It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (23 page)

Kik, she was impatient with herself for crying. “I’m so pathetic,” she said.

The next night was New Year’s Eve, the last night of libations for her. As of the New Year she forswore alcohol and caffeine. The following morning my Java Queen nursed a hangover and

caffeine withdrawal, and from then on she didn’t touch a drop. We wanted our baby to be pristine.

A week later, we had an appointment at the hospital for what we thought was a simple meeting with an IVF nurse. Wrong. We walked into the room and it was, no joke, staged like an

intervention. Two long tables faced each other, with tense couples holding hands in utter silence. A too-chipper nurse said she had to take our photo for her files, so we gritted our teeth

and smiled, and we sat down for two hours of Sex Ed, complete with old films of sperm swimming up the tubes. We’d all seen it in high school, and we didn’t want to see it again. The

nurses handed out information packets and proceeded to go through them page by page. I squirmed in my seat, and kept Kik amused by drawing pictures of a sperm with a circle and a

slash through it, and whispering jokes. I told Kik I felt like I was at an Al-Anon meeting: “Hi, my name is Lance and I have no sperm.”

I elbowed Kik to go, but there was never a good time to leave. We both sat there, dying to bolt, but we couldn’t find the right, polite break. Finally we couldn’t take one more minute. Kik

gathered her pamphlets, stood up, and race-walked out of the room with me right on her wheel. We burst out of the room, giddy as school kids, and ran to our car laughing and out of breath,

and wondered aloud if we were too immature to be parents.

A few days later we returned to the IVF office for blood tests. Kik turned bedsheet white when she had her blood drawn. I told her she was a skirt, but I actually sympathized. She has

needle-phobia–and she was in for a rough few weeks.

That night she took her first Lupron shot. Lupron is a drug that prevents women from ovulating, and she required ten units every 24 hours–which meant a shot every night until the

doctors told her to stop. For someone with an aversion to needles, those shots were highly unnerving. To make matters worse, she had to administer them to herself.

Every night at exactly 8:30 P.M., Kik had to go into the bathroom and give herself a shot in the

thigh. The first time she did it, her hands shook so badly that she couldn’t get the tiny bubbles out of the syringe. Finally she pinched her thigh hard, swore out loud, and stuck herself.

In the middle of the week, the U.S. Postal team came to Austin to do wind-tunnel testing. Kik and I took everybody out to dinner, but just as the entrees arrived Kik looked at her watch. It

was 8:30 P.M. She excused herself, and went to the bathroom and “shot up like some junkie,” as she delicately put it.

After wind-tunnel testing, the U.S. Postal team went to California for a training camp and I had to go with them, which meant Kik would be alone in the pregnancy project for several days.

While I was away, Kik made a grand pilgrimage to the clinic in San Antonio where my frozen sperm was stored. I had been paying rent on it, $100 every year.

Early that morning, Kik went to the IVF office in Austin and picked up a big frozen tank, which filled the passenger seat next to her. She drove an hour to San Antonio and lugged the tank

inside the building and up to the 13th floor, where she read a House Beautiful magazine while one of the nurses prepared our family for the icy trip back to Austin. At my request, the nurse

opened the tank briefly to show Kik the initials LA etched into the vial.

“I said a silent prayer that the vial didn’t belong to some guy named Larry Anderson,” she told me later.

On her way back she drove very carefully and answered several inquiring calls from me, checking her progress. I didn’t feel quite safe until she had deposited the tank back into the

hands of the IVF staff. It was not quite the romantic candlelight interlude we had in mind, but we were now prepared to conceive a child.

Kik continued to shoot herself up. One night she had a bunch of girlfriends to the house for dinner, and when 8:30 came around none of them could believe she was actually going to stick

herself with a needle, so they joined her in the master bath to watch. Call it stage fright, call it slippery fingers–but she dropped her last glass vial of Lupron on the bathroom tile and it

shattered. She stared at it, disbelieving and horrified, knowing full well that if she missed her shot, she would also miss the entire cycle and have to start all over again in another month. Her

eyes filled up with tears. While her friends cleaned up the shards before the dog ate them, Kik frantically searched through her info binder for the name of the nurse on call, and reached her. It

was 8:45 on a Saturday night, and Kik tearfully explained the situation. The nurse said, “Oh, dear.” They both called around town to find a pharmacy that was open. Finally Kik found one,

and raced down the freeway. The pharmacist kept the store open, waited for her to arrive, and gave her a good-luck pat as she left.

A couple of days later, Kik went back to Dr. Vaughn for a baseline sonogram to count and measure her eggs. It was hard for Kik to go to the doctor by herself. All of the other women at

the clinic always had their husbands with them, and she could feel them looking at her as she leafed through People magazine. She read their thoughts: they wondered why someone so

young would need IVF, and why she was always alone.

Doctor Vaughn started her on Gonal-F. This was the drug that would stimulate the follicle and make her produce more eggs. From now on she would have to take two shots: five units of

Lupron and three full vials of Gonal-F. She told me that her body, once a temple, was now “a cross between a pincushion and a henhouse.”

Mixing the Gonal-F was hard to do. It came in powder form in glass vials. Kik had to take a syringe with a long needle, which made her ill just to look at, and draw a half-unit of a sterile

water solution. Then she broke the tops off the vials of powder and shot the liquid into each vial. She filled the syringe with the mixture, flicked it to remove a fat air bubble at the top, and

squirted until the air pocket moved up and out of the needle. Then she injected the evil needle’s contents into her thigh.

On January 22, Kik went to Dr. Vaughn at 7 A.M. to have blood drawn yet again. Another needle. She looked as far away from it as possible and focused on the Far Side cartoons taped to

the wall, wondering how she was going to handle childbirth if she couldn’t even give blood without feeling woozy. Then, at 4 P.M. the same day, she went back to Dr. Vaughn’s office to

get her second sonogram. It revealed 12 eggs, all of them growing right on schedule.

It was the height of irony: on the same day that she had the sonogram, I went from California to Oregon to see Dr. Nichols for my six-month cancer checkup. Dr. Nichols had moved from

Indianapolis to Portland, but I continued to visit him for my periodic monitoring. I couldn’t help remarking on the fact that while I was seeing one kind of doctor, she was seeing another, for

entirely different purposes. But we told ourselves they had one thing in common: each confirmed the possibility of life.

Kik was almost ready for “retrieval,” the surgery to harvest her eggs. The day before she was due to have the procedure I arrived back home, to our mutual relief. That day she underwent one

more round of blood tests and sonograms, and yet another shot, a dose of HCG, the blood marker that had haunted my life during chemo. In this case, HCG was a good thing; it would

mature the egg in Kik’s body for retrieval.

She had the shot at exactly 7:30 P.M., 36 hours before surgery, at a local clinic. It was the longest needle yet, but a very gentle nurse administered the shot while Kik lay on a table

quivering.

That night, she dreamed of knives and henhouses.

On the day of the procedure, we rose at 6 A.M. and went to the day-surgery center, where Kik was given hospital attire to change into, complete with a blue shower cap and patient’s gown.

The anesthesiologist explained his procedure and handed us a stack of releases to sign. Nervously, we scribbled our names on each of them, including one that gave the doctors the

right to cut open her abdomen to retrieve the eggs if the traditional way of extracting them via a

needle didn’t work. Then Kik walked into the surgery room.

She was literally strapped to a table, with her arms outstretched like a crucifixion. She doesn’t remember anything after the anesthesia IV began. It’s a good thing. The doctor harvested her

eggs using a very long needle and a catheter.

When she woke up in the recovery room, she saw me leaning over her. “Will you get in bed with me?” she asked. I crawled in next to her, and kept her company while she dozed on and off for

another hour. Finally she woke up, and the hospital released us. I pushed her in a wheelchair out to our car, and for only the second time in my life, I drove the speed limit home.

Kik spent the weekend resting, sleeping, and watching movies while I cooked and looked after her. Bart Knaggs’ wife, Barbara, came by with some flowers and handed us a carton of eggs.

“Since you no longer have any,” she said. It hurt Kik to laugh, but it didn’t hurt as badly as the progesterone shot I gave her. The latest doctor’s order was a nightly dose of progesterone, and

this was the longest and most oily-looking needle yet. I had to do it for her.

SURVIVORSHIP

On February 1, Dr. Vaughn called with our fertilization report. They had defrosted the frozen sperm and fertilized Kik’s eggs via a procedure called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI),

whereby they physically injected one sperm into each egg. We had nine viable eggs, he said. Of those nine, six were perfect, two were possible, and one was broken. We decided to implant

three of the perfect ones in Kik’s womb, and to freeze the other three. It was strange to think that we were freezing our future children.

After we hung up, we had a moment of panic. I wondered aloud, “What would we would do if all three worked?” We could end up with three screaming, scampering, spoon-banging toddlers

all at the same time.

Three days after the retrieval, we went back to the hospital for the “transfer,” which was the clinical, bus-station term for what we considered the most important day in our lives apart from

our wedding. We were ushered to the day-surgery area, where our embryologist, Beth Williamson, explained that she had spent the weekend fertilizing our embryos. She said that

when she thawed the sperm she was happy to find that they were alive and swimming, which was a relief because this is not always the case after cryo-preservation. She said the fertilization

went smoothly–and she even had photos for us. “Here’s the group shot,” she said, which was her hilarious term for a fuzzy image of three embryos together, followed by individual shots of each.

The embryos had eight cells, and they were dividing right on schedule.

“Can you tell the gender?” Kik asked.

Dr. Williamson said no, that the gender at this stage could only be determined by removing one of the cells and doing DNA testing. I’d had enough procedures to last me a lifetime. “Uh, no

thanks,” I said. “We’d rather be curious.”

After Beth left, a nurse came in with two sets of scrubs–one for Kik and one for me. As we got dressed, Kik said, “You look like some hunk from ER.” Giggling, we asked Dr. Vaughn to take

a picture of us, to mark our last moment as a couple without children. Then we went into a darkened surgery room. The lights were dimmed to make everything as relaxing as possible. We

weren’t anxious; we were only very excited, and both grinning like idiots. Finally, the doctor indicated to the embryologist team that it was time, and they came in with our three embryos in

a syringe. I sat on a stool next to Kik, and I held both of her hands under the sheet. Within five minutes it was complete. We never took our eyes off of each other.

Next, the team lifted Kik very carefully onto a gurney and wheeled her into the small recovery room, where she had to lie motionless for one hour. I sprawled out on a bed next to her. We just

lay there together, looking up at the ceiling, and teasing each other about having triplets.

After our hour was up, a nurse came in and explained that Kik would have to spend the next two days doing absolutely nothing. I drove carefully home, and put her in bed, and waited on

her. I delivered her lunch on a tray, and for dinner I set the table with pretty cloth napkins.

“Armstrong, party of five,” I announced.

I served dinner like a headwaiter. Kik was only allowed to sit up while we ate, and in between the salad and the main course I made her lie down on the sofa. She dubbed me “the warden.”

Kik woke up the next morning to me kissing her stomach. That day she began taking medications we called “hatching drugs.” The embryology team had poked a microscopic hole in

each of the fertilized follicles before they transferred them, and the hatching drugs, along with that tiny hole, would help the embryos hatch out of the follicle and implant.

We wouldn’t know for two weeks, until February 15, whether Kik was actually pregnant, and we could barely wait. We kept trying to notice any subtle changes in the way she felt. But

considering that she had been taking shots and pills for weeks on end, it was hard to make a comparison to “normal.” “Do you feel anything different?” I kept asking, anxiously. “What is it

supposed to feel like?” We wondered about it all the time.

“Am I?” she’d say.

Finally, on the eleventh day after the transplant, Kik went back to the hospital early in the morning to have blood drawn for her HCG (pregnancy) test. She was so nervous that she turned

the radio off and prayed to herself on the way there and back. The results would be back by 1:30 P.M., so we tried to pass the time by fixing a big breakfast, showering, and packing for