period would alert us that Bill and I were not pregnant, I would call Dr. Colaum's office to let them know, and then Bill and I would drive to Evanston for another consultation.

The meetings in Dr. Colaum's office were already beginning to feel repetitive. Dr. Colaum would walk us through the treatment, doses, and possibilities and make a recommendation for next steps. On our fourth consultation, on a warm day in late November, Dr. Colaum leaned forward at her desk and got straight to her point.

“We can keep going with stim,” she said. “You've given it a good try, but I think you may need something more.” I sensed what was coming.

A year or so earlier, a few months before I'd seen Dr. Bizan and then Dr. Colaum, a friend of Bill's father had taken us to dinner and asked bluntly why we didn't have kids yet. I had yammered something about working on it, and he'd said he didn't see why anyone who didn't get pregnant within a month or two on their own wouldn't go straight to IVF.

“My wife and I had all our kids through IVF. And scheduled C-sections. I'm telling you,” he said, his face boring into ours, “IVF is the best way to go.”

“It may be the best way when you have seventeen million dollars,” Bill said in the cab on the way home. We didn't know for sure how much his friend's family had, but they owned several homes and often flew in their own plane, so we were fairly sure cost hadn't been
a consideration in their family planning. While I had purposely not asked for exact numbers on IVF yet, I'd heard rumors that one round could be somewhere around $20,000.

Additionally, IVF was complicated: a complex matrix of medications, injections, and frequent doctor visits—for “monitoring.” More than that, though, I realized that I'd perceived IVF as extreme, something to turn to as a last resort. I didn't like that we were at this place. If we tried IVF and it didn't work, we had nowhere to go biologically.

“The advantage is that we'll take over your cycle, or, in your case, create a cycle and have control of every aspect of the process,” Dr. Colaum was saying. “The statistics for conception are higher”—about 33 percent per cycle, Bill and I had read. “And if we get a good batch of eggs, as there's every reason to believe we will, based on the stim cycles, we can implant more than one embryo and your chances of pregnancy go up even more.”

We told Dr. Colaum we would take some time to think about it.

“We've already started people for December cycles,” she said. “You could do one more round of stim over the holidays and then, if you're not pregnant, we can regroup in the new year.”

 

“We pretty much
knew this was where we were headed,” Bill said on the somber drive home. Most of the leaves in the city had fallen to the ground weeks before. On the stretch of the ride coming out of Dr. Colaum's office, however, a few rows of trees maintained a fiery orange mane, leaves hanging proudly on the branches on the sides of Ridge Road. The sun, in this last warm breath before winter, was hot through the windows of the car.

“I know,” I said, “but I feel kind of freaked out anyway. IVF involves a lot of shots.”

I thought about the day in London when Bill and I had decided
I should stop taking birth control pills, the first time I had viscerally imagined having a child. I thought about the promise Bill and I had already made—that we would do anything, whatever was necessary, to have a family. I was committed to this promise like a covenant, and yet I was balking slightly in the face of moving forward. I thought about a talk I had heard once about covenants: They can provide whatever power or courage is necessary for their fulfillment.

“I want to take a little bit of time before we start the process, just to be sure this feels right,” I said.

Bill looked at me, and I tried to appear confident.

“Since we can't do IVF right away anyway,” he said, “I'm up for doing one more round of stim and deciding in the new year.” I agreed.

I reclined my seat and stared up at the trees that whizzed past against the pale sky. I felt comforted that Bill and I continued to agree on what to do next. The light was fading, but the sun still shone overhead. I found my coat, which I'd left in the car earlier, and laid it over me like a blanket. As we crossed from Evanston into Chicago, I thought that I was lucky. Bill and I had each other, the power of a covenant, and, according to a note Rachel had handed us on our way out of the office, a strong likelihood that our insurance would pay for a good portion of three rounds of IVF.

“Three rounds. Thirty-three percent chance each round,” Bill said, almost to himself, calculating the odds.

B
efore we made the final decision to do IVF, I wanted to take quiet time each day in meditation, to see if I could reach some clarity about our choice. Bill did not practice formal meditation. He tended to have a gut feeling about things, either immediately or over time. If he was uncertain about something, he cooked or gardened or took a walk.

“It's the same as what I do,” I said once when he described his process.

“It's not meditation,” he said. “It's just the way ideas come to me.”

“Same thing,” I repeated.

Since I'd returned from England, I'd been immersed in a writing project on female sexuality and feminine energy. I'd done extensive research on the female archetypes around the world, and in my reading I'd come upon what Carl Jung called the Cosmic Mother and primal cultures called the Great Mother—the mother archetype that showed up in most every culture and religion.

A friend in the UK who knew about the work I was doing had sent me a card the year we moved back to Chicago that featured a watercolor painting of Quin Yin, the mother goddess from China.
The image was painted in washes of pink, rich purples, and blue. One of Quin Yin's hands was raised, thumb and forefinger touching, with her palm forward in a gesture of peace. The folds of her robe and the outline around her face were etched in gold. I knew I'd saved the card somewhere in my office; I found it in a box on the lowest shelf where I kept old journals and vision boards and thank-you cards from clients. I'd protected the card in a cellophane sleeve; the pulpy watercolor paper was still a crisp white, the image beatific and serene. I carried the photograph upstairs and placed it next to my bed, leaning it against a stack of books on my nightstand.

In a way I hadn't done since I was a child, I knelt at the side of the bed. I asked the Mother for guidance. I wasn't sure what, exactly, I was praying to—I had not grown up with a female image of God—but it didn't matter. I believed that God, in whatever form, was multifaceted and that some aspect of it was female, and maternal. It was this aspect I prayed to. What I was really praying for was a
sign.

 

In the two
weeks that followed our November consultation with Dr. Colaum, I dutifully did extra meditation every day. But by the middle of the second week, I didn't feel any clearer about doing IVF. I had not received the kind of sign I like: I hadn't driven by a billboard with the letters “IVF” on it, nor had any stranger accosted me on the street, saying, “Sara, do IVF.” I did, however, keep going back to a lecture my professor of reflexology in London had given about complementary medicine. “Our work is to use the best of what modern medicine and holistic treatments offer to bring about the most successful outcome or healing. Do not become rigid and holistic-exclusive,” she'd said.

Then Kaitlin called from London to tell me about a documentary she'd just watched on IVF, in which the embryologist talked about being a channel for conception, versus “playing God.”

“I'd always regarded IVF as unnatural,” Kaitlin said, “but I feel differently now. I'd do it if we needed help.”

I had not yet told Kaitlin, or any of my other friends, for that matter, that we were considering IVF, yet she'd provided a new context, one I needed. If Kaitlin, who practiced holistic medicine almost religiously, was open to IVF, perhaps I could embrace the process as well.

I still felt ashamed that we needed help to do something that was supposed to be the most natural, basic, biological thing a heterosexual couple could do. And I still felt fearful that IVF was a last resort, that if we couldn't become pregnant this way, we might never become pregnant at all. But Bill pointed out that we already hadn't become pregnant any other way. If we did not take this risk, we would never know what IVF could make possible.

By the fourth week of meditation, I began to accept that I really didn't know what was “natural” and what was not. For Bill, the decision had been easy: IVF was the logical next step for us.

We called Dr. Colaum's office in mid-December and asked to be added to the rotation for the next available IVF cycle. We met with Tracey, Rachel, and Dr. Colaum in January and began the involved precycle regime. Bill and I returned to the office for a mandatory infectious-disease panel—$1,000 worth of blood tests that our insurance did not cover. We would be required to get this panel for each future cycle to confirm we did not have AIDS, HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, or TB.