Fat Tuesday
While I continued the IVF injections and my ovaries swelled, Tropical Cyclone Yasi was building in the Pacific Ocean off Fiji. As Yasi neared the Queenland coast, and shifted direction towards Cairns, where my mum, brother and sister-in-law were living, it was upgraded from category 3 to 4 and then to 5, putting it in the ranks of Hurricane Katrina. I’d just finished reading Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, about one family’s experience of the chaos that was Katrina, and I was terrified. Mum was holed up with my brother and sister-in-law in their Cairns apartment; thankfully, in a cyclone-proof building. They loaded mattresses against the windows, and were well stocked with food and water.
When text messages came through, letting us know that they were okay, I could finally exhale. The storm had been noisy, but not as destructive as had been feared, at least in Cairns. Between them, my mother and brother had survived four car crashes, the Black Saturday bushfires, a Bolivian uprising, and now, a tropical cyclone, the lucky buggers.
Whether it was the IVF hormones or general cyclone anxiety, I still felt off-balance and tender, with a weird low-level nausea. If my ovaries made noises, they would have been submarine-depth-sounding ‘pings’. So, it was a further relief when the clinic rang after a scan to say they were scheduling me for an egg retrieval.
Our egg pick-up was on a Friday. I slipped so easily back into patient mode; Here, you drive. I surfaced from the sedation in a recovery room, alongside two other women. A nurse came along to see how we were, whispered in each of our ears the results of the egg retrieval—it felt very The Handmaid’s Tale. They’d harvested an even dozen of my eggs, whisked away to be firmly introduced to their spermy boyfriends. I was reunited with Rima in the waiting room, wearing a groggy smile, and hugged her with what felt like big, fuzzy gloves, and spent the rest of the day at home under a doona, half-watching the midday movie.
We were back at the clinic two days later, for the embryo transfer. No sedation this time, just the waking indignity of chatting while the doctor navigated a fine catheter through my cervix. The embryologist appeared, and asked us to confirm our names and the name of our donor, and we saw on the screen a magnified blob: two plump cells within a circular cell wall. Welcome aboard, tiny speck!
•
In the quiet waiting space, we took a daytrip down to Somers to visit Z and the bush chapel. It was a whole year now since we’d farewelled Z’s gritty ashes into a sandy hole. We took her some baby roses from the front garden, listened to the birds and the crash of waves, and let the dogs run on the beach.
The ten days before any pregnancy could possibly be detected inched past. I dreamt that I was driving but I couldn’t see properly, that I drove a truck off a cliff, that we survived and stole towels from a great aunt. The first home pregnancy test was negative. I was deflated, but held out a little hope that I’d just tested too early. But then, a day later, my period arrived and I felt silly for believing that such a tiny thing could actually turn into a baby. I was sulky about turning up to the clinic for the official blood test. What was the point, when it was so clearly going to be negative?
Except that it wasn’t. The test came back with a HCG of thirty-seven—a fraction of the 2063 I’d had with Z, but, still, a positive. ‘Come back on Tuesday,’ said the nurse over the phone. ‘I’m sorry; it is really just too early to tell as yet.’
On Tuesday, my HCG level was seventy-eight; still very sluggish and probably an indicator of an implantation, then early miscarriage, explained the nurse. ‘Come back on Friday—but if you get any sharp abdominal pains, go straight to emergency, just in case it’s ectopic.’
Friday, 25 February 2011
When I arrive at the clinic for my blood test this morning it hasn’t opened yet. A queue of people stretches a good fifteen metres down the hallway. Usually we only cross paths in ones and twos in the waiting room. We glance at one another and drop our gaze, respectful of our mutual privacy; we studiously read trashy magazines.
But here we all are, leaning against the wall, relieved and embarrassed to see just how many of us there are. Some women are alone, but most are accompanied by a male partner. ‘Here to support her’ are the looks they give one another, not so much ‘I just want to be a dad’. Either way, they move sheepishly when the queue starts to advance. We didn’t giggle about this type of baby-making in high school.
Seated in the waiting room, I start reading a newspaper article about the Christchurch earthquakes. An earthquake begins in me, sobs catching in my ribs, tears steaming to the surface. I want to close the paper, to stop all these sad things from happening, to un-read the headline, ‘Mother dies with baby in her arms’. I try to divert, read something else. But still, my body freezes, remembers the sensation of being pinned by twisted metal, the realisation that I can’t get out on my own, someone has to come and help me. This fear is here even without the newspaper. I take a deep breath and open the flimsy pages again and let myself weep for the mother, for her baby, and for me and my baby. All that sadness muddied together—if I could just breathe it all in, soak it all up and breathe out a sense that it will all be okay, that there is something connecting my child and I that cannot be crushed by a falling building or by the impact of a 4-wheel drive.
•
On Friday, my hCG level was up to 201. This time, I got the call from the specialist early pregnancy nurse. She asked me again about the bleeding. I explained that it had been heavy, like a normal period. That it had stopped now.
The nurse hmphed.
‘It’s clear that there’s been implantation, and that you’ve got pregnancy hormones being produced; it’s just that those levels are much lower than we’d like to see. You’ll just have to come back on Monday morning for another blood test.’
‘So, have you ever seen a viable pregnancy with those kinds of numbers?’
‘I have, but it’s important to be realistic about your chances here—realistically, it is looking very unlikely at this stage.’
I put down the phone and felt like laughing out loud. Ha ha. Realistic! The realistic view was that they had no idea what was happening, and neither did I. We were all spectators to the unfolding soap opera that was my uterine environment.
By Sunday night, though, my Zen was running out. I had fretful dreams of dodgy hotels, where one room connected to another and another and another. I kept waking, thinking it was time to get up and go in for my blood test, even though it was 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m. I’d run my situation past my online IVF veteran friends, and heard story after story of low HCG results that were now snoring happily in the cot down the hall. A little speck of hope had got under my skin, and with it, the fear that it would be dashed.
By the Monday morning, my HCG had risen to 630. And although it was the same Nurse Realistic giving me the news, she was much more upbeat this time. She’d spoken with my doctor, and he didn’t see any need for a further blood test, just a scan in a week’s time.
‘So, this might mean that it may actually be viable?’
There was a big, realistic intake of breath. ‘Look. With all early pregnancies, but especially when your betas started low, we can’t really confirm anything until the scan; but, yes, congratulations. But if you do have any sharp pains or bleeding, don’t ignore it, go straight to emergency.’
I couldn’t help it—underneath all the caveats, the one word I heard was ‘congratulations’. Welcome, uncertainty—come on in.
A week earlier, when I’d been certain I wasn’t pregnant, I had booked a flight up to Sydney as a consolation prize. I could catch up with friends, enjoy the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade, and if the timing was right, attempt a fresh insemination with our donor. But now, the trip was a welcome distraction while I waited out the days until the next scan.
Sydney, when I touched down, was thick with memories of ‘before’. They were heavy on the ground and mostly still undisturbed because I had spent so little time there since December 2009. The sight of kids in the uniforms from the girls’ old school, the shops where I had bought ordinary, inconsequential things, the road that led to our house—all of these things couldn’t fade into the background until my brain had trotted through its ‘Last time I saw x, Haloumi was here’ routine.
I returned to one of my favourite Sydney spots: the women’s baths at Coogee. The last time I was there, my Haloumi-filled belly had stuck out obscenely between my bikini top and bottom. I had greeted other swimmers with my stretch marks. That belly was remarkable. Everyone remarked on it, speculated on Haloumi’s gender and wished me well.
I had so many pregnant and unpregnant swims there over the years. Some involved mildly athletic laps; some, snorkelling and marvelling at the starfish, shellfish and, once, even an octopus under the surface; some were splashy and noisy, with the girls; some quiet and contemplative, with no one else in the water. I’d seen it in a storm, with the waves crashing over the rock wall; I’d seen the surface sparkle with a beating sun; and I’d eyed off the greeny-blue depths when it was far too cold to swim.
And now—who knows? I was egging on this tiny speck of potential, hoping it was in the right spot, hoping it wasn’t ectopic, chemical, blighted, all kinds of words for ‘lost already’. To swim there felt like an act of love—towards my tentative self and this little question mark of cells.
I met up with an old friend who had also been going through IVF, and was now ten weeks pregnant, that odd early stage of pregnancy where you just feel fat and off-colour; a tenuous, uncertain state. We arranged a spot in the mardi gras parade on my usual float. I’d been to the workshop earlier that day, and made loopy green headdresses and tutus for us. And we danced all the way up Oxford Street, spangled with glitter and shining from the cheers of the crowd. I dared to imagine two small children who might delight in the idea they’d marched in the mardi gras even before they were born. It was our Fat Tuesday (quite literally; from the French, mardi gras)—we feasted on hope while we could.
Flying back to Melbourne, that hope solidified a little. Just being around someone else in those strange early days of pregnancy made me feel like maybe, maybe, we’d see a heartbeat too this time. Lo and behold, at the scan on Monday, there was a fetal sac in the uterus, where it should have been, but nothing else. No fetal pole, no heartbeat.
Our doctor was philosophical. ‘There are a number of possibilities here. It could be that you’ve just got a slow starter. Sometimes embryos drop a few cells before implanting, and that puts them a little behind. It’s still early days, so I think we need another scan, next week, before we make a call either way.’
On the Tuesday, I was back at work, wearing a summery outfit—new dress, new shoes—when the bleeding started. There was a heaviness, but it came suddenly, like something loosening. In the time it took for me to half-run from my office to the toilet, my new strappy white sandals and the lino floor were marked with big polka dots of blood, perfectly circular.