Ten Years Later (11 page)

“He said, ‘I am busy and I am not going to go to a meeting about fertility. I go to
meetings about how to best treat my patients and do my job, and even if I’m at a conference
where fertility is being discussed, it would probably coincide with another class
that’s more important to my patient’s survival, so I won’t go to it. But I am interested
and I want to do right by my patient and do think this is important, but bring the
information to me. Don’t make me find you.’ The leader followed up with, ‘How do we
get to you?’ ”

The doctor explained that every major hospital in the country does something called
grand rounds, most often on a weekly basis. Presenters are brought in, and the goal
is to help doctors and other health care professionals stay current on evolving areas
that may be outside of their core practice; the newest research and treatments. The
doctor said, “If you can penetrate that, you’re in.”

Lindsay immediately developed a business model for physician education via grand rounds.

“Our goal for the first year was to do ten major cancer centers and ten community
hospitals,” she says. “We blew those numbers out of the water.”

Then came another creative idea: a way to get the local fertility doctors into grand
rounds.

“Let’s say we had a talk in Connecticut. So, we’re going to go to Yale and do grand
rounds at the cancer center with all the oncologists. We would call the local reproductive
doctor there at Yale and say, ‘Hey, we’re doing grand rounds. Do you want to come
and do the presentation with us?’ Uh, yeah. Of course you do. So they would come and
we wouldn’t even give them an honorarium. ‘We’re not paying for anything. You come.
It’s a huge opportunity for you that you wouldn’t have without us.’ We would give
a one-hour presentation and then all the oncologists would have the information they
needed, all because that one doctor in that one focus group said, ‘Come to me.’ ”

Blending the two worlds of oncology and reproduction was finally happening. Lindsay
says a particular grand rounds session exposed the disconnect that was right before
the medical community’s eyes.

“I’ll never forget this. We were at the Cleveland Clinic doing grand rounds, and it
was me and the female reproductive doctor and the male reproductive doctor. The male
doctor gets up and says, ‘Before we get started I just want to see a show of hands
as to who knows where the Cleveland Clinic sperm bank is?’ And no one raised a hand.
And then he says, ‘See out the window? There’s a courtyard. It’s right there. You
can see it out the window. Just so you all know, it’s right there.’ ”

Nancy puts herself in the category of cancer doctors who needed to look beyond their
specialty.

“Do you think that I ever once thought about a woman’s uterus or ovaries? I can tell
you, until I met Lindsay, never. My ecosystem was the head and neck. I wanted her
to speak, swallow, and breathe as normally as possible, and those are three things
we do every day and take for granted, but if I don’t fix you right, you’re not going
to do them. So my goal was—this beautiful voice, she loved to eat food, she loved
red wine—to be able to return her to those things. Did I ever once think about her
ovaries? No,” she admits. “Now, I know this is going to sound callous, but did I care
about her ovaries? No. My job was to cure her; to give her a life the best I could,
and to save the things that were in my control. What she did was say to me, ‘Hey,
guess what, doc? Not good enough. I expect you to get me to swallow and speak and
breathe again because that’s your job. But in the meantime, you need to have a conversation
with this doctor and this doctor and this doctor, because I don’t understand the side
effects of all the sort of stuff you’ve ordered for me.’ And I was like, ‘Really?’
And guess what? I did. She taught me.”

In October 2003, Jordan proposed to Lindsay. They were married eight months later.
Nancy and Dr. Hartman went to the wedding. A photo Nancy treasures hangs on her office
wall.

“There is a picture of the beautiful bride smiling, and he and I are on either side
of her kissing her cheeks, and people come into my office and say, ‘Oh! Is this you
and your husband and your daughter?’ ” She laughs. “And I say, ‘No, but it’s my favorite
picture of any wedding I’ve ever been to.’ If they would have told me that I would
see her walk down the aisle with this stunningly handsome man I would have never believed
it.”

In the fall of 2004, Fertile Hope launched Sharing Hope, a financial assistance program
for fertility preservation. The goal was to increase access to egg freezing, embryo
freezing, and sperm banking for newly diagnosed cancer patients whose medical treatments
put them at risk for infertility. Fertile Hope worked with companies and clinics to
arrange for discounted services and donated medications for eligible female and male
cancer patients. The newly married
Lindsay was also launching a personal mission: get pregnant. She had stopped taking
birth control pills prior to the wedding and was a bit concerned because her cycle
became very erratic. She developed severe cramps, pesky yeast infections, and long,
heavy periods. Lindsay had the gut feeling that she was possibly having miscarriages.
She made an appointment in October with Dr. Rosenwaks for herself and Jordan to see
if they were both fertile. Tests indicated each was, and the doctor encouraged the
pair to try to get pregnant on their own. By the next month, Lindsay was pregnant,
but within a week, she miscarried. The stress was mounting for Lindsay. She was having
problems staying pregnant, and due to her prior cancer treatments, the biological
calendar of her ovaries was ten to fifteen years shorter.

“I really felt, in that moment, that infertility was harder than cancer ever was,
because you’re always in the land of the unknown.
I don’t know why I’m miscarrying, I don’t know why it’s not working, I don’t know,
I don’t know, I don’t know
. With cancer you’re always in action mode. There’s a plan every day.
Today I killed my cancer. I had radiation
. That’s very active. But with infertility, you can’t do anything for weeks. You just
have to sit around and wait. I found it very hard.”

Plus, she was haunted by a conversation she’d had with a doctor prior to a speaking
engagement at Yale. She had miscarried in her hotel room before giving a speech to
oncologists. Sad and desperate for answers, Lindsay secretly presented her own case
to the local reproductive doctor she appeared with at the presentation.

“I lied and said, ‘This woman called me this morning and here’s her case.’ I laid
out
my
case, and he said to me, ‘There’s no hope. She needs donor eggs. You need to call
her and tell her it’s not going to work.’ So I asked him, ‘What if it’s on the male
side?’ And he said, ‘That
never
happens. That’s like a point-five percent possibility.’ ”

Lindsay had survived cancer, found her Prince Charming, preserved her eggs, and now
she couldn’t get pregnant. She was thankful she could help other people manage their
fertility, but she felt aggravated that she had no control over her own.

“The challenge of running my own organization and having it overlap with my life,”
she admits, “happened with the fertility piece, not the cancer piece. I found it very
hard to go to work every day. I couldn’t get away. My life at home was all about fertility
and my life at work was all about fertility, and that was very hard.”

Lindsay wanted to explore every avenue of what could be causing the problem, so in
early 2005, Dr. Rosenwaks ordered a karyo-type test for both Lindsay and Jordan. It’s
basically a blood test to identify and evaluate the size, shape, and number of chromosomes
in a sample of body cells. The test could determine whether a chromosome defect was
preventing Lindsay from becoming pregnant or causing miscarriages. Lindsay was standing
in Penn Station en route to a work conference when her phone rang. It was Dr. Rosenwaks.

“He said, ‘Lindsay, I’m so sorry. We got the test results and we uncovered that Jordan
has a rare genetic abnormality that’s causing the miscarriages.’ And he had his bad-news
voice on, the voice he uses when he says, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve miscarried.’ But I said,
‘Awesome!’ ” She laughs. “ ‘You found the problem and now we can fix it!’ ”

Lindsay was excited, but Jordan took the news hard.

“I felt terrible,” he says. “She survived. She did everything she could to preserve
her fertility so she was one hundred percent able to have children, and then I come
along, we’re in love with each other, and then I’m the cause for her to go through
another challenge to accomplish her dream.”

Both were astounded by the odds of two people meeting and getting married who had
such unique fertility challenges. They were also
immensely grateful there was a potential solution, one that had just launched in the
medical market. Science now allowed for the ability to create embryos, suck one cell
out of each, and check them under a microscope to determine which embryos were genetically
normal. So that’s what the pair did. In June 2005, they began IVF utilizing pre-implantation
genetic diagnosis, or PGD. Alas, no good embryos. But in September, three healthy
embryos were identified and two were implanted in Lindsay. The doctor told them that
if this didn’t work, the next step could be a sperm donor. Lindsay’s frozen eggs were
available, but success was unlikely in the reproductive process due to Jordan’s chromosomal
abnormality. Miraculously, this time, Lindsay got pregnant. With cautious optimism,
they counted the days, praying she wouldn’t miscarry. At five weeks, Dr. Rosenwaks
told them they could come in to see the fetal heartbeat.

“So we’re there, and Dr. Rosenwaks cautioned us, ‘If there’s no heartbeat, it’s still
early, don’t panic.’ He was trying to manage our expectations,” she says. “And there
is a little jelly bean with a heartbeat. The moment was surreal, and I remember saying,
‘This is why I wanted to survive.’ I can still picture it: I’m in the stirrups, Jordan
is by my head, Dr. Rosenwaks is literally between my legs, and we’re all looking at
this little TV screen, and despite that completely exposed moment, it was so calm
and peaceful and happy. And I was thinking,
This is what I want for all the people I’m trying to help
. It was really, really powerful.”

The pregnancy went smoothly, although Lindsay was nervous about the health of the
baby. Her ob-gyn calmed her nerves by categorizing Lindsay as a perfectly healthy
mom-to-be.

“And I laughed, ‘What? Have you seen my chart?’ And she said, ‘I know it’s been a
long haul to get here, but from a pregnancy standpoint, you’re a normal, healthy patient.’
I would still be nervous for all the tests and ultrasounds, and I remember she said,
‘Welcome to motherhood. It’s a lifetime of worry.’ It made me feel like I was acting
normal, and this is how you’re supposed to feel.”

Their healthy daughter Paisley was born on June 1, 2006. Lindsay and Jordan were delighted
to keep the gender of their new baby a surprise.

She says, smiling, “We joked that it was the one thing we could do the old-fashioned
way.”

Their joy was paired with a sense of wonder. Both had beaten the odds to have a biological
child.

“For both of us, it was magical.”

When Paisley was just hours old, Dr. Rosenwaks came for a visit at the hospital.

“And I asked him, ‘How long after you stop nursing do you have to wait before doing
IVF again?’ He said, ‘Okay, that’s a record. No
one has ever asked me minutes after delivery when they can have another.’ But I couldn’t
help but think,
I want to do this again and again and again
.”

Lindsay shared the news with Nancy, who made it clear she did not want to be called
Grandma.