Going Off Script

by Giuliana Rancic

  The question was: Should we take a few million strangers along with us, or was it time to ditch Giuliana and Bill and face reality alone?

  As we tried to educate ourselves as much as possible, we were shocked to discover that one in four American couples experiences issues with infertility. That’s a staggering number, and even sadder when you look around your own circle of friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances and consider statistically how many might be suffering in silence.

  “You know how many people we can help?” I urged Bill as we considered whether to cancel the show. “We finally have our purpose.” He agreed. Maybe we could all draw hope from one another. In February of 2009, we began in vitro fertilization with a team of specialists in Chicago. Dr. Brian Kaplan was a handsome South African with a sexy accent. I prefer ugly doctors, especially if they’re going to be exploring the promised land while I’m in stirrups. IVF has a higher success rate than IUI, and I was optimistic about getting pregnant after the first round. For two weeks, I would have to get two shots daily, one in the stomach and one in the butt. There were a lot more side effects than before. I had to stop working out, and any physical movement became painful as my ovaries enlarged according to plan. I was bloated and a little hormonal, too. I started feeling resentful that I was doing all the work, and Bill didn’t have to do anything. “If I could do this, I would,” he told me, and I knew he would in a heartbeat.

  I was put under for surgery so my doctor could retrieve the eggs, and I woke up to good news: fifteen had been harvested. Five days later, I went back to have three fertilized ones transferred. Two others had also become embryos and were frozen in case we needed to use them later. Dr. Kaplan phoned us with the news: I was officially pregnant. Very pregnant, it seemed: my follicle-stimulating hormone level was extremely high, which often indicates twins. Bill and I immediately started discussing whether the babies should have separate bedrooms or share one. I went out and bought a baby book.

  A week later, we went in for an ultrasound to see how many I was carrying.

  “It’s a singleton,” Dr. Kaplan said, pointing to the single little embryonic sac on the monitor. Our son or daughter.

  Later, we got to hear the tiny heartbeat. We were overjoyed, hugging each other, eyes glued to the monitor.

  Even when we were dating, Bill and I would fantasize about the family we would have together. Now we felt within sight of those rollicking backyard barbecues in the summer and snowy Christmas mornings with our kids laughing and playing with all their little cousins while the house filled with wonderful smells from the kitchen. We decided we would put our urban Gold Coast townhouse on the market and start looking for a house in the suburbs of Chicago. Bill was keen to find the perfect fixerupper to showcase all the construction and design expertise he had amassed during his years of flipping investment properties. A place he could turn into our unique dream house. He began the search for a mansion in need of TLC in Hinsdale, a community with both a charming downtown and the beautiful, leafy streets we both loved.

  When I went in for a checkup at nine weeks, the nurse furrowed her brow and squinted at the monitor as she ran the wand over my belly. The sac came into view, but was silent. “Huh, let me try this,” she would say, and then, when we asked if everything was okay, we knew the answer already when she hedged. “I don’t know if the equipment is working right. Let me get the doctor.” She left the room.

  “Bill, hand me the fucking wand, I’ll find the baby!” I snapped. I felt outraged by the nurse’s incompetence. I was pregnant. I was the mother, I would be able to summon that small heartbeat, know where it was hiding. I swiped the wand quickly over my stomach, then pressed it into Bill’s hand. “Here, you do it!”

  Dr. Kaplan came in and sat down in front of the monitor.

  “I don’t hear a heartbeat,” he said as he guided the wand to the spot where the empty sac hung. “Huh. Okay. I’m sorry, but I don’t know if this one is viable.”

  The baby was gone.

  On the way home, we stopped to eat pancakes, picking sadly at the comfort food that would never fill such a void.

  Bill, in the meantime, had found our house: a twelve-thousand-square-foot Hinsdale mansion that had been abandoned mid-construction and was so dilapidated that he had to help me up a wooden gangplank over the debris just to get to the front door. He was so excited when he discovered the place and couldn’t stop telling me how he knew instantly when he stepped inside that it was home. When he opened the door with a flourish to lead me inside, I had a very different gut reaction: Oh, hell no! It was a mess, and impossible for me to envision as anything but an expensive heap of rubble. Bill was passionate, though, and I never questioned his talent, so we became surburbanites on paper, at least. “It’ll just take a few months,” Bill assured me.

  In retrospect, I think that Hinsdale house was the marker we were placing on an emotional bet: a self-fulfilling prophecy with six bedrooms. Our parental field of dreams.

  Devastating as the miscarriage was, it did establish that I could become pregnant, and once we’d given ourselves a chance to recover, we decided to brave another grueling cycle of IVF. It was late summer, and the camera crews were with us as I went to have eggs retrieved yet again. All the way home, I kept saying I wanted a big fluffy omelet from the Pancake House, with spinach, mushrooms, onion, and tomatoes. Bill fetched me one, and as I stood there eating it in the kitchen, I suddenly felt something hard in my mouth. I spit it out.

  “OH MY GOD, it’s a finger! There’s a fucking fingertip in my omelet!” I started gagging. Bill rushed to my side.

  “What is it?” he asked as I dry-heaved.

  “Look at it!” I choked. “The chef’s fucking finger is in my omelet!”

  Bill examined the hard, white evidence.

  “It’s not a finger,” he assured me. I was still gagging. “It’s a fingernail.”

  I kept gagging. Bill reconsidered.

  “No, wait, it’s a tooth!”

  “The chef’s TOOTH is in my omelet?” I shrieked before retching anew. “Call the Pancake House, I’m going to sue!”

  “That’s crazy,” Bill said. “How can the chef’s tooth be in your omelet?” He pondered this mystery while I continued with the retching and swearing. “Hey, wait a second. Open your mouth, honey.”

  I opened, assuming he was looking for more discarded chef’s teeth.

  “Honey, it’s your tooth,” he said with some relief. “You have a hole in your mouth. Your tooth fell out.”

  Great. Now I was going to have to have my eggs retrieved and a crown put on in the same day. More than I could deal with. Between the meds from the egg retrieval and the false alarm over random chef body parts in my omelet, I was exhausted. And not feeling very well. “I’m going to go lie down,” I told my husband. After a while, he came in to check on me and gently laid a hand on my stomach. “Ow!” I screamed. It felt like an electric shock. “Oh my God, Bill, something is wrong with me!” I cried. The pain was excruciating. “Something is going on with my body! Oh, God, there’s so much pain!” The Giuliana and Bill crew was in the living room, breaking down their equipment and getting ready to leave, a little sulky that they’d decided not to follow me into the kitchen earlier because eating an omelet sounded too boring. Now Bill came charging out of the bedroom.

  “Get out of here!” he yelled. “Turn off the cameras! This is serious!”

  As soon as they’d cleared out, he carried me out to the car, and we raced to the ER.

  “I think I’m overstimulated,” I told the young doctors trying to figure out what was wrong. I knew that was a risk with IVF, and that overstimulated ovaries could swell and push against the abdominal wall. They took my vitals and started running tests. My suspicions were confirmed. They gave me painkillers and we waited. Bill was dozing in a chair around three in the morning when one of the doctors came back into the room and told me my hemoglobin levels were dangerously low, and they needed to do a blood transfusion.
r />   “Okay,” I groggily agreed.

  Fortunately, Bill snapped awake.

  “Blood transfusion?” he asked. “No blood transfusion! How long can we hold off?”

  “A few hours,” the doctor said.

  “Okay, let’s wait till six a.m. and call our ob-gyn,” Bill said. If Dr. Sabbagha confirmed that such drastic measures were needed, then we’d go ahead with the transfusion. At six, Dr. Sabbagha came in, examined me, saw that my numbers were starting to improve, and decided to hold off for two hours to see what happened. By eight, I was out of the woods.

  I had never challenged a doctor’s decision before. Bill’s insistence on a second opinion—one we trusted implicitly—spared me an unnecessary and potentially risky transfusion. It was the first time I truly realized that doctors aren’t gods, that they’re human and fallible just like the rest of us. That knowledge was both scary and empowering.

  I went to cover Fashion Week in New York City at the beginning of September with my belly grotesquely distended. I looked seven months pregnant, and hid it with long scarves and coats. I was in excruciating pain. Only my personal assistant and hair and makeup people knew it was because my ovaries were swollen to the size of grapefruits. They choreographed themselves like a precision dance team to body block any paparazzi shots so no one would notice my belly and report that I was pregnant. After Fashion Week, I went back to Chicago utterly exhausted. Dr. Kaplan told us I needed to let my body heal for four months before we continued. Then I would have to start the meds all over again.

  True to his word, Bill somehow managed to rehab the Hinsdale mansion and get us moved in just in the nick of time before I would try to get pregnant again. It was beautiful. I had my big, white dream kitchen, and Bill had his Scotch and cigar room, painted navy blue to show off a built-in bar with white marble top. The huge yard reminded me of Tuscany with its planters of purple salvia, herbs, and a gorgeous tulip tree. There was even a bocce court for my Italian relatives. When we moved in, neighbor kids welcomed us with homemade cookies. We hosted a big Thanksgiving for our families in that house, Mama and Bill cooking together in the kitchen.

  Despite the hellacious near-death ordeal of the overstimulation, lots of eggs had been retrieved during that round of IVF, and two “A-plus” embryos were finally transferred after the holidays. I was pretty sure they had implanted. My body just read “pregnant.” The reality cameras captured the anticipation shining in our eyes when Dr. Kaplan called to tell us the results.

  “Well guys, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “You’re not pregnant.”

  “Wait? What?” I repeated dumbly. “Not pregnant! That’s impossible!” My head was spinning. I thought I was going to faint.

  We must have asked the doctor to repeat himself five times. How could this be happening? We had been told that the number and quality of our eggs were above average; we were in perfect physical condition; we had followed the shot regimen to a tee. To be told now that it hadn’t worked was a sucker punch. The doctor couldn’t give us much of an explanation. He, too, sounded perplexed and deflated. Bill pushed the “End” button, and the two of us just looked at each other in shock. Tears streamed down my face, and I fell into Bill’s arms. Our dream was once again shattered.

  About three hours later, the familiar sorrow made a crash landing at our dinner table as just the two of us sat quietly eating at a table for eight.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked Bill.

  “What?” he said.

  “Do you hear our echoes?”

  His face fell. “Yeah.”

  At first, I chose my words carefully—words I was sure Bill would not want to hear after pouring his heart and soul into building our dream home. “I’m sorry honey, but I think we have to move,” I began. “We have to sell this house. I can’t stay here.”

  Then the deeper truth came tumbling out: “And I can never go through IVF again.” Bill didn’t argue. Not with my plea to move, or with the revelation that I was giving up on having a baby. We would make L.A. our primary residence—I’d sold my little condo and we had a lovely house there now. We would just stay at the Trump hotel when we commuted to Chicago.

  Bill quietly sold the house, no questions asked, no pleas for me to reconsider. But he didn’t let go of his dream of fatherhood as easily.

  Whenever he would tentatively broach the subject of trying for kids again, I would shoot him down. “Stop asking!” I implored. I couldn’t imagine enduring another round of fertility treatments—the daily shots in the stomach, the raging hormones, the pain of hyperstimulated ovaries pushing against my insides, the delicate egg retrieval, and ultimately, the risk of another heartbreak. Who were we fooling, thinking we had any control over this? Whatever happened, or didn’t, was God’s will.

  Although I was raised Catholic, and prayed each night as my grandmother had taught me, my relationship with the Church was more casual than Bill’s when we first got married. When I was a kid growing up in Bethesda, most of my best friends were Jewish. I went away to Camp Judea with one of them for four weeks one summer and came back able to recite Hebrew prayers so perfectly that a rabbi later asked me at a friend’s bat mitzvah what temple I was a member of. “Oh,” I said. “Holy Rosary Church.”

  “How are you Catholic?” he wondered. “I saw you know the prayers!”

  Junior high was one long merry string of bar and bat mitzvahs. This is so dope, I decided. “I want to be Jewish,” I told my mother.

  “Shut up. Don’t ever say that again,” Mama replied. She held Jews in the highest esteem, too, since she considered them very similar to Italians, but she drew the line at letting her youngest daughter convert just so she could have a bat mitzvah. I tried to negotiate the bat mitzvah without the actual conversion, but that plan was nixed, too. I whined about it enough to finally get permission for a big blowout confirmation party. I invited the entire school and everyone was bored out of their mind during Mass, but there was a DJ at the after-party, so I was good.

  When I started seeing Bill, I would accompany him to Mass, and praying together was a tender part of our relationship. Over the years, we had both become more devout. But infertility was testing my faith: I remember once being in church with tears running down my face, I was so hurt and angry at God. My sister had three perfect little girls. MTV was full of teen moms who’d rather party than change a diaper. Newborns were found in Dumpsters. How could God put babies in Dumpsters, but not in me? I remember looking up at the sky and literally raging at the God I wasn’t sure I believed in anymore. Why, why? What the hell is this about?

  Bill was hurting, too, but held fast to his conviction that whatever happened to him, to me, to us, was meant to be, and that God had a plan that was still unfolding.

  Because of the reality show, our private anguish was public knowledge. We would get cards, letters, and e-mails of support from fans, as well as weird but well-meaning promises from people who swore that crystals or acupuncture or meditation would cure us. Women on Twitter would offer to become my surrogate. It wasn’t unusual for sympathetic strangers to approach us on the street or in a restaurant, or for women to share their own fertility stories and offer advice in the checkout lane of the supermarket. But the weirdest thing started happening. Over and over again, I kept hearing women referring me to the same fertility specialist: Dr. Schoolcraft.

  One day, I stopped at this random nail salon in Venice Beach to get a mani-pedi. It wasn’t one of my usual places, and as I settled into the spa chair, I noticed this one customer stealing glances at me. She was a young, stylish Asian woman. The more she looked at me, the more I racked my brain, wondering if I knew her from somewhere. Maybe she worked for a magazine and we’d met on a shoot? When she got up to pay and leave, she walked up to me. She was hugely pregnant.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you, but have you ever heard of Dr. Schoolcraft?” she asked.

  “Yes, I have, but I’ve never gone to him,” I said. What was with this Schoolcraft guy?<
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  “We tried everything for years,” the woman went on, “and nothing worked. I went to Dr. Schoolcraft, and now I’m pregnant with twins. I’m telling you, you will get pregnant with him. Just try.” She left, and I went home and Googled the doctor’s name. I found out that Dr. William Schoolcraft and his clinic, the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine, boasted the highest success rate in the country for live births—70 percent of his patients had babies. They blew the next closest clinic, with 50 percent, out of the water.

  “Bill, take a look at this,” I said. When he saw that the website I had on my computer screen was a fertility clinic, he looked at me hopefully.

  “You think you might wanna go meet with them?” he asked tentatively, feeling me out. “Should we call them and find out more?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I agreed. “A call doesn’t hurt.” We made the call and asked about the program. We quickly learned that one of the reasons their success ratio was higher was because they screened their candidates so rigorously: Dr. Schoolcraft only accepted patients he felt certain he could help become pregnant. I appreciated the extra effort being made not to waste the time, and more important, the emotions of couples already at the point of desperation. We made an appointment.

  For the first time in my life, I stepped onto a plane filled with excitement instead of dread. Unlike the medical towers we visited in Chicago, the CCRM was a freestanding building in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains outside Denver. Inside, it was airy, clean, and bright, with a beautiful waterfall in the waiting room. Couples from Russia, Germany, and Florida were waiting to take the one-day battery of tests to see if Dr. Schoolcraft would accept them into the program. The workup included blood tests, ultrasounds, and a full medical history and exam. I was nervous. What if he didn’t take us?

  Bill Schoolcraft turned out to be a quiet, soft-spoken family man with a kind bedside manner. He told us he thought he could help us, and accepted us into the program. Just like that, I knew I was definitely ready to try again. I got my meds and my protocol, and headed home to start the by now familiar but still scary routine. I barely even flinched at the shots anymore, and Bill knew what to expect with my hormonal moods.