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.
