Freeze
December 25, 2002
It was Christmas Day, but no one was
merry.
A curtain of dread hung over us, much
like the chill that permeated the air outside.
It wasn’t an icy chill – come on, we live in Florida; did you think
there’d be ice? – but it was cold. And
by cold, I mean upper-forties cold.
Which is practically subzero for a Florida girl.
Christmas is pretty much the only day
I don’t hate cold weather; it’s an excuse to bust out the one scarf I own and
drink hot cocoa by the light of the… TV.
Pathetic, I know. That’s one of
the things I missed, growing up in Florida – white Christmases. But then, I’d gladly give up a white
Christmas for a warm winter.
That Christmas, though, it wouldn’t
have mattered if it was forty or eight outside.
I still felt cold on the inside.
As cold as I had two days earlier, when I’d gotten the news.
“Claire, your lab results came back, and I’m afraid they don’t
look good. Your bloodwork shows
twenty-five percent blasts.”
Dr. Rodrigo’s words made my heart come
to a crashing halt, or at least that’s what it had felt like. For a long few seconds, I couldn’t breathe.
“Blasts” were the oncology nickname
for cancer cells. You expected to find a
few of them even during a remission. At
one point, mine had been under five percent and dropping, or so it seemed. But now that figure was back up. Way up.
The higher percentage of blasts, the worse it was, and this was the
worst it had been since around the time I started treatment after my original
diagnosis. That was bad news. It meant a relapse. After over two years in remission, my cancer
was back.
I should have seen the relapse coming,
but it still came as a nasty shock.
Maybe I was just in denial. But
it was the holidays, and I figured the exhaustion I’d been experiencing was due
to all the usual hustle and bustle.
I’d been working extra hours at the
dentist’s office, where I’d been a hygienist for the last year or so, ever
since finishing my associate’s degree the summer before. Dental hygiene wasn’t exactly my field of
choice when I’d started college, but in all honestly, I hadn’t really known
what I wanted to do, and when leukemia had screwed up my college plans, it had
seemed a suitable Plan B. My dad was a
dentist, so I saw myself as following in his footsteps, and I went out into the
field thinking that if I liked it, maybe I’d go on to dental school and get a
degree in general dentistry later on.
I’d been working for Dr. Somers, an old friend of Dad’s who worked out
of an office in Tampa, ever since, and I really enjoyed it. I liked working with people and wearing
scrubs, the pay was pretty good, and the hours were flexible – some hygienists
only worked part-time, but I’d been doing it full-time. I was happy to take on even more hours over
the holiday season, when the kids were out of school and my older coworkers had
travel plans with their families. I
needed the money for my rent, bills, and, of course, Christmas presents. But between working and participating in all
the Christmas festivities, I had worn myself out – and apparently ignored the
other symptoms.
Right after I’d gone into remission, I
had been so diligent about keeping tabs on my own health. I checked my body for unexplainable bruises
and worried whenever I found one. I kept
track of my temperature if I had even the slightest fever, and lost sleep over
feeling fatigued (which only made me more tired). My greatest fear was that the leukemia would
come back. But eventually, after clean
bills of health at all of my regular check-ups, I began to realize that I was
going to make myself completely neurotic by constantly worrying about a
relapse, and so I made myself relax. It
was normal to feel tired sometimes, I told myself, and perfectly healthy people
bruised too.
For awhile, my life returned back to
normal. I had moved on to the next phase
of my life – the adult phase. I’d
finished college, at least for now, gotten a good job, and moved out to my own
apartment in Tampa. My parents had sold
our old house after my dad’s retirement and moved to a smaller home in
Gainesville, so for the first time in my life, I felt like I was truly “out of
the nest.” I was building my own nest
now, preparing for the future.
And then I went for my check-up, and
all of my future plans were shoved into a giant question mark. In the span of a couple seconds, my entire
life had changed again.
I felt like I was having a recurring
nightmare. And really, I was, except for
that it was no nightmare. This was my
life.
I had wanted to wait until after
Christmas to tell anyone. I’d let my
family enjoy the holiday and not dampen the Christmas spirit with bad,
frightening news.
The problem was, I knew I couldn’t
hide it. My parents could read me like a
book, and they would have known something was up if I wasn’t happy and excited
over Christmas. And my faking happiness
act could only go so far. I simply
wasn’t a good enough actress to pull it off, not during Christmas. Besides, it was horrible carrying the burden
of my relapse around, even for a few hours, and not having anyone to talk to
me, hug me, pray with me, and reassure me that this news wasn’t the end of my
world.
I’d called my parents late that
afternoon, and they had called my brother Kyle, and now it was Christmas and we
were all together, trying to make the best of it. It was hard, nearly impossible, to get into
the Christmas spirit, though, not with the news of a relapse hanging over our
heads. It was the scenario we’d feared
ever since I had gone into remission, come true.
The worst part for me was that I
wouldn’t begin treatment until after New Year’s, at the earliest. I hated waiting. It wasn’t that I wanted to go back on chemo,
which had been a horrible experience the first time around, but just sitting
around, I couldn’t help but imagine my bone marrow popping out blast after
mutated blast, the leukemia cells making their way into my bloodstream and
choking out all the good blood cells around them, slowly killing me from the
inside. I wanted those fuckers gone, and if chemo was the only way to
do it, so be it.
We tried not to talk about it over Christmas
dinner; I guess everyone else figured it was too depressing.
A part of me wanted to talk,
though. I had a lot to think about, and
it was hard keeping it inside. I’ve
always been one of those people who blurts out whatever I’m thinking. It’s a curse – diarrhea of the mouth, my dad
calls it. He’s the same way about some
things, louder and more opinionated than even I am, but in typical guy fashion,
he didn’t seem to want to talk about this either. I knew it was just because he was scared and
didn’t know how to express how he felt.
But he didn’t really have to; I knew.
I’ve always been a Daddy’s girl, closer to him than to my mom, and I
knew how hard it must have been for him to watch me, his “little girl,” go
through the kind of pain he was helpless to fix. Wasn’t like when I was little and would skin
a knee roller skating in the driveway or an elbow falling out of a tree. A kiss and a band-aid worked just fine then.
I wished a kiss could save me now.
During dinner, I sat across the table from
Kyle and his wife, Amber. They were so
cute together sometimes, it made me sick.
(Well, sicker.) Amber taught kindergarten, so she was all
sweetness and spunk, and together, she and my brother still acted like
newlyweds, even though they’d been married a few years. But really, I was happy for him; he’d done
well. My sister-in-law was a great
person, and I knew she would make one of those picture perfect mothers someday. There had been a few hints that she and Kyle
were thinking about trying for kids, though they didn’t seem to talk about it
too much around the whole family. I gave
Amber a good once-over every time I saw her, though, secretly watching for
signs of pregnancy – a certain glow, uncharacteristic moodiness, a slight pooch
that hadn’t been there before…
I couldn’t wait to have a little niece
or nephew.
As I watched them, thinking of romance
and family and babies, something other than hunger gnawed at my stomach. I wasn’t hungry anyway, not even for the
Christmas feast my mom had cooked. I
hadn’t been hungry in two days. I was
too filled up with worry. Worry and
confusion.
Chemo wasn’t the only treatment option
Dr. Rodrigo had offered me this time around, after she’d told me I had
relapsed. She had also mentioned a bone
marrow transplant, though she reserved this as a very last resort. “There’s a great deal more risk involved,”
she’d said, her dark eyes looking very serious, “and it can take six months to
a year to recover from. It’s much more
intense than chemo, but if another course of chemo doesn’t lower your blast
count significantly, it’s an option to be considered.”
That sounded reasonable to me, but
there was a catch. (Don’t you know? There’s always a catch.)
In order to work, Dr. Rodrigo had
explained to me, a bone marrow transplant required that my immune system be
wiped out with massive doses of radiation.
Radiation, from what I had heard, wasn’t like chemo in terms of side
effects – it didn’t make you puke or lose all of your hair or get canker sores
and weird tastes in your mouth. In
normal doses, it mostly just made you tired.
But in the quantity I would receive it before a transplant, it would do
worse than that.
It would make me sterile.
When she first used the word
“sterile,” I pictured the examining room I’d just been in – all stainless steel
and disposable gloves and reeking of antiseptic. Clean… pure.
Sterile. But, quickly, I
realized, with a sinking feeling, that she was using it in the other context,
the biological sense. Sterile was a
synonym for infertile. It meant I’d
never be able to conceive a baby.
That possibility hit me harder than
I’d expected it to. I was only
twenty-two and hadn’t had a serious relationship since high school, so marriage
and children weren’t really on my radar.
But they were both things I wanted, someday, when the time was right.
I just hadn’t counted on the fact that
when the right time came, it might already be too late for me.
“I wanna avoid the transplant if I
can,” I had told Dr. Rodrigo up-front. “I
mean, I really do want to have a baby someday…” But then I trailed off, feeling silly. This was my life I was talking about. If it turned out that I needed the
transplant, I would be stupid to not have it because I wanted to have a baby…
right? There were always other options…
adoption, for example.
But still, it bothered me more than I
wanted to admit, the whole fertility thing.
I had always seen myself as a mother someday. Like most little girls, I’d envisioned my
ideal family: the perfect husband, three
kids… a boy first and then two girls because, well, I wanted my daughters to
have a big brother, the way I’d had growing up, and I had always wanted a
sister myself. Hell, at one point in
time, I’d even owned one of those baby name books. Bought it in the checkout line at the Kash n’
Karry while stocking up on junk food for a sleepover with Dianna. I think we were about thirteen at the
time. We’d made long lists of the names
we liked for boys and girls, both first and middle, and drafted up imaginary
families with our top picks for kids and husbands. I probably still had my list somewhere,
written in my bubbly, teenage girl handwriting and shoved in a memory box with
the crumpled up notes Dianna had folded up into little triangles and passed to
me in class. I saved all kinds of stuff
like that, never knowing what I would want to put in a scrapbook someday.
It made me sad to think of my teenage
innocence and wonder if those fantasies had any remote chance of coming
true. Far from getting married and
starting a family, I was faced with the very real chance that I wouldn’t live
long enough to fall in love again.
For someone who had just reached the
age when people get married and start building their futures, the thought was
incredibly depressing. All of the plans
I did have had come screeching to a sudden halt, my life instantly frozen in
place, like a movie put on pause.
And there was more. More bad news, along with the good, for me to
process.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you
about,” Dr. Rodrigo replied to my comment about having babies. “If you do see yourself having children
someday, then there are some things you need to consider. You can start back on chemo first and hope
that it works, but it may not. At that
point, a bone marrow transplant would be your only chance for survival. There are measures you can take to preserve
some aspect of your fertility before having the treatment: you can have your eggs harvested and frozen,
then re-implanted into your womb in the future, through in-vitro
fertilization. Have you heard of that?”
I nodded; I knew it was what women who
had trouble conceiving had done. I
didn’t know much about it, though, and I’d never really thought I would need
to. No woman in my family, even in my
extended family, had ever had trouble getting pregnant – that I knew of,
anyway. I guess I had just taken it for
granted that it wouldn’t be an issue for me.
“I’ll do that then,” I said, thinking
that, if the time came, it would be better than just letting the radiation fry
my ovaries and not doing a damn thing about it.
But that’s where the real catch came.
“Then your best option would be to do
it sooner, rather than later. As you
know, chemo itself can interfere with your menstrual cycle and make you temporarily
infertile. If you wait too long, it
might make harvesting the eggs very difficult or even impossible.”
A sick feeling churned in my stomach
as I realized the logic of what she was saying.
The last time I’d done chemo, my period had stopped altogether. At the time, it had been kind of nice – the
last thing I’d wanted to do was deal with cramps and bleeding on top of all the
other physical crap I was going through.
I really hadn’t missed it, and it came back after I went into remission,
irregular at first, but I was back to a fairly normal cycle by now.
And chemo was going to screw it up all
over again. Maybe forever.
I sighed, and she put her hand lightly
on my shoulder, offering the kind of guarded sympathy doctors usually give,
which is pretty sterile in itself. She
didn’t really make me feel better, but I left her office that day with a
handful of pamphlets about fertility, egg harvesting, and in-vitro
fertilization and the name of a specialist I could call for a consultation.
I had plenty to think about, and, two
days later, I hadn’t made much headway.
But I needed to. I couldn’t afford to wait too long – I wanted
to start chemo as soon as possible, yet I had to wait until I figured out what
I wanted to do about the egg harvesting.
So much for a happy holiday.
***
January 2, 2003
The start of the new year found me
sitting with my mom in a consultation room at the Hillsborough Fertility and
Gynecology Clinic with Dr. Gwen Nevin.
Dr. Nevin was an embryologist, the
kind of doctor who specialized in fertility treatments. She had given me a quick exam, which, weirdly
enough, had been my first of the gynecological variety – not that it was a
memory I would treasure. Oh, no. Then she had brought me to this consultation
room, where she’d sat Mom and me down to talk about the options.
As it turned out, there weren’t as
many as I’d thought.
I had come in with the notion that
they could take out some of my eggs, freeze them, and thaw them out to
fertilize later, once I had a husband and was ready to have a baby. But, to my disappointment, it wasn’t that
easy.
“At this clinic, we don’t freeze
eggs. We freeze embryos,” Dr. Nevin explained, stressing the difference. “In-vitro fertilization using eggs that have
been frozen is still in the experimental stages, and unfortunately, the success
rate is very low. One day, I’m sure
we’ll have the technology and know-how to do it well, but at this point in
time, we just aren’t quite there yet.
We’ve had much higher levels of success using eggs which are fertilized
through IVF while they’re ‘fresh,’ so to say, and then cryogenically frozen as embryos. But, of course, to make an embryo, you need
sperm.”
Sperm. So basically, I needed a man.
“Are you in a serious relationship?”
was the doctor’s next question.
I don’t blush a whole lot because I
don’t let myself get easily embarrassed, but I blushed then. “No, not at all,” I answered truthfully.
“Then, if you’re serious about going
through with the procedure, you can use an anonymous sperm donor.” Dr. Nevin talked about the process of getting
a sperm donor for awhile, handing me more leaflets with information. I would be able to read profiles of the
donors from their sperm bank, she explained, without names or other identifying
information, of course, and pick the one I wanted to use.
It sounded interesting, but… quite
frankly, weird. In essence, I would be
picking my babies’ father from a pile of papers, without ever meeting him. I knew he wouldn’t be thought of as their father, per
se, because I didn’t plan to have a baby until I was married. My husband would be their father. But even so, this would be their father in
the biological sense, and that was weird.
My mom must have thought so, too,
because she asked a lot of questions. I
think it bothered her that I was having to go through this. She and my dad are both pretty hardcore
Catholics, and I was raised this way, and IVF isn’t exactly smiled upon by the
Church. But we’d had a long talk right
after Christmas, and when I had told her that I was pretty positive I wanted to
do this, she had been very supportive.
I knew deep down she just wanted to
have grandchildren someday. Biological
grandchildren. And she wanted me to
experience pregnancy and childbirth, the way she had twice. I didn’t blame her; I wanted that too. I knew I would adopt, if it came down to
that, but this seemed an option worth trying.
At this point, I had nothing to lose.
The first step was to settle on a
sperm donor. After that, Dr. Nevin said,
they would track my cycle and then start me on regimen of hormones that would
prepare my body for the egg harvesting.
All in all, it could take up to two months or more for the entire
process.
Two months before I could start my
cancer treatment.
It was a scary thought, waiting that
long, but the more I thought about it, the more I decided it was a risk worth
taking. I knew that if I didn’t do it
and ended up living through cancer, but losing my fertility, I would regret having
not tried. I had always been a risk-taker,
a daredevil, willing to bet against the odds.
It didn’t take me long to make up my
mind: I was going to go ahead with this.
I just needed some sperm.
***
January 6, 2003
Four days later, I’d made some headway
with the sperm donor profiles, but hadn’t decided on anything. I was still wrapping my mind around the whole
idea of it, and, in the meantime, I’d faced the heavy task of telling my
friends and coworkers about what was going on with me.
The other hygienists at my work had
been very sympathetic, and my boss, Dr. Somers, had been great. He’d given me a leave of absence from work,
telling me that I needed to take the time off to concentrate on getting healthy
again and assuring me that when I did, there would always be a place for me in
his office.
My friends had taken the news
harder. I went over to Dianna’s
apartment to tell her in person, as it seemed the only right way to do it –
after all, she’d been my best friend since middle school. She cried, almost reducing me to tears
myself, and clung to me as she hugged me, sobbing about how I was her best
friend in the entire world and she couldn’t believe this was happening to me
again. It was nice to have her to vent
to about how unfair the whole thing was because she was right there with
me. When she’d calmed down enough, I
told her about the IVF dilemma too.
“So… you get to pick your own baby
daddy?” she asked when I finished. The
innocent way she said “baby daddy” cracked me up, and suddenly, I felt a lot
better. Guess that’s the point of having
friends, right?
“Yeah,” I laughed.
“Hm… that’s pretty cool! How fun!
Do those profiles you have to look at include pictures by chance?” A playful light entered Dianna’s eyes, and I
knew just what she was thinking.
“Yes…” I said, and she beamed.
“Be sure to pick a hot one then! You wanna have cute babies!”
I laughed. She was right, but there were a lot of
factors to consider. The profiles listed
basic bits of information like the guys’ height and weight, but also more personal
things, such as their educational background, hobbies, and interests. Even though they were anonymous – no names
were included, just tracking numbers – there was a lot more to look at than I’d
realized, and I wasn’t sure what the “perfect” combination would look like to
me. I just hoped I would know it when I
saw it. I wanted to take my time with
it, figuring if I was going to pick some random guy to father my children, I at
least wanted a good one – someone smart, athletic, and… well, cute wouldn’t
hurt.
But I felt rushed. The clock was ticking, and I was still
picturing those cancer cells pouring out of my bone marrow with each passing
second. I couldn’t afford to waste too
much time making up my mind.
Dianna happily agreed to pore over the
donor registry with me; we made it our weekend project, looking through the
profiles all afternoon on Saturday.
By Monday afternoon, I hadn’t settled
on anyone yet, but I was feeling a little better about the whole thing. I could do this. I had to.
And then Jamie called.
I admit, his call threw me for a loop,
maybe more than it should have. My
stomach clenched when I saw his name flashing on my cell phone, and I knew that
he knew. See, I hadn’t exactly called
him myself to tell him that I had relapsed.
The first time around, I had worked up the guts to call all of my close
friends, who were scattered across the state of Florida at different colleges,
thinking I had no other choice. But for
some reason, the thought of doing that was even harder this time around, maybe
because it was somehow more devastating to relapse than to be diagnosed in the
first place.
You wouldn’t think that would be the
case, but it was. I think it’s because
the first time, once I’d gotten over the shock and slowly started to accept it,
I took on the attitude of “I can beat this” and “Die, leukemia bitch,
die.” Once I went into remission, even
though my greatest fear was still relapsing, I really had thought, deep down,
that I had succeeded, that I had beaten it and would be considered “cured” in
five years. The thought of going through
chemo and all of that shit a second time was worse than it had been the first
time because I knew what it was like. I
knew that it was every bit as awful as I’d feared it would be the first time,
and that I’d have to do it all over again.
And for what? There was no
promise of remission this time. The
chances of remission and survival are pretty high the first time, but they
plunge after a relapse. I knew the
statistics.
That’s what made it so much harder to
tell people this time. So I counted on
others to do it for me. I told Dianna,
my best friend from high school, counting on her love of gossip and drama to
spread the word for me. The only other
friend I called was Jenn, my best friend from college, who I expected to do the
same for the different circle of friends we shared.
I knew Dianna had called Jamie, but in
nearly a week since, I hadn’t heard from him.
He was living in Des Moines, Iowa now; he’d gotten a job up there right
out of college. So it wasn’t like I
expected him to just show up at my doorstep with a hug for me or anything, but
a call would have been nice. I
remembered his reaction the first time around, though, and it made me almost
nervous to talk to him now. But it
wasn’t like I was going to avoid him, so I punched the button to answer his
call and put the phone up to my ear.
“Hey, Jamie.”
I could always count on Jamie to reply
with a completely monotone “Hey.” Even
when we were dating, that was always how he had answered the phone – it was
something I had teased him about a lot, which was maybe why he always did it -
just to annoy me. We were just like that
with each other; I think people could tell that we had been friends before we’d
been a couple.
But he didn’t say “hey” this
time. All he said was, “Claire.”
I could hear his voice waver on my
name, and I knew for sure then that he definitely
knew. Probably he was upset, though he’d
try to hide it. Not very well though – I
could read him like a book, even over the phone.
“So I’m guessing you’ve talked to
Dianna?” For some reason, I smiled as I
asked the question, even though there was really no reason to smile.
I could hear Jamie release his breath
into the receiver. “Yeah…” He paused.
“I can’t believe this is happening to you again.”
“Yeah, I know, me neither. I was praying it would never come back,
but…” I trailed off, then quickly
changed my tune, trying to stay positive for him. “But… there are still plenty of options; I’m
still gonna beat this thing. I’ll be
okay.”
A few seconds of silence passed, as I
waited for Jamie to say something. I
wasn’t about to do all the talking –
he was supposed to do some reassuring or something of his own. That was
why he had called, wasn’t it?
As it turned out, it wasn’t. Not the only reason, anyway.
“Di said you were waiting to start
your treatment because you want to freeze your eggs,” Jamie spoke again
finally.
“Embryos,” I corrected him
automatically. “But yeah… I’m going to
freeze some embryos, ‘cause there’s a good chance I might end up sterile when
this is all said and done. I mean, it’s
not a sure thing, but… I want to do it, just in case. So I can still have babies of my own
someday.”
“And you need a sperm donor for that,
right?” asked Jamie, and I realized he was more informed than I had
thought. He and Dianna must have really
talked.
“Right...” I chuckled.
“I’ve been shopping for one of those – it’s totally weird, like, picking
out my future baby daddy.”
Jamie let out a stiff chuckle
too. “I bet. Actually, uh… I’ve been thinking, and… I’d
like to help you out with that.”
I blinked as his words sunk in, caught
off-guard. What a weird thing to
say. “What do you mean, help me out with
that?”
“Like…” Jamie hesitated before finally spitting it
out. “Being your donor.”
“My sperm donor?!” I choked, before I could hold it back. “You mean you wanna give me your sperm??”
Great, now I’ve got him all embarrassed, was my next thought, as Jamie went completely quiet. Good
going, Claire. I hadn’t even given
myself time to react, to actually think
about it, before I’d responded. It was
kind of a bad habit with me – remember that whole diarrhea of the mouth thing I
was talking about? Yeah, prime example
right there.
I tried to correct myself. “Sorry… I mean, are you serious, Jamie? You want to… donate?”
“Yeah,” he answered hoarsely, very
quiet. “I do.”
My mind reeled. My thoughts were going a million miles an
hour, but in the midst of them, I couldn’t help but think that this had to be
the weirdest phone conversation I’d had in my life – and I’d had quite a lot of
weird conversations. Here I was, talking
to my best guy friend, my ex-boyfriend, about donating his sperm to
artificially fertilize my eggs so that they could be frozen.
Any way you sliced it, that was just weird.
“Um, not to sound rude,” I said,
hoping to excuse any more oral spewage ahead of time, “but… can I ask why? I mean, you realize what that would mean,
right? If I used those embryos to have
children, you… you would be their father.
Biologically. But still… Is… is that what you want??”
“I wanna help you,” replied Jamie, his
voice firmer now. “That’s all I really
want. I owe you, for how I acted the
last time. I want it to be different
this time, and I figured, this is something I can do to make it different.”
I frowned. “Well, sure, but I don’t want your sperm as a charity gift, ‘cause you feel
sorry for me… or guilty… or whatever you’re feeling. Honestly, I think I’m better off just going
with an anonymous donor… less weirdness for all of us that way.”
“No, don’t think of it like that,”
Jamie interjected quickly. “Think of it
as… well, a gift… but not
charity. Just… a gift. With no strings attached. Just because I-… because you’re my friend.”
I guess it made sense that he would
want to do something meaningful to make up for how he had treated me before,
and this was definitely something meaningful, but… it was still weird, and I
couldn’t help but think how it could get complicated down the road. There was a reason for such a thing as an
anonymous sperm donor…
But I didn’t want to just blow him off
either, so I said, “Okay… well, can I think about it? I… I appreciate the gesture and all, but… I
really need some time to think on it.”
“Oh yeah, sure,” agreed Jamie. “Take all the time you need. Just… call me, whenever, and let me know what
you decide.”
“I will…”
Saying awkward goodbyes, we hung
up. But I didn’t put down the phone
right away. I sat with it in my hand,
staring through it, for what must have been close to twenty minutes, not
moving, just spacing out… thinking…
***
February 24, 2003
A month later, I was doing the same
thing, this time in the waiting room of the Hillsborough fertility clinic, with
a magazine on my lap and a lot on my mind.
This was it, the day I’d been waiting for after a month of constant
testing, hormone therapy, and a medication regimen that was supposed to kick my
ovaries into overdrive, urging them to make as many eggs as possible. My body was as ready as it was ever going to
be, and today was the day they would “harvest” the eggs from me, fertilize them
with sperm, and freeze them as embryos.
I’d spent the last few weeks on the
internet, reading the blogs of women who had gone through fertility treatments
like this. Their mere words gushed with
the worries, the hopes, the fears, and the excitement of this moment, this day,
when the waiting was over and they could finally begin. But for me, there was no excitement.
Worry?
Fear? Of course. Let me tell you, having cancer does not make
you immune to the anxiety that goes along with having a medical procedure done. I may have built up more of a tolerance to
needles and pain than I used to have, but trust me, it never gets
pleasant. At best, it’s only what I said
– tolerable.
But excitement? No. I
knew I was doing the right thing for myself, for my future, but everything
about it felt wrong. Babies aren’t
supposed to be created in a lab; they’re supposed to be conceived out of
love. That’s what I had been taught, and
that’s what I believed, yet there I was, waiting to have my eggs sucked out of
me and infused with the sperm of a man I had once loved, but no longer
trusted. Jamie Turner had broken my
heart… and I was about to let him father my children?
But no one at the fertility clinic
referred to them as “children” there, or even “babies.” They were embryos. Not even fetuses, but embryos, tiny clusters
of cells too small to be seen without a microscope. They seemed insignificant when described that
way, and it was weird to think that a little blob of cells could be frozen and
stored away, like a fudgesicle forgotten in the back of the freezer, only to be
thawed out later and grown into living, breathing human babies. My
babies. And that made them not
insignificant at all.
It was a huge decision I had made, and
in the emotional cyclone of the last two months, even I didn’t fully comprehend
the impact it would have on my life. It
was like a whole part of me had gone numb, as numb as I’d be when they knocked
me out and stuck a needle up me to suck out the eggs. (Lovely image, right?)
I was so numb already that, at first,
I didn’t feel Jamie’s hand on my leg.
When I glanced down and noticed it there, I looked over and found him
smiling at me. A crooked, nervous smile. “Are you scared?” he asked.
“I wasn’t until you asked,” I
retorted, poking my tongue between my teeth.
Truth be told, I wasn’t really scared about the procedure… I’d be asleep
for it, so it would be painless. I was
more afraid of whether or not I was doing the right thing, making the best
decision. But I wasn’t going to tell
Jamie that. He was doing me this huge
favor, something I’d never expected him to do; I didn’t want him to know how
many doubts I had about the part he was playing in all of this.
He smiled more genuinely and patted my
hand, which I realized was cold once I felt how warm his hand was in
comparison. “Don’t worry. Everything will be fine,” he said, in his
lame way of trying to reassure me. I
hated when people told me that, as if they were psychic and just knew it.
“Psh, yeah, easy for you to say,” I
scoffed. “All you have to do is jack off
into a cup. Same thing you do every day,
minus the cup. What do you have to worry
about?”
Jamie’s face got red, and he looked
around to see if any of the other people in the waiting room had heard me. It was the same thing my mother would do; I
guess I have a habit of embarrassing people in public. I have no filter.
At least my mom wasn’t there with us
that day. She had wanted to come, but
for whatever reason, I’d decided this was something I needed to do alone. Well, with the exception of Jamie. I’d let him come because, well, he had to
give his sperm sample at some point anyway… why not today? At least it’d be good and fresh when it swam
into my eggs.
And that was the image swimming in my
mind when the nurse came and called us both back. Jamie was escorted off to do his business,
and I was taken to a different room, to change into a thin gown and lie my bare
ass down on a freezing cold table while I waited to be knocked out and raped by
a syringe.
There should have been a million
thoughts and feelings racing through me at that point, but instead, I continued
to feel numb, like it was I who was frozen.
And I wished I was. I wished I
could shout “Freeze!” and everything
would be frozen, just stand still so that I could catch my breath. But it was no use. I was in a race against time, against death,
and there was no chance to pause. That
day, I would freeze the only thing I could:
a few microscopic blobs of hope for my future.