Issue 34: Someone pressed pause

Saturday February 02 2019

I made a pregnant woman cry this week. It’s not my proudest moment, but, in my defence, I was crying too. We’ll get to that. Nothing huge has happened. No big milestone gone wrong, but it’s the nothing that is stressful. And then the accumulative stress becomes such that I’m not even able to comfort Mr B when he cries one night because it’s feeling like a bit of a nightmare, rather than the dream we were aiming for. I think it’s because I need comfort as much as I need to give it, and that has caused some kind of stare-into-space emotional malfunction.

Waiting for I-don’t-know-what is the worst kind of waiting. What are we supposed to do? The doctor has somewhat dashed our hopes of it working out with our surrogate Melissa. Our emotions have packed up and left the building, and I’m numb. We’re in a holding pattern. Melissa is midway through another cycle of IVF meds and her scan to find out whether the fluid in her uterus has returned. If it has, it’s game over. Maybe because of that small window — it might all work out — we don’t freak out just yet, but we know we could lose it very soon, and that is not a good place to be.

Annoyingly there’s nothing to latch on to in the meantime. No news. No word from Melissa, no word from the agency, no knowing what word we’re waiting for, but knowing we need something to help us to get through this uncomfortable anticipation.

I recognise that I’m teetering on the edge of full-blown panic. My mind wanders and soon starts to stray into the forbidden zone: “This isn’t going to happen for you. You’ve already gone 100 per cent over budget and you haven’t even started yet.” I suppress the creeping anxiety by pretending that every day that goes past with no news and mounting costs is happening on a Monopoly board, rather than in our bank account. If I don’t dwell on it, is it really happening? (Did I mention I have a degree in philosophy? I’ve never used it until now.)

I need to be proactive so I call Jane, our (pregnant surrogate) surrogacy co-ordinator. I want to find out what happens next, logistically — as per Dr Fernando’s advice to start the search for another surrogate while we see if it can still work out with Melissa. But I’m also looking for some expert advice and/or comfort. And, yes, I am cross because I think this should be offered, rather than chased. By now I am so well practised and relentless at chasing, I could probably catch Usain Bolt (if he were hungover).

I start off fuming, because I am at a loss how to emote. And I am cross, but more with the fact that I’m in this situation. I’m cross with my cancer diagnosis, and every day since that has culminated in stupid today, eight years later. I’m not cross with Jane per se, but she is my contact, she represents the American arm of this maddening situation, the one that is so frustratingly far away that I can’t deal with it. Poor, pregnant Jane with raging hormones that I trigger by bawling down the phone.

She sounds nervous — this could have something to do with all the panicked emails we’ve been writing where we’ve asked them to please, please, we beg of you please, start looking for a new surrogate because the odds are absolutely not in our favour and we cannot face being right back to square one this far down the line. Again.

I’m worried that Melissa has changed her mind: she doesn’t want to do this any more, but she’s afraid to tell us. Fair enough. To be expected, even, but could she . . . therefore, um, be, well, sabotaging the cycle? She could, couldn’t she? To get out of the contract, just not take the medicine so it looks like . . .

Jane butts in: she has spoken to Melissa and she is fine. And even if she wanted to call the whole thing off, she wouldn’t need to go to such extreme lengths. The contract only comes into effect once an embryo is transferred. This is drop-my-coffee news to me. Until then we’re floating along, untethered, burning through our funds fuel to keep the balloon in the air.

Jane admits that Melissa’s behaviour is off. “Well, yes, it’s not good and it’s not fair. I’m so sorry, this is absolutely not how we would expect a surrogate to act.” How can we make this better? Who can help us? “Sorry” is an emotional full stop. It doesn’t suggest action, solution, advice. But we worry about complaining: it doesn’t feel right in this scenario. That will be down to the emotional investment, the fear of falling down the priorities list because the agency doesn’t like us any more. And it is contributing to this twisted anxiety.

I explain that we just feel lost, abandoned, frustrated and, for the first time, unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It is so surreal that our destiny is in the hands of a collective of people on the other side of the Atlantic that we know nothing about. How can they care as much as we do?

My voice cracks and I let go. Poor Jane catches the brunt of eight years of frustration. The Hoover dam of balling that culminates in: “Jane, this is the worst I think I’ve ever felt in my life, and I’ve had cancer.”

This isn’t true of course. A cancer diagnosis is the worst. Two miscarriages felt nearly as bad at the time, but that’s the thing: any time you’re in pain, in that moment it always feels catastrophic. Humans are designed to suppress a previous pain memory. It’s how people overcome tragedy. How women go through more than one childbirth, surely. But I digress.

Jane is horrified by how upset I am and then admits, through her own tears, that she would feel the same way in my position. She tells me that she has heard of cases where surrogates have had fluid in the uterus — which we now refer to as Lake Michigan — and gone on to have healthy pregnancies. She tells me our journey is not the norm, confirms that, yes, we have had more bumps than most (if you’ll pardon the pun), but she has absolute faith that Melissa’s next ultrasound will show zero fluid and our miracle will come to us.

I know she happens to believe in and take great comfort from faith and miracles. But me? Not so much.

Once I’ve put the phone down it occurs to me that IVF is as much of a gamble as roulette, it’s just disguised in white lab coats and powered by a desperate dream rather than whisky sours and trying to win your money back. Anyone who has done more than one round of IVF knows that it can be just as addictive — what if it works next time?

But this is the last time. If a Harley Street doctor told you to put £100,000 on red 22, with a 40 per cent chance you’d win, would you do it? Because this is where we are right now. We’re waiting for our chips to come in, the odds are not in our favour, but what if . . ? Miracles do happen sometimes, right?