Six months later, I was pregnant again. This time, though, I was tired and anxious and had trouble sleeping. I felt sicker than I ever had with my two previous full-term pregnancies. I was convinced that something was terribly wrong. And I was not excited about being pregnant. I lay awake at night wondering why I was tempting fate at my age (now 39). I had two healthy children. Why was I rocking the boat? What if my selfish desire for a third child left us with anything less than a perfectly healthy baby? How would that affect the healthy, beautiful children I already had? Not to mention my marriage. Could it stand the stress of an imperfect child? Would my husband blame me for forever altering what we had previously had? This is what kept me up at night.
While my husband was on a week-long business trip, I suffered a horrendous 72-hour bout of insomnia. I was a mess. Weak, nauseous, and out of my mind with sleep-deprivation and stress. I called my mother-in-law at 7:00 a.m. after the third sleepless night and that angel from Florida was at my door by 10:00 that night. For 6 days she cooked, watched my children and made me get out of bed whether I had slept or not. She listened to my rants of regret and fear. I got some strength back and began to feel better emotionally. By the time my husband got home, and I was nearing the end of my first trimester, the morning sickness was subsiding. I was sleeping a bit better and feeling more positive about the pregnancy. I still had worries and restless nights, but I was much better.
I chose to have CVS (chorionic villus sampling) testing rather than the slightly less risky amniocentesis so that if something was wrong, I could choose to terminate the pregnancy before I was showing and feeling fetal movement. The night before the procedure was not a good night for me, and as is often the case when one is tired, I was feeling anxious and agitated. While in the waiting room the next morning, I said to Kevin, “If something turns out to be wrong with the baby, I am out of here. I need to get away.” The CVS went smoothly and I was sent home. Results would come in exactly one week. The genetic counselor had told us that if something was wrong, she always called in the evening, so patients would be less likely to be alone when given sad news.
I felt really good that week. I had worked most of the anxiety out of my system and was eating and sleeping. I was on my way to having a baby! I had spent no time celebrating this pregnancy and now I was ready to! I went for an OB check-up six days after my CVS, so I had just one more day until I would know if I was carrying a boy or a girl. I heard my baby’s heartbeat for the first time and it made me cry with relief. Alison said, “You’re on your way!” She later told me she found my response odd. I answered, “Yes, if the baby doesn’t have Down’s, and I’ll find out tomorrow.”
The next day the phone rang and the caller I.D. showed it was the hospital. Delighted with the ramifications of a daytime call, I answered the phone, “Is it a boy or a girl?” The counselor said, “I’m sorry, but I have bad news.” “But it’s daytime,” I said. She explained that she’d already spoken to Alison, who knew that I would terminate a Down’s Syndrome pregnancy, and that they’d tried to make everything easier for me by scheduling my D & E for the next day so I wouldn’t have to make any arrangements myself. That’s why they were calling during the day. I needed to go to the doctor’s office for a pre-operative check-up in two hours.
I put down the phone, sobbing. I couldn’t reach anybody. Not my husband, my mother, or any of my friends. One thing was for certain. I was in no condition to drive myself to the doctor’s. I left a message with Michele’s husband and shut myself into my daughter’s room with a telephone, because there was a rocking chair in there and I couldn’t sit still. I was still crying when Michele ran into the room an hour later. She, too, was crying. I was so sad for my baby, who would never know a healthy life, for my family for the roller coaster I had put them on, and for my husband, who had been swayed mostly by his love for me to agree to this third child.
At the pre-op appointment, my least favorite doctor in a practice of three was to do my D&E, so I had to meet with him. He had the empathy and warmth of petrified wood. I felt ridiculous crying across from his desk as he calmly explained the procedure to me. I told him I wanted to see my baby after it was over. He told me it wasn’t really a baby. I said, “Yes it is. It has a head and a body and arms and legs.”
“Not when I’m done with it,” he answered. I hated him immediately.
A few days later it was Valentine’s Day. Kevin and I went to a famous and beautiful restaurant for dinner. We had had these reservations for weeks. I would soon be leaving for Puerto Rico for 10 days to visit a dear friend, Julie, from those carefree days when my family had lived there for 18 months. I asked Kevin at dinner if we could try again and he said no, even as he watched his answer make me cry. I was surprised I wanted to try again after the anxiety of the pregnancy, and I know it sounds trite, but there was a tiny flame still inside of me.
Puerto Rico did wonders for me. I was laughing with Julie and her family immediately. Puerto Rico was a place where I had spent one of the happiest periods of my adult life, and the weather was like a balm, as well. Being in Puerto Rico lifted me out of the misery of the pregnancy and the horrid winter weather that had exacerbated it, and gently set me down into tranquility and even joy. When I returned to New Jersey, I resumed mourning, but it was much less intense than it would have been had I stayed in a depressing northeastern February.
Life returned to normal. I was now 39 and my husband was 42. Neither of us pursued any birth control options and we gradually fell into trying again. My new deadline was 40. I would not try to get pregnant after I turned 40 in December. Kevin agreed to the new terms, probably thinking I wouldn’t conceive by then.
But I did. Because of my history, my doctor wanted me to have my Hcg (pregnancy hormones) checked. This is an excruciating practice that should be banned. If your numbers are good (rising steadily), fine. But if they’re not, there’s nothing that can be done. So why put women through this? The numbers are supposed to double every day in a healthy pregnancy. Since I knew the exact date of my last period, Alison had a pretty accurate idea of the range my hormones should have been in. Mine were low, but not quite low enough to completely rule out the pregnancy. So I had to return for another blood test and another Chinese-water-torture-like S-L-O-W 24 hours of waiting to see if the numbers doubled. They didn’t. Not only did they not double, they decreased. Bye-bye, pregnancy number three. I turned 40 and my time was up.
You might think I was a miserable person through all of this, but I wasn’t. I am naturally upbeat and yes, I was sad and negative and very, very angry for a period after each loss, but once my hormones returned to normal, usually in about 6 to 8 weeks, I felt like myself again. And even while waiting for my body to right itself, I laughed, worked, got together with friends, went out to dinner, enjoyed my family (most of the time), and pretty much lived my life.
My poor husband, though. I said I wanted to try just one more time, this time with the help of a fertility specialist. I argued that I couldn’t ditch trying until I had exhausted all of my options. I didn’t want to do anything too heavy, like in-vitro fertilization. As much as I longed for another baby, I did NOT want twins. It would have shifted too much attention away from my existing two children, as well as being too much of a financial burden. Putting twins through college when my husband would otherwise have been winding down his career would have been cruel.
It was taking me increasingly longer and longer to conceive, and with my 40th birthday behind me, I didn’t have the luxury of taking my time. The fertility doctor read through my history and promised she’d get me pregnant. She would spin my husband’s sperm, making it super-aggressive, and then turkey-baste me at the optimum time during ovulation. With my ability to conceive, along with some nice self-administered injections for a month prior to artificial insemination, I’d have a nice crop of eggs (scary!) and be pregnant lickety-split.
I woke up the morning of my first injection very excited. I kept the drugs in the basement refrigerator so the kids wouldn’t touch them or see me giving myself a needle (which didn’t hurt at all). I felt like I wasn’t just injecting myself with a drug, but with an actual pregnancy, so great were my expectations. Finally, my body was going to have some much-needed help. I went to bed that night (alone, Kevin was on an extended business trip) and had a thought that gave me a surge of anxiety. What if I not only got pregnant, but got pregnant with Down Syndrome twins? I never fell asleep that night and went on to lose 4 lbs. off my already slight frame from worrying.
But I didn’t need to. My body didn’t produce any eggs. My doctor had been very conservative with the drugs because of my desire for a single fetus. I needed to get one normal period before we could try again, and by that time, I had worked through my fears and was ready for round two, my final round. That was my limit because I didn’t want to mess too much with drugs that could have health risks later on if they were used too much.
I produced 4 eggs the next time. I put the fear of twins out of my mind. I would deal with that if it happened (deal with it mentally, NOT by selective reduction). I was told the odds for conception were pretty slim with only four eggs. Pretty slim, indeed. I failed to conceive even one. Instead, I was pregnant just three months later on my own, but I miscarried at six weeks after another nasty game of count-the-hormones.
Luckily, I had recently been hired as a children’s librarian at a local public library, so being busy with something I loved doing helped me get over the latest loss more quickly usual. And it was clear that my “40-year-old deadline” was meaningless. I wanted a baby, and the more that was denied me, the more I wanted one. By this time, I wanted to right four wrongs, end on a positive note, reward my family, not just my nuclear one, but all the grandparents, with a healthy baby for all our combined pain. It wasn’t something that I remember discussing with my husband. It just was. It was like the big white elephant that was always with me. Me and my infertility. Me and my quest for a third child.
I was 41 when I found out I had conceived for the fifth time since going off of birth control. I don’t remember much about the early pregnancy. Maybe because I had something else big going on in my life. I was co-writing a Holocaust memoir with a survivor and we were about to go to Poland together. And I would be eleven weeks pregnant during this emotional trip, if I didn’t miscarry first. The Hcg numbers game went well. Morning sickness soon followed. It appeared that I had a healthy pregnancy. Alison and I scheduled my CVS test for within a few days of my return from Poland with the doctor who had given me my first CVS.
The first CVS had been relatively painless because the doctor had been able to administer it vaginally due to the position of the baby. The second time, though, the needle had to be administered through my abdomen and it was incredibly painful. I didn’t move an inch and held my breath during the entire procedure. When it was over, the doctor kissed my cheek because I had done so well, and probably for luck, too, given my history. I drove myself home and went on with my day. I was expecting good news and I finally got it. I was carrying a healthy girl. I called Kevin who was in Thailand on a business trip, my parents, my sister, and then ran out of the house to tell my next-door-neighbor, Doren. The next day, my mother, who lives by the edict don’t catch your chickens before they’ve hatched, came to take me shopping for maternity clothes at a fancy boutique nearby. My daughter came with us. She asked, “How do you know you’re not going to lose the baby?” I told her my problem was losing babies early or having healthy babies, and that I was way past the point of my miscarriages, and that her future sister was indeed healthy. Two days later I went to Alison for a routine check-up. There was no heartbeat...
The final installment of Robin’s story will be posted next month. Again we invite you to comment below.
