11

Into Their Bodies, Out of Our Hands

By the time I returned from Iceland, Susie was bracing for hot flashes. She had begun taking a medication called Lupron, which drained her estrogen levels to those of a prepubescent girl. The goal was to keep her from ovulating until Tiffany’s body was ready to accept her eggs. But in effect, she also got a sneak preview of menopause.

Tiffany’s meds did just the opposite. She was pumped full of hormones, a signal to her uterus to gear up, because it was baby-making time. Both women were placed on active birth control pills in order to synch up their cycles. The only way an embryo transfer would work is if Tiffany’s reproductive system was primed to take over right where Susie’s left off.

It was during all this that I realized Drew and I were pretty much done. My sperm were banked, the trust was funded. We may have been pursuing a nontraditional means of having a baby, but even our way, it was women who got stuck doing all the hard work.

After a couple of weeks of Lupron, Susie started taking two more drugs, Menopur and Follistim, which signaled her ovaries to go into overdrive. And like popcorn exploding in hot oil, eggs would suddenly start ricocheting around her belly.

She only needed to come to L.A. for two days—one day for the egg extraction, the next for her body to sort out what the hell just happened. (The doctor called it “rest.”) But she decided to stay with us for two full weeks. That way she would still be around when we transferred the embryos to Tiffany. She wasn’t needed for that, but it would be nice to have her there.

I can only imagine what it was like for Susie asking her boss for all that time off.

“So, yeah, I’m going to L.A. for two weeks to help my brothers make a baby, and you have two choices as to what you want to do about it. You can either just give me the time off with no hassle, or you can fire me. And I know you have every right to fire me, because that’s a lot of time off, and this isn’t much notice and you probably need somebody to fill in for me while I’m gone. But either way, I’m going, so here are the dates. Just let me know your decision.”

She got the time off.

Susie’s favorite TV show at the time was Jon and Kate Plus 8, so we filled up our TiVo with episodes for her to watch. I’d never heard of it before, but I sat down with her a few times to check it out. It struck me as strange that, as we were going through this process, Susie’s form of escapism was watching a show about the two most horrible people to ever go through fertility treatments. “Do they fight all the time?” I asked. “He’s disgusting. She’s shrill and insane.” “I don’t know whose side to take.” Susie pretty much agreed with me, but I think she just liked watching the kids.

Drew was coping in his own way, with wildly inappropriate humor. He teased Susie about setting her up with a hot guy from his office, wondering what would happen if she had unprotected sex right now. She could be the first woman ever to deliver centuplets, which is probably the term they would invent for a hundred babies, if all the eggs inside of Drew’s little sister were to fertilize at once. We laughed about her being an addict, constantly in need of her next injection. Drew even made up a song about the egg retrieval procedure, which began like this:

“We’re gonna stick a wand inside your cooter, and then we’ll do a number count!”

The rest of the song consisted merely of us all shouting out our guess as to how many eggs the doctor was going to find in Susie’s lady parts. He had told us that, given Susie’s age and good health, we should expect to extract around three dozen ova. But that didn’t stop us from speculating higher, sometimes up to a million or two.

Finally, it was the day before the Big Day. Egg Extraction Eve. To celebrate, we took Susie out for dinner at our favorite restaurant. Like every other night during a Susie visit, we had friends meet us there so we could show Susie off to them. This time, though, there were two very special guests waiting for us.

“Omigod, hi!” Tiffany squealed as she threw her arms around Susie. All they’d ever seen of each other were a few pictures on Facebook, but they hugged like BFFs from high school, reuniting after their first semester at college. Their bond was one none of us quite anticipated or understood, but it was definitely unique. They were two women from opposite sides of America who had come together to help Drew and me make a baby.

Drew was already tearing up, just from the sight of them side by side. “It’s so wild,” he told Tiffany. “I see so much of Susie in you.”

The waiter must have come four times before we were ready to order. Nobody wanted to look at a menu. There was too much to discuss. The women compared medications and side effects. Drew told embarrassing stories about Susie as a little girl. We talked about Tiffany’s upcoming birthday, on September 11.

Tiffany was a different person that night, nothing like the shy, nervous girl she’d been when we first met her at Rainbow Extensions. She was a giddy, gossipy woman, outgoing, inquisitive, and hilarious. Drew was different, too. Quieter. There was no need for him to play talk show host that night. He would have slowed things down if he had.

My one fear about surrogacy was that it would turn having a baby into a business transaction, something cynical and cold, where the baby became nothing but a product to be haggled over. But there was nothing businesslike about moments like this. You could say the night was perfectly ordinary, just an evening out with people whose company we enjoyed. Yet there was something truly special about it, too, something we all felt. This was bigger than us, bigger than the baby, too.

On our way out of the restaurant, Drew ran into an old colleague and friend named SallyAnn. She was there with her elderly mother, who had just arrived from Long Island for a visit.

“Hi, I’m Drew,” he said, introducing himself to the polite older woman. Then he turned to the rest of us. “This is my partner Jerry, our surrogate, Tiffany, Tiffany’s husband, Eric. And this is my little sister Susie,” he beamed proudly, throwing his arm around Susie’s shoulders. “She’s getting her eggs extracted for us tomorrow.”

It was the first time we had all been together and the first time we’d been introduced this way, like a family. I couldn’t help but smile.

We might have expected the elderly woman to do a spit take or roll her eyes at her daughter’s wacky L.A. lifestyle. But SallyAnn just happened to have created the reality show Jersey Shore, so her mother had long since lost her capacity to be shocked.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, grinning, and a minute later, we were on our way home.

Even though there was only one line to the song, we sang “Wand Inside Your Cooter” all the way to the doctor’s office the next morning. This time, our guesses on the number count took on a more serious tone.

“You’re feeling pretty swollen, right, Susie?” I asked. She nodded. “Okay. I’m going to say. . . forty-eight.”

“Wow, that’s high,” Drew said.

“What? You don’t think your sister is incredibly fertile?”

Susie shrugged. “He said the average was thirty-six, right? I’ll say thirty-six.”

We knew Drew would come in low, cautious as ever. We waited while he mulled it over.

“I’ll take two dozen,” Drew intoned, confidently. “Assorted.” On the way to the doctor’s office, we stopped at a donut shop to get some goodies for the staff. It was something Drew did virtually everywhere he went—the dentist, the accountant, his shrink. If you did any kind of business with Drew Tappon, he brought you donuts. It was his way of ensuring you’d remember him and treat him well. And it worked. Whether it was because of the donuts or just his charm, Drew got VIP treatment everywhere he went. Even his mechanic never cheated him.

Drew still hadn’t given us a number for Susie’s egg count, and whenever I asked, he dodged the question. “What’s up?” I asked him finally.

Susie was out of earshot. He lowered his voice, and his confident, jokey façade drained out in an instant. “I’m just . . . nervous.”

“Nervous? Why?”

“Because she’s my sister.”

The office was empty when we arrived. We were the first appointment, at 7:00 a.m., and though the doors were open, there didn’t seem to be anyone there. Did Dr. Saroyan forget that this was the most important day of our lives? I wondered if it would be rude to open up the donuts before we gave them to the staff. The smell of cinnamon was driving me crazy.

“Gerald, you’re here!” we heard finally. I found it a bit odd that the first nurse we saw was looking for me, not my sister-in-law, the one with the eggs.

“Yeah, Susie’s here for her appointment.”

“I know. Tell me, were you going to be using a fresh sample today?”

“Sample?”

“Yeah, your sperm.”

“No, I thought we were just going to use the leftovers.”

“Oh, I don’t think we knew that, because we didn’t save any.”

“What?”

I hadn’t expected to be called on to perform that day, but it turned out, I had a function there after all.

Two minutes later, I was sitting in the specimen room on the half couch, half bed, holding an empty cup. I had no choice but to use the office’s materials this time. It turned out they had plenty of gay porn, an entire plastic bin full of it. Just another thing Rainbow Extensions got wrong. I popped in a DVD of two beefy blond wrestlers tussling on an athletic mat. Their match started off like any other, but it continued long after most wrestling matches would have come to an end, as the intensity heated up and their uniforms got torn in revealing places. It was a well-made film, but I was having a difficult time focusing on it.

It’s not like I hadn’t done this before—in this very room, no less. It’s just that, well, the cavorting Greco-Romans on screen and I were about to create human life. Ever since adolescence, I’d been doing this at a strictly amateur level. Now, without warning, I was thrust into my professional debut. I’d spent my whole life practicing. Now I was in Carnegie Hall.

I thought about how many untold trillions of sperm I’d wasted over the course of my life. Who knows how many potential Einsteins I’d flushed hastily down the toilet, how many Mozarts I’d wiped away with a wash cloth and wrung out in the sink, how many Ghandis I’d wadded up in a ball of tissues and dumped down the trash chute of my senior dorm with a spritz of Lysol to mask the odor. This time would be different. These sperm were actually going to do the thing that sperm were created to do. Much like the wrestlers on screen, they would continue on where so many before them would have stopped.

I could only hope they were up to the task. My future kid might be floating around inside my body at this very moment, waiting for his big chance. I prayed my wad wasn’t full of Saddam Husseins or Snookis. This time, I was even more careful not to spill.

As I rejoined Drew and Susie in the waiting room, Dr. Saroyan was just coming out to greet them, wearing scrubs and ready to begin.

“Hello, guys! How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I’m so nervous,” Drew confessed.

Dr. Saroyan rolled his eyes. “Why are you nervous? You don’t have to do anything! You know who should be nervous? Me. This is a very complicated procedure!”

Drew cackled, instantly relaxing. I’d never been more grateful for Dr. Saroyan’s sick sense of humor.

“I’m just joking, of course,” he continued. “This is very routine. Susie will be given some mild anesthesia, and we’ll be done in about ten minutes.”

As Susie stood up, we hugged like she was shipping off to Baghdad. We told her we loved her as many times as we could before she disappeared down the hall out of sight.

Then, while we waited, our thoughts turned to politics.

It was August 29, 2008, three days before the start of the Republican National Convention. A TV in the waiting room of Westside Fertility was tuned to CNN, which was just about to announce whom John McCain had picked as his running mate. As two gay men in the midst of reproducing, Drew and I were particularly concerned about this decision and what it might do for the tenor of the campaign. I was having uncomfortable flashbacks to 2004.

In his first term, George W. Bush had failed at just about everything—the economy, the war on terror, basic human diction. But he and Karl Rove cooked up a scheme that would get him reelected anyway. Who were the only people in America more hated and feared than Bush himself? The gays. So they made sure everyone knew those child-raping AIDS spreaders from San Francisco were looking to invade their homes, their workplaces, and their classrooms and that Democrats were standing there holding the door open for them. And it worked. The most disliked president in history was swept back into office on a tide of homophobia. (Historians will probably cite other reasons as well, including the suckiness of John Kerry, but that’s the way I saw it.)

Bush’s second term was equally disastrous, so I was bracing myself for a repeat of those same scare tactics from the Republicans. McCain’s choice for V.P. would be the first indication of what we were in for. Would he pick Mitt Romney, the anti-gay governor of Massachusetts? Maybe Mike Huckabee, the even more anti-gay governor of Arkansas? Or perhaps Charlie Crist, the super-anti-gay (allegedly) gay man who ran the state of Florida? I held out for someone like Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who’d once voted to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation—before admitting nine years later that he regretted that vote. In the Republican Party, that qualified him as a moderate on gay rights. Go Pawlenty!

It was the groundhog poking out of his burrow. Would we have four more years of gay baiting? Or were we on the brink of a welcome thaw?

And the nominee is—Governor—who?

I studied the strange face on CNN. A woman with glasses and her hair pulled back into a tight bun. She looked sweet and studious, like a librarian. CNN shared everything they knew about her, but I couldn’t wait for them to get to what mattered. I dug out my iPhone and googled “Sarah Palin gay rights.”

Nothing.

There was very little public record of her at all, but when it came to her stance on gay marriage or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, it seemed like she had never before been asked to take one. I could only assume that, in Alaska, gay rights doesn’t come up much.

I didn’t find the word “gay” attached to Sarah Palin, but I did find a more telling word. “Sarah Palin to Broaden McCain’s Appeal to Evangelicals,” one article already proclaimed. “Evangelicals Applaud Palin Nomination.” “Palin Bid Seen as McCain’s Gift to Evangelicals.”

Shit, I thought. She’s one of them.

I looked up and saw Dr. Saroyan striding down the hallway toward us. He had just left the exam room and was still pulling off his face mask. Was it over? Had he even started?

Drew put down his Blackberry, but the doctor wasn’t stopping to talk to us. He was heading with purpose toward his office, on the opposite side of the waiting room.

“How’s it going?” we called out to him.

He shook his head. “She doesn’t have a lot of eggs, guys.”

And just as quickly, he was gone.

“Did he say . . . ?”

Drew cut me off. “Yeah.” He buried his face in his hands.

“What does that mean? He did the ultrasound. Her follicles were so healthy. She could feel her ovaries swelling. How many eggs do you think he means? Like twenty-five?”

Drew didn’t want to play my guessing games. “I don’t know!” he snapped.

A minute later, Dr. Saroyan appeared again, walking just as purposefully back toward the operating room. Once again, he wasn’t stopping.

“How many eggs does she have?” I called out.

“We’ll have to see,” he said, in passing. “Looks like seven.”

Seven? Seven eggs? I didn’t think that was possible. What did it mean? Could we still have seven babies?

The look of concern on Dr. Saroyan’s face was nothing compared to the one he had when he returned a few minutes later. This time, he stopped. He sat down next to us and sighed. “We need to talk, guys.”

The expression he wore wasn’t one of concern or empathy. It was something I never would have expected: guilt.

“I said something I shouldn’t have said,” he confided.

“What?”

“Didn’t you tell me she had kids of her own?”

“No. She’s not even married.”

Dr. S buried his face in his own hands now. “I was just trying to make a joke. She was waking up from the anesthesia, and I . . . I said it’s a good thing you have your own kids already, because your ovaries are a mess.”

We stared blankly at the doctor, hoping the joke was on us. But he wasn’t faking. He was devastated.

“Her eggs are just . . . it’s not good.”

Drew didn’t want to hear any more. He just wanted to see his sister.

Susie’s smile might have been more convincing if she’d wiped away her tears first. She was lying in a recovery room underneath a TV that was tuned to CNN on low volume. She looked over as we entered, trying to put on a brave face. “So I guess he told you?”

“He told us he made a bad joke,” Drew said.

“It’s fine. He didn’t know. He thought I had kids already.”

“You okay, Suz?” Drew asked, stroking her arm gently. He was trying so hard not to cry. It was almost too much to bear, knowing that half an hour ago, Susie had walked into an operating room to do the most selfless thing she had ever done, only to be blindsided by the worst medical news she’d ever received.

“I’m fine,” Susie assured us.

We could see she was anything but fine. Her lip started to quiver, and Drew couldn’t hold back his tears anymore. I could see him searching his mind for an inappropriate joke to make, but for probably the first time ever, he was coming up empty.

Now Susie was comforting him. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Drew caught his breath. “What on Earth are you sorry about?”

“I feel like I let you guys down.”

Both Drew and I were speechless for a second. It was so typical of Susie, at a time like this, to be concerned with everyone but herself. Or, as I chose to put it at that moment, “You’re insane, Susie. Shut up.”

“I just want you guys to have a baby.”

“We’ll have a baby, one way or another. I mean . . .” I didn’t want Susie to think I had already written her off as an egg donor.

A nurse came to check on our patient. She asked her if she was ready to get dressed. Susie nodded, and as the nurse pulled the curtain, Susie glanced at the TV above her bed. On it, Sarah Palin was waving eagerly to reporters.

“Who the hell is that?” we heard Susie say.

From the look on Dr. Saroyan’s face, it was clear that he wasn’t about to launch into his comedy routine. Susie’s low yield had caught him off guard. Nothing in the tests indicated she was anything less than freakishly fertile. He turned toward Susie, and his first question was not encouraging. “Are you dating anyone?”

Susie laughed. “Nah.”

Dr. S turned to Drew and me. “You guys need to find her somebody.” He was only partly joking. “I can’t say for sure you won’t be able to conceive, but I’d highly recommend you try as soon as possible. Your ovaries right now are the best they’re ever going to be.”

Drew groaned. “I feel so bad that we put her through this.”

“Don’t,” Dr. S scolded. “If not for this, we wouldn’t have known she had any fertility issues. She would’ve waited to have kids, and it would’ve been too late. At least now we can plan.”

I had an idea. “Should we forget about our transfer and freeze these eggs for Susie to use instead?”

“No!” Susie blurted out. “These are yours!”

Dr. Saroyan shrugged. “We could do that, Gerald, but I’ll learn a lot from seeing how many of these eggs fertilize. If everyone’s okay, I think we should proceed as planned.”

“Yes.” Susie decided to answer for everyone. Drew and I nodded along.

“When will we know if they fertilized?”

“In three days.” Dr. S sighed. “Guys, I want to be very clear about where we stand. If we don’t get at least two or, better yet, three quality embryos, I’m going to call off the transfer. I don’t want to waste your time.”

Susie had refused to accept any compensation for her eggs. We offered her the standard $8,000 fee, we offered to buy her a car or to rent her an apartment so she could move away from home. She was changing our lives, as we saw it, and we wanted to do something potentially life changing for her as well. But she wouldn’t take a penny, wouldn’t even let Drew buy her an iPhone for her birthday. I understood perfectly why she was so reluctant. Any reward might have cheapened the gesture.

Now I had a new idea. What if, when this was all done, we paid for Susie to freeze some of her eggs for her own use? Then, years later, if she had any trouble conceiving, she would have a safety net. It was perfect. We would pay Susie back for her eggs—with her eggs. Finally, something made sense.

Three days later, Drew, Susie, and I huddled around the phone to call the doctor’s office. Aida, the nurse, answered.

“We’re calling to see if our embryos fertilized?”

“Can you hold a minute?”

It didn’t sound good. It sounded like Aida was putting us on hold so she could find the person whose job it was to crush people’s dreams.

“You have three embryos,” she said, a minute later and a bit more chipper. “The doctor would like to do the transfer this Friday.”

“Wait, Dr. Saroyan said he might cancel the transfer. Have you checked with him? Are you sure this is happening?” I was suddenly skeptical. I wasn’t anticipating good news.

“Oh, for sure it’s happening.”

In an instant, all our attention shifted to Tiffany. We were determined to make the next few days as smooth and comfortable for her as we could. Dr. Saroyan liked to do transfers first thing in the morning, at 7:00 a.m. So rather than have Tiffany leave home at 5:00 a.m. and fight Orange County traffic, we booked her a room in a hotel near the fertility clinic.

We put together a care package full of magazines, fresh cookies, and other assorted treats, then dropped it off at the front desk of the hotel. As we walked out, Drew muttered, “Kristen Lander doesn’t know how good she would’ve had it! Her IPs probably didn’t even say thank you.”

When we arrived at Dr. Saroyan’s office for the transfer, he presented us with a picture. Against a faint gray background were three translucent blobs, almost perfect circles. These were our embryos. I’m very progressive about women’s reproductive rights, and I agree that life begins at birth, not at conception blah blah blah, but I have to admit a strange feeling overcame me as I stared at that picture. They had no defining characteristics whatsoever and I knew they might never be more than blobs on a sheet of paper, but as I stared at them, I saw my children. I would have taken a bullet for those blobs.

I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, obviously, because both Drew and Susie were weeping like they were watching the end of Shawshank Redemption.

“Wow, Susie,” I said, looking at the embryos. “It’s like you and I ‘did it’!”

When Tiffany arrived, the doctor took us all into an exam room. I’d heard that embryos were graded for their quality, much like schoolchildren, and I couldn’t wait to see if we had any A students on our hands. Dr. S told me he didn’t normally give letter grades, but that we had “three gorgeous, gorgeous embryos.”

“C’mon,” I said. “Can you rank them?”

“One is a nine out of ten,” he said. “The other two are ten out of ten.”

The mood in the room was electric. “So Susie delivered quality over quantity then?” I asked.

“Yeah, who knew?” Dr. S said. “Maybe we shouldn’t write you off just yet.”

Susie had never looked prouder or more relieved. The same could be said of Drew.

“So we could really be dads?” I asked.

“I mean, there are no guarantees, but I’m a lot more optimistic now than I was after the retrieval.”

“Then how many are we transferring?” Drew asked.

“Given the circumstances, I think we should be aggressive,” Dr. S informed us. “I recommend you transfer all three.”

Drew clutched my hand anxiously. “Three?”

“I just want to increase your odds, but it does mean there’s an outside chance you could have triplets.”

“Let’s do it,” Drew said. He turned to me. “Right?”

I wanted to say no. Triplets terrified me, and so did the thought of reducing three fetuses to two once they’d taken hold in Tiffany’s uterus. Then again, what if we transferred one or two embryos and ended up with no baby at all?

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do all three.”