Issue 22: We need progress!

Saturday November 10 2018

We’ve spent an inappropriately annoying amount of time trying and failing to understand how insurance works in America. Annual deductibles? Anyone? It’s the amount you pay each plan year before the . . . Anyone? Anyone? Before the insurance company starts paying its share of the costs. Anyone? Nope, us neither.

We reach out to our agency to help to decipher the US code, but the responses are almost as confusing.

One thing they are keen for us to understand in detail, though, is WhatsApp.

“Oh, it’s this cool thing where you can talk to each other across the Pond, but using wifi so you don’t have to pay!”

Oh yes, we have that here.

“So, you two and Melissa and Chad can start a group and all chat any time you want, it’s just a little app on your phone here.”

Yes, thank you, we actually have that here.

“OK great, so you can go ahead and chat without us now. So, off you go!”

And off we go. First things first: what is this group going to be called? Mr B has a penchant for nicknames, and naming WhatsApp groups. He spends an inappropriately annoying amount of time debating this with me.

“Project Oven. Is that offensive?”

I nod.

“Three Adults and a Baby?”

I roll my eyes.

Me: “Other Mother?” He’s immediately outraged: “What her or you?” I point to myself. “You’re not the other mother. You’re the f***ing mother!” This is harder than naming a baby.

Shall we just go back to Project Oven? Yeah.

Googles image of bun in oven to stick in chat icon. Done.

Taking our conversation away from the agency is a bit like leaving a dating-site platform and progressing to social media. You get more of a real feel about each other. You’re not constrained by the parameters of the digital-mating call, or in this case of “surrogate logistics”. Still, we mostly talk about surrogate logistics. First order of business, Melissa is off to Miami to have her medical, whereby Dr Fernando will take a look at her uterus using a tiny camera to make sure it’s healthy and “normal”, as well as the blood tests and whatever else is medically necessary to move forward. Ahh, I like that f-word.

Except the only appointment Dr Fernando has is more than a month away. Hang on a second. I am definitely at a below-WhatsApp-level of comprehension when it comes to the American medical system. I get the basics: it’s very expensive, you have to have insurance or you’re screwed, as such it’s more like private care versus the NHS, except in that case how come the waiting time is longer than The Lord Of The Rings (ie waaay too long) ?

Maybe it’s just my British ignorance and this is standard, so I ask some American friends how long they usually have to wait to see a doctor back home. It’s about two days, apparently. “Be patient,” I tell myself, and Mr B when he finds out too and his face goes puce. Only patient is really what I have been, this whole time. Again, this isn’t what my timeline was supposed to look like. I know I shouldn’t, but it’s hard to think — as I do very often — that had things gone right with my own IVF treatment, I’d have a one-year-old child by now.

That first miscarriage would now be a six-month-old baby. Stupid, torturous thoughts that don’t do anyone any good, but it’s difficult to escape them. I need some positive progression! I need to see some light at the end of this tunnel. At the moment it’s the Blackwall Tunnel in peak rush hour when you need a pee. Endless, crawling and actually getting quite painful now, actually.

Melissa pops up on the Project Oven group to let us know she went a month without hearing anything from anyone, and the extra month after that for the medical seemed a long way off (tell me about it), but suddenly she has an appointment next week.

Whoop! Progress! The gods must be smiling. I look up from my phone screen and see that Mr B is smiling too. Slyly and knowingly, in fact. He scrolls a bit and chucks his phone at me to read. The man has somehow bypassed and surpassed the surrogacy agents, the clinical staff, the nurses and co-ordinators and badgered Dr Fernando himself into bumping us up the priority list. He can be persuasive can our Mr B. Some might say belligerent, some might say aggressively determined, I say bloody brilliant.

Thanks to some super-sweet-talking, we’ve beaten the system and shaved a month off our timeline. Every little helps, and Mr B helps to the point where I wonder if we ever needed an agency in the first place. It’s a full-time job on top of our full-time jobs, but his hard work is allowing me to be on emotional sabbatical. Before I know it, Melissa’s plane is booked, her hotel room held, and we will soon know if we can get through this interminable red light and move forward. Sweet, peeing-after-holding-it-through-the-Blackwall-Tunnel relief.