Issue 31: Something is wrong
Saturday January 12 2019
Something is wrong. Mr B and I had a good half a day of hopeful joy between one morning on the sofa when I said, “Oh my god, Melissa is going to have her embryo transfer a week today,” and that afternoon when I get a disgruntled WhatsApp message from Melissa saying: “Something is wrong.” That’s a 10lb stone in the stomach I could have done without.
Melissa went in for her penultimate ultrasound before the scheduled transfer. At this stage it’s to measure the thickness of her uterus and make sure the levels of medications are correct and the measurements are on track. I’m not sure exactly how they do it in the US, but in my scan experience it’s a neither unpleasant nor pleasant 15 minutes lying in an undignified position that is forgotten once you see an awesome image of your insides on a screen next to you.
What the hell I was looking at I couldn’t tell you, so I searched my doctor’s face instead. Warm smile equals everything’s good. “See, look here. That’s your left ovary, all nice and quiet.” Oh yes, I see. (I didn’t see.) “And your lining is 6cm. That’s great, see?’ Mmm hmm. (Still just a grey haze with some streaky lines.)
Eventual heartbreak aside, I love that I have this extensive frame of reference. My experience means I can empathise with Melissa and her appointments and benchmarks — to a point, obviously — but it helps me to feel connected, helps me to feel helpful, and so I go back and remember them often.
My point here is that within that 15 minutes I knew what was what with my womb.
Melissa went in for her scan at 8am (amid a flurry of “Yey! Let’s do this!” messages pinged across the Pond). At 4pm we still know nothing. Silence is not golden in this scenario. It’s more black. Flat, bad-feeling black.
We chase and chase the clinic, the agency, the clinic again, but it’s not until the next morning that we get an email from Jane, our surrogacy agency co-ordinator, saying that “Melissa’s appointment showed some fluid in her uterine cavity. Dr Fernando is requesting another ultrasound in two days.” What does this mean? The subsequent email from the doctors’ clinic was equally lacking in information. What the holy hell does this even mean?
Melissa is furious: “I think I deserve to have things explained to me.”
As do we, but an explanation is not forthcoming. I empathise with her, and I also viscerally need to know WHAT IS THIS? We have our precious embryo transfer booked for next week. I’m not exaggerating when I say it feels as though it has taken a lifetime to get to this point. Melissa is fragile and angry and needs to understand what “fluid in the cavity” means for our prognosis too. Why, in this precarious particular scenario, would a diagnosis not come with an explanation?
I know exactly what not to do. Don’t google it, don’t google it, don’t google . . . Oh damn, I googled it. It is my one rule in life apart from never to get in a helicopter: avoid being an internet medical detective at all costs. It is a dark and persuasive place that tells me fluid on the uterus means game over. Most likely due to excessive scarring from a caesarean, of which Melissa has had two. At least it doesn’t say “cancer”, because everything can be linked to cancer on the internet. “Microwave popcorn causes cancer”; “laughing too hard causes cancer”; “laughing too hard is a symptom of cancer”. (It isn’t; it’s a symptom of joy, which is something I’m lacking right now.)
As a cancer survivor, I keep myself and my fearful mind away from the thing, but in lieu of any tangible information and an anxious surrogate on my hands, I have no choice. I googled and googled until I found something with a positive spin that I could send to Melissa. “Many women will have some amount of fluid in the uterus due to normal bodily secretions, and it is not always a cause for concern. It is when the fluids continue to be retained or appear in larger amounts that it becomes a problem for IVF procedures.”
Our co-ordinator Jane tells us she is trying to get more information from the doctor, but the fluid needs to have dispersed or lessened by the time Melissa goes for a repeat scan in two days. That’s 48 hours of worry and irrational overthinking scheduled into my diary, then. How about you, anything nice planned?
So, an interminably long 48 hours later, we wait for yet more scan results. I’ve conditioned myself to feel more optimistic after my incessant googling. It’s like scratching an itch. Every time I close my laptop I think of a different way to phrase the search that might bring up more hopeful results, so I open it up again and, lo, maybe just maybe, it’s because she had been scanned in a funny position. Or had a cold. At least I had something to do to pass the anxious time, eh? I stumbled across various surrogacy forums with chat ranging from “I had the same thing and everything resolved by the time we went to transfer”, to “the progesterone dried mine right up”. Mr B, on the other hand, is cautious and despondent. I don’t know whom it’s emotionally safer to side with.
Ping! You have a WhatsApp message. It’s Melissa — gulp — coming on the chat to report on the scan she has just had and tell us how awful she has found the past two days. And then . . . “Well, the fluid is still there, so we’ll see what Dr Y says.”
I feel I already know what Dr Y will say, and it doesn’t feel good.
Mr B keeps sending Melissa WhatsApp messages saying that it will all work out, to try to get some sleep and to keep her chin up. “It’s just a little bit of fluid. It’ll go away and everything will be fine.” Then he turns to me and says the same thing, but out loud and in real life this time, to my back, because I’m curled in the foetal position, convinced I’m a talisman of bad luck and so of course this spells disaster.
Ever the fixer, Mr B gets Dr Y on Skype straight away so we can speak in person and try to understand what the hell is going on, what happens next. He only makes himself available this easily when the shit hits the fan, and we slump over the screen, barely able to look him in the eye.
But then, miraculously, he doesn’t say that we need to give up. Instead, if we all move fast and book tickets for Melissa and Chad to fly to Miami tomorrow, he can change his plans and come in at the weekend to remove the fluid. We have a chance. A back-from-the-brink option that would only push the embryo transfer date back by two days. “I’m confident I can remove the fluid,” Dr Y says. “There’s typically an 80 per cent success rate.”
Melissa, miraculously, manages to move her plans around too so she can be there, and once the tickets have been booked we go to bed with hope in our hearts again.
Only . . . I’d read another bit at the end of that more hopeful surrogacy fluid article that I didn’t share with Mr B or Melissa so at least they could get some sleep. I know it starts with “on rare occasions”, but I’m a worrier and I hang on to the bad news. “On rare occasions doctors will be unable to determine the cause of the fluid or unable to stop it from recurring. If this is the case it may be recommended that you not proceed as a surrogate.”
I can’t get it out of my head, along with, “Is it me? Am I a bad-luck omen?” I bloody hope not.