Inconceivable (5 page)

While MK was in the NICU for the month after she was born, Carolyn convinced herself that she was never going to be pregnant again. Her body was clearly telling her that she wasn’t cut out for pregnancy. She even gave away all of Ryan’s preemie clothes from ten years earlier. I didn’t know what to say to her about this, as she knew as well as I did that we had pledged to give all of our embryos a chance at life. I felt our pledge even more strongly after receiving the blessing of Mary Kate. Embryos were still in a tube with our names on it in a cryopreservation tank. Could there be a sister or brother there for MK and the boys?

In October, Carolyn suggested we visit our fertility doctor to inquire about a frozen embryo transfer and thank him for Mary Kate. She called ahead to make sure it would be all right to bring the baby in. She remembered how it had felt to sit in that waiting room pining for a child, and she wanted to be sensitive to those women who would be there. The staff told us to enter through a side door.

Carolyn had dressed MK in her cutest outfit. When the doctor came in, we thanked him for Mary Kate. We eventually got around to the subject of our remaining embryos. Our doctor said that we could proceed with a frozen embryo transfer as soon as we wanted but that, with so few embryos, we’d probably get only one transfer attempt. He suggested that we act quickly, considering that Carolyn was about to turn forty. We took his advice.

So, in December 2008, Carolyn once again started taking pills and sticking herself with blood thinners, all in an attempt to get pregnant. For the first time we were certain that if it didn’t work, we were done. But as the transfer grew closer, we became more hopeful. Maybe we would have four children after all.

C
HAPTER
3

Shaking Off the Shock

CAROLYN

T
HE AFTERNOON WE FOUND OUT
about the embryo mix-up, I sat on our bed with my face in my hands, trying to contain my grief and my fear. I didn’t know what to do next. When I looked up at Sean, I could see the wheels of his mind turning. He’s not a man who lingers in his pain; he needs to act, to make a plan.

“You have to call Dr. Read right away,” Sean said.

“Why?”

“I think it’s best to transfer care of this pregnancy out of the hands of our fertility doctor,” he said.

I reached for the phone and dialed Dr. Read. When she recovered from the news, she told me to get blood work done immediately to double-confirm the pregnancy and set a baseline for further tests as the pregnancy progressed. As Sean and I got ready to go to the hospital lab, he called Father Joseph Cardone, a priest at our church who also works as vice president at the hospital, and asked if we could see him. He agreed.

The weather had turned sunny and surprisingly warm we discovered when we exited the house and got into Sean’s car.

“I need to call my parents,” I said.

“I don’t think you should do that yet. We have to be very careful about what we do. We only learned of this a few minutes ago. We need to decide how we are going to handle this.”

I knew Sean was right, but I had an overwhelming urge to run to my mom and dad.

“Are you saying we shouldn’t tell anyone? How can I do that?” Sean was pulling out of the driveway, focused on the road.

“I’m saying that we should sit with this for a little while. We want to make sure we don’t upset anyone needlessly. Let’s get your blood test, talk to Father Cardone, and see what he recommends.”

The streets were clogged with people on their way home from work. As we stopped at the main intersection downtown, I realized that I dared not look up. We knew so many people in this town. Some of my former students were now driving, or their parents were driving them to errands or school functions. Sean knew many families through his coaching, plus there were the people he knew from work and his clients. If I looked out the car window, I probably would find two or three people waving at me. I didn’t know what my face would betray. As long as I kept my head down, none of the people who looked our way would get a hint of the secret we carried with us.

I used Sean’s cell phone to ask our neighbor if she could keep Drew and Ryan for dinner, explaining that something unexpected had come up. When she asked what the problem was, I told her Sean had car trouble and I needed to help him out. How many more lies would I have to tell in the next few months to people who cared about us?

Just as I hung up with her, our fertility doctor called.

“Oh, Carolyn, I cannot tell you how sorry I am about this,” he said. I could hear the sorrow in his voice, no longer the sound of the confident physician who brought us Mary Kate on our first try. “My wife and I did not sleep last night. We were so frightened by what would happen if your pregnancy test was positive.”

I did feel sorry for him, but we were still so overwhelmed. I had no words.

“I love my work and my patients,” he continued. “And nothing makes me happier than helping them have babies. But, Carolyn, you must be careful about this pregnancy. You know that a woman at your age, and with your difficult pregnancies, faces considerable risks carrying a baby to term. Do you want to face those risks for a baby that is not yours? You have to think of yourself. And what about your family?”

He and I had discussed all of the risks in detail before my embryo transfer. I looked up at Sean, who was scowling. He gestured for me to get off the phone, but I was immobilized.

“I’m not sure how this happened. I don’t know how it could have happened. I only found out yesterday, and I’ve thought of little else since,” he rambled on desperately. “I would not want my wife pregnant with someone else’s baby.”

Suddenly I was angry. Who would?

“Look,” I said, cutting him off. “We will not be terminating this pregnancy. We’re on our way right now to meet with our priest to discuss this.”

“Oh, of course. I understand,” he said. “Talking to your priest is a good thing to do right now. But make sure you weigh carefully the consequences this pregnancy would have for you, both physically and emotionally. If you continue your pregnancy, you will be risking your life for someone else’s child. You have to understand, if you go through with this, you cannot keep this baby.”

“I’ve got to get off the phone now,” I said. We’d just pulled into the hospital parking lot.

I struggled to get my bearings as we entered Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center, the hospital where so many significant moments of our lives had taken place. Drew and Mary Kate had been born in this hospital. I remembered being there a few months before Sean and I married when Sean’s father was dying. All of us—Sean and I and his
eight brothers and sisters, with their spouses—haunted the halls for days, sleeping in the waiting areas. We wanted to be together when John Savage passed away. In this family, birth and death were such natural events, swaddled in love and tradition. Where would I place this pregnancy on that continuum? It was a celebration of life and loss, all wrapped in a baby blanket.

Father Cardone met us at the door of the executive offices of the hospital. I was disoriented by seeing him in a suit, a stark contrast to his Sunday vestments. His voice was also softer, more consoling than the booming tone I was used to hearing at church. Sean had described our situation when he arranged to see Father Cardone. As we took our places at the round table in his office, he placed a box of tissues at its center.

I knew he was looking at me, but I didn’t want to look anywhere. I stared straight ahead, not knowing what I was supposed to say. My mind was elsewhere, thinking over all I knew about IVF to see if I could remember something like this happening to another woman. In one IVF mix-up in New York, a white woman gave birth to a black baby, but that was a fresh IVF, not a frozen embryo transfer. How could a doctor screw up a frozen embryo transfer? Did they pull the wrong embryos out of the freezer? Did they mix my embryos with someone else’s? Oh God, where were my embryos?

Now think. This is a baby. A human being. Some other couple’s precious child is inside of you. What if your baby was in someone else?

“I cannot imagine what you are going through right now,” Father Cardone said.

I couldn’t say anything, so Sean started.

“We have eight months to go, and I’m having a hard time anticipating what those months will bring. What about the other family? And the delivery? And the possible media onslaught?”

“Sean, don’t think too far in advance right now or it will be overwhelming,” Father Cardone said. “I encourage you not to get
so far ahead of where you are that you are dealing in the hypothetical, things that may never happen.”

He was right. Based on our history, why should we think about the delivery? The bigger question was what we needed to do tomorrow. Yet my mind could not stop, and I know I wasn’t fully taking in what Sean and Father Cardone were talking about. I heard Sean ask him for the Church’s official position on IVF.

“The Church’s stand on IVF is quite clear,” Father Cardone said. “The Church does not approve of procreation taking place outside of the intimate relationship between a man and a woman. It also rejects the notion of ‘spare’ embryos.”

“We know that, Father Cardone,” Sean said. “That’s why we wanted to give every embryo we created a chance at life. Our belief in the sanctity of life is what got us into this situation.”

I listened as they discussed church doctrine but had a hard time focusing because the world seemed upside down. Did it matter how we got to where we were? I didn’t think so. I was lost in conjectures about what the future would hold for us. I pictured ultrasounds where we would be forced to admire the progress of a baby we were going to give to someone else. I envisioned a doctor cutting the baby out and handing him or her to someone else to love, leaving us with nothing but wreckage.

Okay, stop thinking. Just breathe. Slowly…inhale, exhale; inhale, exhale.

I looked up at the clock. “I have to get my blood drawn,” I interrupted.

Sean and Father Cardone looked up from their discussion. Father Cardone offered to escort us to the lab.

“Science is not the enemy,” Father Cardone said as he left us at the lab. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that as I sat in the little lab chair, laying out my arm for my second blood draw of the day. The technician strapped a tight elastic band around my upper arm, and
I could see her prepare the needle, but it felt as if I were watching myself in a movie.

The needle slid swiftly into my vein, and the bright red blood filled the syringe chamber. This blood, my blood, would nourish the life inside me. I would do everything I could to make sure that this life grew strong and healthy. And then I would give this life away. How could science have done this to me? No, Father Cardone was right! Science hadn’t done this to me. Another human had made this mistake.

One thing I was certain of was that God had not done this to me. I believed in a loving God. I also believed that God gives us free will. The person responsible for doing this exercised his or her free will by choosing not to protect me. Out of carelessness, this person disregarded my safety. No, God did not do this to me. God loved me. God loved my family. That was one thing that I knew.

SEAN

When we arrived home, we had to pretend that everything was fine. Carolyn had asked our sister-in-law JoAnn to get MK from my mom and bring her home where she could watch all the children for the evening. She was the only one who knew we were getting the pregnancy test results that day. We gave her the thumbs-up, and she smiled and mouthed,
Congratulations
. We had to act as though we were controlling our excitement when we were, in fact, suppressing our anger.

When the boys were settled and Mary Kate was in bed, I laced up my running shoes, put on my hat and gloves, and went on my regular evening run. When I run, I am away from the pressures of the day. Without distractions, thoughts rise up, come through me, in a form of running meditation.

I started down the street that leads out of our little subdivi
sion and turned right at the dilapidated barn just across the road, a remnant of the area’s farming days. When we bought our house, Carolyn and I agreed that this was the one we would grow old in. Carolyn had had to work hard at persuading me that we needed to move to a larger place. Then we saw this house on nearly three acres of land, which was about as close as we could get to my childhood home. As I ran farther, I thought of my dad, who died when I was twenty-two, and wondered what he might think about our problem. If I could call him right now, what would be my first question? I knew he would give us unconditional love and support no matter what we did. I bet he’d tell me that the decisions were mine to make, not his. He was such a powerful influence on the way I analyze situations, I knew that I’d handle this in a way that would make him proud.

As I turned onto the road that leads to the trail I run most evenings, it was as if the problem was laid out before me on the flat landscape of northwestern Ohio. Father Cardone was right about needing to stay focused on today and not spinning complications out far into the future. We had enough to do getting through the next day. We definitely needed to keep the news private, as we had done with the prior two pregnancies. The prudent thing seemed to be to suffer in silence until we knew the pregnancy was going the distance.

My pace picked up as I turned onto the road that led into the park, originally landscaped as a golf course. The terrain is dotted with small hills and shallow ponds. I chose the short route, only twenty minutes, because I knew Carolyn needed me back home.

Carolyn.

She was going to suffer so much through the next eight months and for a long time after that. The physical part was daunting, but we had great medical care. That part I knew she would find a way to endure. But the emotional part was uncharted territory. We’d been through many pregnancies and terrifying ups and downs with fertility. And even with all that, I knew I’d never really understand the
bond she would develop with the baby. Could I help her through it? I’d do what I could, but that probably wouldn’t be enough. We would need to develop a support system so that she would be free to go through whatever feelings she had. Getting help would be the best way to protect her.