Issue 27: So much red tape

Saturday December 15 2018

The lion’s share of this process is the struggle to get things moving. I’ve talked about it before, but the worse it gets, the more I think it must be akin to those couples desperate to start their family, but failing to get pregnant every month. Only we have that, but with loads of other snail-paced participants involved.

I purposefully haven’t gone into the logistical details too deeply, for fear it might be as boring to read as it is trying to push them through, but let’s just say it’s a full-time job and Mr B is default project manager. He is excellent at logistics. I am more creative. Which presents as emotional and scatterbrained. Let’s hear it again for Mr B.

The next step in this dance is legal clearance — yes, another legal clearance, this time for the actual surrogacy, (the last contract we signed was for the donor eggs) — so we can get on to the actual medical protocol. More lawyers! More contracts! More time and chasing and scary clauses and scenarios I don’t want to think about right now. So I won’t.

We (he) emails several different parties daily to hurry things up. Our US lawyer lets us know she has the draft contract but is in a long meeting Monday to Thursday — what the hell kind of a meeting is that?! — but goes on to say: “If there are no substantive changes it should be fine to move it along quickly.” Quickly! That’s what we need to hear.

Mr B comes back: “At this stage you could have a clause that I have to sit in a bathtub with Trump and I’d sign it.” (Not the most responsible legal advice, please don’t take it).

Lawyer: “Please pace yourself on the read-through — some of the things you have to contemplate are not fun. For the future I would prefer not to visualise Trump in any body of water please. Have a good weekend.” I like this woman.

We laid out what would would happen in the event of both of our deaths (appoint a default friend-parent), miscarriage (we pay compensation), twins (we pay a bonus). We signed it, we had a great weekend.

What’s next? Bring it! Let’s go! Only, oh, it’s more waiting; this time to receive a “timeline” from the doctor, whom we now fondly refer to as Dr Fernandslow, for when our surrogate, Melissa, can have her embryo transfer. This will be the pivotal, monumental, life-changing, life-creating, life-affirming moment (you get it, right? It’s big) where we hold our breath and hope like we’ve never hoped before.

It requires its own schedule because it takes some serious medical prep to get to that monumoment (on top of the Millennium Force rollercoaster that brought us here of course).

So, the process of transferring an embryo: let me break it down, because I have extreme personal experience and a close network of confused friends and relatives who struggle to grasp how a uterus works.

If we were lucky enough to be taking the conventional route, my whole being would be busy preparing itself every month to grow a baby — the lining of my uterus would be thickening in preparation for the eagerly awaited meeting and embedding of egg and sperm(s) and here is my best analogy:

A couple, who by the way just met outside, are doing a viewing to buy your house, starting with the living room. So you plump your sofa cushions to look the most new and inviting it is possible to look. So that not only do this couple (whom we’ll call the Pembryos) want to buy your house, they want to sit down and put the fire on and basically move in immediately. If you leave the sofa in its Netflix-binge flattened form, the Pembryos won’t embed in your lining, sorry, your sofa. In fact, they’ll decide they don’t even want to stay together and you get a period and try again next month. It’s a woman’s functional birthright, but mine was renounced by bloody chemotherapy, so, back to the allopathic drawing board.

The assisted conception route basically brings in an estate agent to plump your cushions for you. While I was having donor egg IVF, mine was called Mr Hiyer and had an office just off Harley Street. I should add that NHS-funded IVF does not apply to patients requiring donors. We had to pay for the whole thing.

The schedule works backwards from the embryo transfer date, and it would take about three weeks to thicken my uterus with the supplemental oestrogen cocktail Mr Hiyer prescribes. I’d be injecting myself, having scans to measure it, eating teff grains and swerving alcohol in a misguided effort to make my house as inviting as possible (clearly it wasn’t, though. My theory now is that no one likes a worthy, dry-as-toast host). Then, when it’s at optimum thickness, off you go to a surgical suite and lie back and pray to a god you don’t think exists while the embryo is put back in.

It’s amazing, actually, that very precise art of depositing this tiny, precious potential life in exactly the right place to give it the best chance of embedding. Of becoming. Afterwards you look at a screen while the doctor does an ultrasound and the embryo appears for a moment like a tiny ball of white light inside your womb. I’ll never forget that feeling, as though I was special and important and something bigger than just me. I cried and shuffled out of the theatre with my thighs squeezed together as if that would help keep it in. I uncharacteristically rubbed crystals and tried to meditate and didn’t wee for about two hours, even though I was desperate. Then I got in a cab to the airport and worried all the way home that the cabin pressure in the plane would do some damage.

That, times five, never gets old, but, boy, does it get heartbreaking.

This time, it isn’t about me. Melissa’s schedule has come through and it’s AGES AWAY. Jane, our co-ordinator at the agency, first got in touch to say it would be early next month. “Hooray! Bet you’re excited!”

Melissa got in touch and said she was told it would be late next month. “Oh my gosh. I’m so excited.” Then the doctors got in touch and said it would be in three months’ time. “WTF?” (That last one was us). Then, frustratingly, Jane emailed again as if nothing had happened and said: “Amazing news! Transfer is planned for three months, hooray! Bet you’re excited!”

Actually we were a bit infuriated all of a sudden. We’ve been waiting forever for this to happen. We’ve had knockbacks and setbacks and admin errors and financial woes and communication breakdowns and spreadsheets coming out of our earholes. This could feasibly take three weeks, so why is it three months? Because Mr B hadn’t got involved yet, that’s why.

Somehow he got Dr Fernandslow on a call. (I witnessed it, he basically battered the proverbial door down via belligerent emails.) He wanted a chance to speak to him, reason with him, put our case forward. Time is and has been our enemy in this whole process. We don’t want to waste any more of it.

Turns out Mr B could have a prosperous career in either arguing law or telesales should his day job not work out. By the end of the phone call that three-month sentence had been reduced on appeal for good persuasive behaviour. We have our embryo transfer date and it is four short weeks away. Thank that ambiguous god for Mr B.