Bringing in Finn (24 page)

“Nana,” I said, remembering my father's mother.

“Lissa!” my mother said. “And your father. He would get to forever say, ‘It's all Lissa's fault.'”

“Nancy,” I said, naming Bill's mother.

“For sure Nancy,” my mother said. “You know, I dreamed the other night that she was helping to organize all of this.”

I liked this notion. Bill's mother had been a skilled producer, orchestrating many media productions and, later, segments for the
Today
show. She was a woman who could get things done.

As I turned onto Ridge Road, I thought of more names: “Dr. Colaum, Tracey, Rachel, Lorelai, Lisa—everybody at RMI,” I said.

“All the researchers, doctors, and nurses who have dedicated their lives to developing new fertility processes,” my mother added.

“And Dr. Allen and Pam!” she continued. “They'll love having a great story to tell everyone about the
sixty
-year-old woman who successfully delivered a baby to term.”

I saw a flash of an image of myself—like a memory, only of something that had not happened yet—helping my mother out of my car in the parking lot at Dr. Allen's office, her belly already bursting, seven or eight months pregnant. I could see her purple maternity top and tailored black maternity slacks.
Oh, please,
I thought,
please let this be real.

In addition to checking my mother's uterine lining, Dr. Colaum needed to check and measure my eggs. I went first. Using the ultrasound, Dr. Colaum counted thirteen to seventeen possible eggs growing in my right ovary.” More than we've ever had,” she said. “Looking good, Sara.”
¹

“Your turn,” she said to my mother, who slipped off her pants and shifted herself to the end of the exam table. “Hmm,” Dr. Colaum
said, moving the wand back and forth to view my mother's uterus. Her smile had faded. I had only one leg in my jeans and dropped them to the floor, leaning over the chair with my legs and backside exposed. Dr. Colaum's lips were pursed tight. “There,” she said to Tracey. I followed where she pointed. In the middle-left part of the screen, I could see a black shape that looked like an engorged comma filled with ink.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Fluid,” Dr. Colaum said. “Have you been feeling bloated?”

My mother nodded, her lips pressed, her eyes wide and round. “Sometimes the uterus fills with some fluid in response to the hormones,” she said. “We don't like to see that, because it can negatively impact successful implantation.”

The room started to move like a carnival ride. I clenched the top of the chair.

“What does this mean?” I said.

“I don't think we should transfer this cycle. You're ready for retrieval; we need to get the eggs. So I suggest we retrieve next week, as planned, and freeze as many embryos as we get.”

I didn't like this. I had the sensation of walking on a tightrope, a lone steel line, hundreds of feet in the air. I felt as if I might throw up on Dr. Colaum's floor.

“You always get great embryos,” Tracey said to me in the hallway after I'd changed and she'd looked up dates for our retrieval. “They'll be safe until your mother is ready.” I hadn't researched statistics about freezing embryos, but I thought I remembered reading somewhere in the RMI literature that the success rate for frozen-embryo transfers was lower than that of nonfrozen, and that not all embryos survive the thaw. With the extra $7,500 in medications for my mother and me, we'd spent almost $22,000 on this cycle already. I imagined $20,000 swirling down a large drain.

“Yeah,” I answered glumly. My mother and Dr. Colaum met us in the hallway. I steadied myself by holding on to the counter and asked the question I feared: “If my mother got fluid once, is it likely to happen again?”

“We can't know for sure,” Dr. Colaum said, giving us the only truthful answer she could. She turned to address my mother. “There's a good chance your body is just adjusting to this first round of hormones after ten years off. We'll give you a break over the holidays, retrieve Sara's eggs next week, and then we can start up again just after the first of the year.”

I thought about my mother and the whispered dreams we'd started to voice—how synchronistic it was that it was our year to be together for Christmas and how sacred it would be to be newly pregnant, when the whole holiday was about a miraculous pregnancy and the birth of a baby.

Now, instead, we would be going to D.C. for yet another Christmas without a baby or a pregnancy, our embryos frozen in a solution of glycerol and sucrose. We could be hopeful, yes, but had no guarantees of what we would have when the embryos thawed and we attempted to bring about a pregnancy that was already going to require its own miracle of sorts.

 

 

 

 

 

Flying off the slide
▶
on Hickory Street