Bringing in Finn (26 page)

 

 

 

 

 

O
n the day of retrieval, Dr. Colaum collected eleven eggs from my ovary. They looked strong, and of those fertilized with Bill's sperm, five embryos advanced in the lab. Carli from the lab called to tell us that two looked especially good.

“They'll be here for you when your mom is ready in January,” she told me.

Bill was disheartened by the attrition rate. “It's the same every time, though. Ten eggs turns into two or three embryos. You think I'd be used to it.”

We tried our best to focus on the positive. We had three good embryos. We reminded each other of the phrase we'd repeated consistently during other cycles: “It only takes one.”

We flew to D.C. on December 23. Bill's stepfather, Roger, gifted us with three nights at the W Hotel on Fourteenth Street. The hotel décor was Mad Hatter mod, with angular black-and-white-striped rugs, oversize red and purple velvet chairs, and glistening chandeliers. In the lobby, gold and silver balls bobbed from white birch branches that hung from the ceiling. We made friends with the holiday staff and spent our days at my parents' house, wrapping
gifts and baking the cookies that were my mother's classics: madeleines, pecan tassies, gingerbread men, and spritz. We didn't talk about the surrogacy.

“We'll make ourselves and everyone else crazy if we obsess,” Bill had said the first day of our visit. My mother and I had agreed.

When Bill and I returned to the hotel in the evening, we'd take the elevator to the lounge on the top floor that offered a 360-degree view of the Washington Mall. On Christmas Eve, Bill ordered a single-malt Highland scotch, one made in a town that we'd visited on our first trip to Scotland, and we took turns taking little sips from the heavy crystal glass. D.C. was beautiful at this time of year; the Washington Monument, the National Christmas Tree, and the Lincoln Memorial twinkled like stars in the inky sky.

In January, my mother went to her gynecologist in Virginia to have a baseline ultrasound, the prerequisite for restarting her medications. Since it took only two weeks to grow the uterine lining, Dr. Colaum had taken her off the hormone medications during our break. Braun shipped the oral and injectable estrogen directly to her house. Midway through the cycle, she would fly to Chicago so Dr. Colaum could take a look at her uterus.

At the early-January appointment, my mother's uterus looked good. Not only good, but it had the desired thick lining. “Like a featherbed,” Dr. Colaum said.

We were cleared to transfer in two weeks. I felt relieved but cautious. Waiting felt hard. With the eggs retrieved and embryos frozen, I didn't have anything to do. My mother decided to visit my grandmother in Nebraska for a few days while the hormones continued to take effect.

On January 29, Bill, my mother, and I arrived at RMI for transfer. Even though I had booked extra work each day and gone out with Bill or friends almost every night, the week leading up to this
day had passed slowly—though not as slowly as the weeks we waited to find out if we were pregnant. During those, each hour felt as if it were being pulled through a lengthening device that made time as stretchy as saltwater taffy.

Now we were waiting in the patient waiting area, near the procedure room of RMI in the same curtained room Bill and I had sat in for many of our previous IVF cycles. I'd filled a two-liter bottle of water for my mother and kept encouraging her to drink more.

“Dr. Colaum wants the bladder really full for the transfer,” I said.

Even when I wasn't pregnant, I would go to the bathroom every hour or two and had no trouble filling my bladder for transfer procedures. My mother was the opposite. She said her bladder was like a camel's. “If I need to, I can last almost a day without needing to go.”