Bringing in Finn (2 page)

I had stayed on the Pill for nine years. When I'd gone off it, three years into my marriage, I had been so optimistic. I'd just assumed my cycle would resume. Bill and I had been living in London, having the expat experience of our lives. It was in England where I'd discovered holistic medicine and had taken every opportunity to study with pioneers in life coaching and the healing arts.

I became certified in reflexology and then as a life coach and counselor. I trained with teachers from Africa and Ireland and visited the research lab and greenhouses where flower essences and essential oils were distilled and transferred to the dark amber bottles we used at the holistic clinic where I went on to work. As manager of the clinic, I had the opportunity to apprentice with herbalists and homeopaths and a fourth-generation teacher of ayurvedic medicine from India.

Growing up in a traditional Western family, I was ignorant of alternative healing. There was no mention of meridians or quantum physics at the dinner table with Uncle Tom, the cardiologist from San Diego; or Aunt Jen and Uncle Alan, who worked in hospital administration in New England. If the subject of alternative medicine had come up among the Midwestern intellectuals on my mother's side, it would have been seen as a joke, appropriate for a cartoon in
The New Yorker.
My new field of work seemed uncharted and exotic. At the same time, I felt I'd come home.

For the first two years we lived in London, Bill supported us while I did my postgraduate programs and training. I'd met him at the advertising agency where I worked straight out of college. He remained with the company, and his work with the agency was the source of our move to London. What I first noticed about him was his lean, wiry body and dark eyebrows that gave him the look of a character out of one of the Brontë novels I used to love.

One of our first conversations was on a walk back to the office from a business lunch, during which we discovered we shared a dream to live abroad in England and to have children. The relationship progressed, and within months we put in a request with human resources for a move to the UK, one that was initially greeted with a guffaw.

“We have English-speaking people who can do the work in England,” the company rep said. “The only way you'll get transferred to London is if something gets majorly screwed up and you're the only one in the agency who can fix it.”

We didn't have to wait long. In June 1999, two weeks after Bill asked me to marry him, the account that he had spent the past five years growing in the United States was put on probation in London. He was, according to the executive vice presidents, the person to fix it. And so they moved us to London, into a row house on the River Thames, close enough for Bill to walk to the agency's office in South Kensington.

We embraced the experience, spending long weekends in Paris and exploring London's burgeoning culinary scene. I wrote and studied and worked part-time. I joined an artists' group and started reading my pieces in small circles. I was offered a column in a holistic-health magazine, and Bill and I celebrated with a dinner at Nobu in Mayfair. We savored the freedom, taking care, as people often reminded us, to enjoy this time, unhindered, before we had children and would need to be more
responsible
.

 

I made the
decision to go off the Pill because of an article I read at the clinic while preparing for a women's health workshop on hormones. My friend Kaitlin, who was leading the workshop with me, discovered the work of a homeopath named Melissa Assilem, who'd written a treatise about taking a natural approach to women's
health. The article expressed concern about a possible link between women who'd been on the Pill for an extended time and later fertility issues.

“Young women in our culture are now going years, if not decades, without ever having a natural menstrual cycle.”

Even though I understood that the Pill controlled my menstrual cycle in some way, I had never considered exactly how it worked.

“Did you know we're not even having real periods?” Kaitlin asked after I read the article. “Did you know we haven't been ovulating?”

I had not known, and we guessed we were not the only women with a deep misunderstanding of what was happening in our bodies.

“I am going off the Pill starting tonight,” Kaitlin said. I had come to the same decision. I offered to consult my gynecologist to obtain more information and went home to tell Bill I wanted to stop taking the Pill.

It was May and balmy for London. Bill made pizzas and we ate outside in the garden, from which we could make out the outline of colorful houseboats bobbing on the lapping brown water of the Thames. At low tide the river receded to expose rocky sludge and the houseboats sat wedged on the slanting gravel river floor; the air smelled mossy and damp.

“So, we just wouldn't use any birth control?” he asked. I'd been on the Pill since I'd met him, and we'd never had to explore other methods.

“We can use condoms, or foam, or spermicidal jelly,” I said, giggling as I tried to recall various birth control methods I had learned about in seventh-grade sex ed.

“Actually, I'm fine if we don't use anything.” He smiled at me and pulled at one of my fingers. “I know we're planning to wait until we move back to the States, but if we have a baby sooner than planned, it certainly wouldn't be a bad thing.”

I looked at Bill for a moment, surprised, and then grinned. I imagined strolling through Hyde Park with a baby in a Moby wrap, snuggled to my chest. The image filled me with joy. I reached for Bill's hand and he squeezed mine firmly.

 

My gynecologist in
London, Dr. Eagen, confirmed the information Kaitlin and I had read in Assilem's article. Dr. Eagen was Cambridge educated, a tall, reedy woman with formal manners. She was caring, though, and took extra time in consultations. When answering a question, she would place on her nose and then remove a pair of wire-framed glasses to emphasize her points.

“The Pill does suppress ovulation. The period you have is caused by the low dose of hormones in the Pill,” she said, holding her glasses like a pointer in her left hand.

“So, I haven't ovulated in almost nine years?” I said, incredulous. “Could not ovulating for so long have an impact on my fertility?”

“I wouldn't worry,” she said. “Most women are able to get pregnant, even after taking the Pill for many years. You are young and healthy, and you have no reason to be concerned about your fertility.”

I relaxed a little in Dr. Eagen's confidence. I hadn't been worried about my fertility until I'd read the article, even though I'd already had one reproductive issue—an ovarian cyst when I was fifteen years old that had ruptured, causing my left ovary to be removed. The surgeon and every gynecologist I'd seen since affirmed that the operation would have no negative impact on my ability to have children. Of course, in the years to come, as we navigated the tangled world of fertility treatments, I often questioned whether this assessment had been accurate, if perhaps the removal of my ovary did play some role in my fertility issues. That day, though, I took the affirmation with relief and reassurance. I had no reason to doubt.

“Each ovary has enough eggs for many lifetimes,” the doctor had
assured me the day of the surgery. “The human body is pretty incredible. You'll even have a period every month.”

And I had, or I had until I'd gone on the Pill in college and apparently started pseudomenstruating.

Melissa Assilem's article scared me. Several of Bill's peers at the ad agency were having trouble conceiving, women without any reproductive trauma at all. I'd also worked with clients at the clinic who'd undergone fertility treatments. One of them, a writer for a top UK magazine, detailed her journey in a monthly column. She wrote candidly of the fear, the painful longing to have a child, the crushing despair when an in vitro cycle was not successful. In private, she'd confided in me that her marriage was in jeopardy, that she was jealous of her friends who were having babies, that she felt like a failure and was ashamed of her inability to conceive.

I held her hands while she talked, my palms growing sweaty as she expelled her pain. My desire to be a mother was like my desire to continue breathing and maintain the use of my limbs. It sounded excruciating to want something so deeply and not know whether you'd ever be able to experience it.

I knew that I couldn't control any of these women's destinies, but I looked for ways I could give support. I let their sessions run overtime, and Kaitlin and I concocted herbal tinctures made with ingredients known to increase fertility. We poured them into amber bottles with black rubber stoppers and wrapped them in handmade paper and petals from Quasadi roses, a marriage and fertility flower from a village in Iran.

Dr. Eagen supported my decision to go off the Pill.

“It can take some time for the body to remember what it's supposed to do,” she told me. “It takes some women up to ten months for their regular cycle to resume.”

When I told Dr. Eagen that our expat term was up and that Bill
and I would be moving back to Chicago at the end of the year, she encouraged me to find a good OB-GYN.

“Find someone you really like,” she said, winking. “Someone you'll want to deliver your babies.”

 

As we prepared
for the move, I said goodbye to our friends and our life in London. It was a sorrowful parting with our friends, so many of whom had become our family in the UK. But the crushing wall of sadness I expected in making the move never came. In the previous four months, a kind of homesickness for America had come on; Bill said he felt it, too. A new vision emerged in my mind: a spacious house with a home office, a roof deck/garden, space for a child, a place to grow our family.

Seven months had passed since our conversation back in May. Per our agreement, we hadn't used any birth control. And I hadn't had a period.

Every so often I would feel the twinge of a cramp or mood changes that I hoped were indications that my period was coming. I would find the nearest bathroom in anticipation, but no blood came. The cramps were like the phantom pains of an amputated limb, or maybe psychosomatic; I wanted so much for my period to return. If I thought about its absence for too long, I became fretful until I remembered Dr. Eagen's words: that it might take close to a year for my cycle to resume.

 

After we'd been
in Chicago two months and I'd finally unpacked the last of the moving boxes, I decided it was time to find a doctor. I didn't have any close friends in Chicago yet, so I went online to research OB-GYNs in the city and found Dr. Angelli.

Dr. Angelli was one of four female OBs in what many patients and the media considered a top-rated practice. The office was located
in what people called the Playboy Building, named for the notorious magazine that had occupied its upper floors from 1966 through the'90s. Its ninety-five floors were now filled with luxury condos, doctors' offices, and an Asian-fusion restaurant on the first floor.

I arrived at the office feeling nervous, as if I were going there to take an exam instead of be examined. I arrived early and sat in the plush waiting room. After a few minutes, a nurse came to get me and showed me to an examination room. Dr. Angelli was already poised at the door, wearing pin-striped Brooks Brothers pants and a pink cashmere cardigan. She shook my hand and motioned for me to take a seat on the examining table. The room was neat, clinical. Dr. Angelli took a seat on a stool next to the table and asked me about my medical history, making notes as I spoke. When I told her the date of my last period, she stopped abruptly.

“Excuse me,” she said. “How long has it been?”

“Almost ten months,” I said. “My doctor in England said it can take some women a while.”

“Two months is average,” she said. “Three months max. Ten months is absurd—not to mention unhealthy.”

I received her words as a slap.

“I have been trying to let my body resume a cycle naturally,” I sputtered.

“Well, it's not working,” she said.

My face burned. I wanted to explain my dedication to a holistic approach, but I stopped myself, thinking I would sound foolish, like a child describing a make-believe world.

Ignoring my obvious distress, Dr. Angelli pulled a prescription pad out of a drawer and began writing in neat, perfect script, the kind children are praised for in elementary school. She prescribed a low-dose birth control pill and told me to start immediately.

“But if I go back on the Pill, I won't have a full cycle,” I said.
“I won't ovulate.” My voice sounded wobbly and pleading. I was embarrassed at my vulnerability but determined to voice my concern. I wanted to ask how taking a pill that suppresses ovulation would be a good move for someone who wanted to become pregnant in the near future, but didn't think I could speak further without my voice breaking.

“You have to have a period,” she said, ignoring my concern. “Then we can talk.”

I started crying before I made it to the exit. The building was downtown, a block or so from Lake Michigan, and the March wind whipped through the tunnel created by the tall rows of buildings. Tears forced themselves out in a chute and blurred my vision. I pulled my coat closer as I leaned on the side of the building and called Bill.

“I feel so humiliated,” I said when he answered. I felt childish for crying, for being upset by the appointment. I'd crumbled in front of a woman I'd just met, just because she was a doctor. “She doesn't understand my concerns about the Pill. She didn't talk at all about underlying causes. This is my complaint about Western medicine: Treat symptoms. Literally, ‘just take a pill.'”