Bringing in Finn (22 page)

And now my shoulder touched hers in the ballroom, where speakers were presenting on and we were discussing creativity and personal empowerment and the sacred feminine. When one of the presenters talked about the importance of finding a calling or purpose, my mother poked my arm. “They should take your vision workshop.” We imagined presenting the workshop there.

“Hopefully, I'll be home with a baby!” I said, and she squeezed my hand in my lap.

In between speakers, we spent our time talking about “the vision.” We explored the hotel gardens, filled with rows of leafy plants, the air thick with the smell of cedar from the mountains nearby. We couldn't rehash the meeting with Dr. Colaum enough.

We ate dinner one night in the Old Town district of the city. On
the porch of a hacienda-style restaurant, we ate red and green chilies and dipped warm sopapillas into honey while we talked about the female reproductive system and menstrual cycle and how mystical the female body seemed.

In the mornings, while walking down a stretch of industrial road to conference site, we broke into a skip, chanting, “No difference! No difference!” to the outstretched desert sky. Dr. Colaum's revelation about the uterus had become our mantra.

 

We made an
appointment with Dr. Allen for the week after the conference. As the day approached, my mother and I seemed to take turns being nervous. Riding up to Dr. Allen's office, we were both antsy. Bill was in D.C. for the day, meeting with a television network about a new show he was going to executive produce. I drove my mother to Evanston, relieved for the moment that we had only our emotions to manage. My mother held her purse in her lap; a banana and a bottle of water peeked out of the top. “To show Dr. Allen I'm healthy,” she said.

“I also brought a pad of paper and a pen to take notes.” She was like a student on the first day of class. Her fingers kept clutching and unclutching the black leather straps of her bag.

“Now I know how you feel,” she said after we'd driven another mile in silence. “I'm suddenly self-conscious about what my body will be able to do.”

“I hear you,” I said, trying my best to separate the memories of my previous fertility appointments from this one.

Dr. Colaum made it clear she would work with us if we had an OB's approval. I had the noxious thought that Dr. Colaum had only said yes to appease us.

Dr. Allen didn't have a five-year relationship with us. He didn't know anything about my history. Our meeting that morning would be the first he'd hear of our proposal.

My mother began listing points to share with Dr. Allen:

A smile pulled at my lips. I might be scared of Dr. Allen's response, but I was not worried about my mother's physical abilities. Her ribcage held a healthy heart and her body was built of long, lean muscle. My hands were clenched on the steering wheel and I focused on relaxing my grip. I reminded myself that the women in our family had unusually low blood pressure. The highest either my mother's or mine had ever been was 100/70, even when stressed.

The traffic slowed for several minutes near Lawrence Avenue, but opened up again north of Devon. We arrived at the hospital, parked in the garage across the street, and took the elevator up to Dr. Allen's office. There we sat waiting, nervously waiting to get the go-ahead for the next step of our journey.

 

Dr. Allen came
to the waiting room to greet us himself. He was ex-military and looked it with his closely cropped hair and towering height. At sixty-one, he still possessed the trim, muscular build of an active duty officer. On the way to his office he shared that he started his career in the army before his enjoyable twenty-five-year career in obstetrics. I imagined he inspired great confidence in a delivery room.

He guided us into a small consultation room with a single metal desk and three chairs. He invited us to sit and finished his introduction by saying that his team worked with a lot of high-risk cases. I sucked in a breath. Dr. Allen seemed forthright and skilled. I believed he would listen and give us an honest opinion.

Dr. Allen asked me to begin and to detail my pregnancy history and why we had come to see him. He showed emotion, twice, at the stillbirth of the twins and at my mother's offer to be our surrogate, moving his head back in the chair slightly and letting out a small wow.

He interviewed my mother next about her health, medical history, and previous pregnancies. He jotted down her answers on a small notepad he had pulled from his lab coat pocket, writing in what looked like some kind of shorthand that included symbols, capital letter abbreviations, and hash marks.

“You'd need to pass my physical exam, an EKG, chest X-ray, stress test, blood pressure, and full gynecological exam for us to even consider it,” Dr. Allen said matter-of-factly. “We do have some experience with advanced maternal age pregnancies. Last year we had a woman in our practice deliver at fifty-four.”

I looked at my mother hopefully.

“There are some other things to consider,” he said. “Did you say you live in Virginia?”

My mother nodded.

“You'd need to move here for most of the pregnancy,” he said. “So we can monitor you closely. As the pregnancy progressed, I might recommend bed rest or even short stays in the hospital if blood pressure or any other issue arose. The blood volume doubles in pregnancy, more in the case of multiples—something to consider when deciding how many embryos to transfer.”

I looked at my mother again but said nothing. We hadn't even begun to discuss those types of details.

“I realize that's jumping ahead a bit,” Dr. Allen said. He leaned back in his chair and paused, resting his silver pen on his notepad, as if giving us some time to catch up with him. He cocked his head to one side and settled his sharp gaze on my mother.

“First, let's find out if your body can handle a pregnancy.”

“You're considering taking us on?” my mother said, her eyes hopeful.

“If you pass all the tests to my approval, I would be honored to handle this,” he paused for a moment, “mission.”

My mother bounced her legs under the desk. I restrained myself from hugging Dr. Allen. He told us he could do the initial gynecological tests immediately and excused himself to prepare the examination room next door. When we assured ourselves he was out of earshot, we called Bill and cheered into the phone. “You will love this man,” I said. “He talks like an army general.”

My mother stood up while I was on the phone and had turned toward the door. I hung up the phone and walked to her, reaching my hand out. She turned and I dropped my hand. Her eyes were shining and wide. “I feel like the ostrich,” she said. “I feel like I was made to do this.”

 

While Dr. Allen
examined my mother, I met with Pam, Dr. Allen's nurse practitioner, at the reception desk.

“My mother is in town for the next two days,” I informed her. “I have Dr. Allen's list of tests here; we were hoping we could get them all done before her flight back to Virginia.”

Pam jerked her eyes up from the desk.

“This level of tests usually takes several weeks,” she said.

I attempted to keep my voice calm. My mother had made it clear that she wanted to attempt to become pregnant this fall.

“I've talked at length with your father,” she'd told me in the car on the way to our appointment. “I'm fifty-nine already. If I'm going to do this, I need to do it now.” Rachel at RMI had sent a heady typed list of items that needed to be completed before we even began treatment, with a note that the legal documents could take over a month to prepare.

“It takes longer than regular IVF,” she'd said over the phone. “A minimum of two months.” She went on to remind me that the legal documents could not be prepared until we had the medical okay.

“I just don't see how this would be possible,” Pam said now, scrolling through the hospital's master calendar.

“If there is anything you can do,” I said, laying my hands open on top of the desk console.

Pam set her hand on the phone. “Your mother's the one who offered to be your surrogate?” she asked. I nodded.

“As soon as Dr. Allen finishes with your mother, come find me,” she said. “Be ready to run.”

Over the next forty-eight hours, my mother and I flew through the halls of Evanston Hospital with Pam, sometimes literally running from one floor or wing to another, while my mother underwent the battery of tests.

More than once, the rapid train we were riding threatened to halt. The doctors in radiology said they would not perform a new mammogram without viewing my mother's most recent films, which were somewhere in an archive of some medical-records center in Alexandria. While my mother went to cardiology for her chest X-ray, I phoned four different doctors, tracing the paper trail from my her gynecologist to her primary care physician and ultimately to a medical-records center, where Tyrone, a saintly man, offered to personally go into the vaults, find the film, and FedEx them for same-day delivery.

The final item on the long list of tests was a glucose test—one I remembered from my own pregnancy. The test involved a blood draw before and after drinking a bottle of saccharine orange liquid to rule out gestational diabetes.

We reached the hospital's lab at four forty-five. In our haste, we did not see the blue-and-white placard on the wall informing
patrons that the lab closed at 5:00 PM. My mother had already managed to chug half the bottle of Glucola, when the nurse informed us of the cutoff time. My mother's flight to D.C. was at eight o'clock the next morning. “No, she cannot do the test at a lab in Virginia and fax the results,” the nurse told us when we asked. The tests needed to be done as a unit, in one hospital—Dr. Allen's orders. We would not be undone.

I called United Airlines and moved my mother's flight to two o'clock the next day. She could come for the glucose test in the morning when the lab opened at nine, take the blood test by eleven, and make it to the airport in time for her flight.

 

One week to
the day after our meeting with Dr. Allen, Bill and I received a letter by mail, with a note stating that a duplicate copy had been sent to my mother's address in Virginia and another to Dr. Carolyn Colaum of RMI. The letter affirmed that my mother had passed all necessary medical testing and baseline boards and was “approved to begin fertility treatments with the intention of becoming pregnant as the surrogate for her daughter and son-in-law.”

There was a note from Dr. Allen himself, or perhaps from Pam, that read: “We wish you the very best and please keep us posted as you progress.”

That night, my mother called and we celebrated this milestone.

“I am so grateful for my body!” my mom said.

“You should be,” Bill said. “You're a marvel.” I held the letter to my chest and took it to bed with me, placing it on my nightstand. The approval felt like a major validation. But lying in my bed that night, the sound of Bill's breathing steady beside me, I felt doubts lurking in my mind like shadows. The tests we'd just completed were only putting us at a starting line. A surrogate pregnancy would be different, but we had no more guarantees than we did starting any other IVF cycle.

Dr. Allen and Colaum were quick to remind us that we really didn't know how much age would affect chances of pregnancy and implantation as well.

In the morning I called Tracey to schedule our first “gestational host/IVF” appointment. We'd hoped to do an October cycle, but, based on the legal steps we still needed to complete our status, Tracey said the earliest we could start was November.

“And to make that, you're going to have to hustle,” she said.

“We'll do November,” I said, dialing my mother's number on my cell phone while I was still thanking Tracey on the landline.

Bill and I met with Stacy Jacobs, a reproductive technology lawyer, the first Monday in October. Her office was located in a large, stone, art deco–style building on a dense block of the downtown Loop in Chicago's financial district. Stacy wore a conservative brown wool suit and looked about my age, mid-thirties. She shook our hands and began to walk us through the legal document we would need to complete to be eligible for surrogacy.

“Your parents will need their own document,” she explained. “It has to be prepared by another firm, but I can recommend someone if you'd like.”

We told Stacy that we wanted to pay for the legal fees for both sides.

“That's fine,” she said. “Most people doing surrogacy within the family do the same.” She told us about other families she'd worked with, including an aunt-niece pair and sisters, who'd embarked on this very same process.

In the contract she would prepare, we'd be required to specify our decision if faced with a multitude of upsetting scenarios revolving around one core theme: What would we do in the event that we had to make a choice between the life of the baby or babies and the life of my mother?

In every case, we told Stacy, we would choose to save my mother's life.

When Stacy completed the exhaustive list, she asked about the number of embryos we intended to transfer, recommending that we be conservative.

The doctors always say the risk of multiples is low, but I've seen it so many times.”

“Twins?” I asked

“And triplets,” Stacy said.

The thought of my mother's becoming pregnant with triplets was sobering. Bill and my father were both advocating the transfer of one embryo. I felt comfortable transferring two. My mother said that she was on board for three, if Dr. Colaum would do it. When she said this, my father shook his head insistently at Bill, entreating him to be a tempering agent to my mother and me if he was not there.