12
Infertility isn’t the kind of subject people tend to talk about at work. “Hey, Frank. How was your weekend?”
“Pretty good. Saw the new Batman movie, tried that new Italian restaurant downtown, found out my sperm count is zero.”
“Oh yeah, how was the food?”
In my case, though, it was a source of endless fascination among my coworkers.
I was in the middle of a six-month freelance gig on a TV show called Smash Hit Video. Each weekly episode was a compilation of shocking caught-on-tape clips featuring anything from bull gorings to runaway speedboat crashes. It was like a sizzle reel of human suffering. On a daily basis, producers would swing by my desk to drop off screeners and say, “This driver flips over nine times and smashes through a concrete wall. A-minus.”
“Does he survive?” I’d ask.
Shrug. “Make sure you say he does.”
If I overlooked my contribution to the decline of humanity, it was a decent job.
The writers’ room at a place like this is probably not all that different from that of a network sitcom because in a better life, that’s where we all imagined ourselves. At any given time, the staff consisted of me and between three and seven straight guys, along with between zero and one woman. We’d goof off, crack jokes, play darts, anything to take our minds off car crashes for a few minutes.
For months now, no topic had been as fascinating as how two dudes could make a baby without having sex with a woman. Nothing was off limits—the cost, the gory details of the procedures, the sperm. On a daily basis, I provided comic fodder and teachable moments for the Smash Hit Video writing staff, and I loved every minute of it.
That all changed once the procedure was finished. Drew and I would have to wait ten days before we’d learn if Tiffany was pregnant, and I wasn’t in the mood to share how I was feeling.
We texted with Tiffany regularly, and her responses were encouraging, which is to say, she felt like crap. “tiff thinks its morning sickness,” Eric wrote once. “she had it real bad when she was preg w gavin.”
I didn’t share these messages with the writer’s room, but I did have one friend I confided in privately: Bernie. He and I had a complicated relationship. We’d known each other forever, which meant since I first moved to L.A. We were classmates in the USC screenwriting program, and we’d kept in touch through a series of weird jobs like this ever since. He was a good guy, so good that he could tell for sure that I was going to hell. I know this because he told me so. “Yes, Jerry,” he said. “You’re going to hell.”
To be fair, this followed about five minutes of me badgering him with, “Just tell me if I’m going to hell! C’mon, just tell me!” Of course, I knew what his answer would be because Bernie believed you only got into Heaven if you accepted Jesus as your savior. Still, I wanted to hear him say it out loud.
Bernie’s very religious, but incredibly, that’s never gotten in the way of him being my friend. We hung out often, and he laughed more than most people at my jokes, which made me like him even more. He even made me a groomsman in his wedding. It always surprised me how he could look past what his religion said about me and be my buddy. Maybe he was just trying to maximize his time with me on Earth because he knew that in the next life, we’d be long-distance pen pals at best. I guess he’s what the nicer Christian people call “a true Christian” in that he tries to love everyone and not judge—unless, of course, some little snot like me really puts him on the spot.
Bernie had always been uncharacteristically quiet when we talked about surrogacy in the office. For a while, I assumed it was because the idea of two men reproducing made the crucifix around his neck quiver and emit smoke. Then, one day, he spoke up.
I’d just informed the room that the success rate for in vitro, as Rainbow Extensions quoted us, was approximately 98 percent.
I’ve never seen anyone do an actual spit take in my life, but that moment was the closest I ever came. Bernie was just sitting down at his desk, and he nearly fell out of his chair. “What? I hope you don’t believe that!”
“Well, it might be a little inflated . . .”
“You think 98 percent of couples who try in vitro get pregnant? It’s more like thirty, forty percent. Tops.”
“Well maybe. If you mean straight couples. But our situation is different. A straight couple going through in vitro has already had problems conceiving naturally. For us, everyone’s healthy. Our surrogate’s already had a baby of her own, our egg donor is young and fertile, and if either of them fall short, they can be replaced with someone else. Gay couples even have two potential sperm donors.” Bernie had been an engineering major in undergrad, so I knew I could make my point using math lingo. “Straight couples are locked into who’s providing the egg and the sperm. In our equation, everyone’s a variable.”
Bernie got quiet. This was one argument he didn’t want to pursue further, although clearly I had hit a nerve. I could tell this was more than just a hypothetical area for him, that he’d pulled his 30 to 40 percent statistic from personal experience.
That’s the good news about breaking through the “you’re going to hell” barrier in a friendship. After that, nothing’s off the table anymore. The next time I was alone with Bernie, I asked him what was going on.
It turned out he and his wife were on their third in vitro attempt. They’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars into procedures, with no luck. This would be their last try.
I told him about Susie’s egg yield and how nervous we were. In a weird way, I guess I was hoping to cheer him up, but he didn’t take any comfort in my story. “Making eggs was never our problem,” he confided. In fact, his wife produced dozens of them. The resulting embryos, though, just weren’t making the cut. Where we got nines and tens, Bernie and his wife were getting twos and threes.
We both wished each other the best of luck and made a silent pact not to bring it up again. It was good to have someone to commiserate with, but I knew the odds of both of us getting pregnant were extremely slim. This was bound to end in heartbreak, at least for one of us.
Finally, the waiting was over. Ten days had gone by, and Aida at the fertility office told me to keep my phone close by because there was no telling when they’d hear back from the lab. The test results wouldn’t come in the form of a “yes” or “no,” just a number that corresponded to the hormone level in Tiffany’s bloodstream. If the number was over one hundred, Tiffany was definitely pregnant. If it was under one hundred, it was a “maybe,” and in that case, there would be a second test, three days later.
Some friends of ours knew a couple who had taken this same test and scored somewhere around two thousand. They ended up with twins. “Multiples make your numbers go through the roof,” they said. I imagined what number we might get if we were having triplets. Three thousand? Thirty thousand? Three million?
“Tiffany scored an eighteen,” Aida told me, late that afternoon.
I didn’t want all the other writers to hear my conversation, so I stepped outside onto the patio, where the smokers congregated. I could barely breathe, which didn’t help me contain my emotions. “So she’s not pregnant?” Cough, cough.
“We can’t say for sure. I’ve seen lower numbers than that where the woman ended up being pregnant. We just don’t know.”
“But it’s not twins, is it?” Sniffle, exhale. “Or triplets?”
“We don’t know. You just have to sit tight for three days. If she’s pregnant, the number will at least double.”
Three days was better than ten days, but on the flip side, it was three more days. I started my daily count over. “Two days left.” “One day left.” Ugh.
The morning of Tiffany’s retest, my hopes were skyrocketing again. Tiffany said she could feel something growing inside her. I imagined what number Aida would give me this time. Two hundred and twenty? Four hundred? No, one hundred and eleven. I didn’t want to get my hopes up.
Finally, my cell phone rang.
“Gerald?”
“Yes?”
Aida sighed. “I’m sorry.”
I braced myself against the wall. I was once again standing outside, with the smokers, once more on the brink of tears. “So it’s bad news?” Cough.
“I can’t get through to anyone at the lab. They usually call us by now, but I think they went home.”
“Wait. You don’t have the results?”
“I’m sorry. We won’t know until Monday.”
Oh, Jesus. Three more days!
I was tense and furious all weekend. Those lab workers were so unprofessional! What’s the equivalent of the Better Business Bureau for medical labs? Was there a Yelp for fertility clinics where I could write a one-star review? Ooh, I was burning up.
Shockingly, Drew stayed calm through the whole thing. I didn’t get it. He was supposed to be the panicker. I was the sane one. How had we suddenly reversed roles? “We’ve been waiting thirteen days, and now it’s going to be three more!” I shouted. “How are you not losing your shit?”
Drew just shook his head. “Because I already know the answer.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jer, we’re not pregnant.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because the odds are one in a million.”
“And where did you find that statistic? On Drew Makes Shit Up dot com?”
“Just let it go. You’re only going to be disappointed.”
“But Aida said lots of people get pregnant when they have a number lower than eighteen. It’s all about the next number, and if it’s at least double what it was, then there’s a good chance . . .”
“Okay. If you want to keep your hopes up, go ahead.”
“Yes!” I shouted. “I want to keep my hopes up!”
That was the last I talked to Drew about the pregnancy test. After that, I hid my anxiety. I quietly called Aida on Monday morning while Drew was in the shower. “When will you have an answer? When? When?”
“The lab opens at nine.”
It was 7:30. I couldn’t believe it. In a mere ninety minutes, I’d know.
I drove to work with my headset in so I wouldn’t miss the call. Just as I was pulling up to the Sunset-Gower studio lot, I felt my phone vibrate.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Gerald? Tiffany got an eleven.”
“I’m sorry, wait. She got what?” I was hoping we had a bad connection. Maybe she said two hundred and eleven. Or eleven million. Maybe it was eleven-uplets. I refused to give up until I knew for sure.
“She’s definitely not pregnant. I’m sorry, Gerald.”
“Oh.”
“I just spoke to Tiffany and we scheduled a D & C, which is standard procedure . . .”
Everything else she said floated past me. I listened as long as I had to, thanked her, and hung up.
I stayed in my car for ten minutes. The first five, I was doing a mixture of trying not to cry and crying. The next five, I was on the phone.
Drew and I conferenced Susie in to give her the bad news. She didn’t even hesitate. “So when do we try again?” she asked.
“Sweetie . . .” Drew began. But I cut him off.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I told her. “We’ll talk to Dr. Saroyan. I think we need to wait a few months. But if you really want to go through this again . . .”
“Well, I’m not gonna stop until you guys have a baby,” she said.
“We’ll talk about it,” was all Drew would say. But I didn’t want to talk about it, not with him. I was terrified he might tell me that he’d already given up hope.
The only one less enthusiastic than Drew was Dr. Saroyan. He called me that afternoon to see how I was doing. All I wanted to know was when we could try again.
“Three months,” he said. “The question is, are you willing to look for a new egg donor?”
“No! We’re not replacing Susie.”
Dr. S sighed. “It’s going to decrease your odds of having a baby significantly.”
“Why? I thought the embryos were perfect. Two tens and a nine. This wasn’t her fault. Are you sure it’s not Tiffany we should be replacing?” Just that easily, I was ready to throw our surrogate under the bus. I would have hated the idea of losing Tiffany, but the thought of having to dump Susie was unbearable, both for what it meant for us and for what it meant for her.
“I see no reason to replace the surrogate, but if Susan were anyone other your sister-in-law, I would tell you to find a new egg donor. I wouldn’t even agree to do the procedure again for you.”
“It’s that bad?”
Dr. S thought it over for a moment. “Well . . .” he said, pausing cautiously. “There’s one hope.”
“Tell me! We really want to keep Susie.”
“Because she was Drew’s sister and not an anonymous donor and because she seemed so healthy, I gave her a relatively low dose of the meds. If we were going to try again—if—I would double her doses, raise her to the absolute maximum. It could be a lot more uncomfortable for her. She’d have to be okay with that, because otherwise, there would be no point in trying.”
I didn’t even call Susie to check. I knew what her answer would be. “Go ahead and make the calendars then. We’ll try again in three months.”
“Okay, Gerald,” Dr. S sighed. “But listen. If this doesn’t work, I won’t put her through it a third time. This is your last chance with Susan.”