It was the groundhog poking out of his burrow. Would we have four more years of gay baiting? Or were we on the brink of a welcome thaw?
And the nominee is—Governor—who?
I studied the strange face on CNN. A woman with glasses and her hair pulled back into a tight bun. She looked sweet and studious, like a librarian. CNN shared everything they knew about her, but I couldn’t wait for them to get to what mattered. I dug out my iPhone and googled “Sarah Palin gay rights.”
Nothing.
There was very little public record of her at all, but when it came to her stance on gay marriage or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, it seemed like she had never before been asked to take one. I could only assume that, in Alaska, gay rights doesn’t come up much.
I didn’t find the word “gay” attached to Sarah Palin, but I did find a more telling word. “Sarah Palin to Broaden McCain’s Appeal to Evangelicals,” one article already proclaimed. “Evangelicals Applaud Palin Nomination.” “Palin Bid Seen as McCain’s Gift to Evangelicals.”
Shit, I thought. She’s one of them.
I looked up and saw Dr. Saroyan striding down the hallway toward us. He had just left the exam room and was still pulling off his face mask. Was it over? Had he even started?
Drew put down his Blackberry, but the doctor wasn’t stopping to talk to us. He was heading with purpose toward his office, on the opposite side of the waiting room.
“How’s it going?” we called out to him.
He shook his head. “She doesn’t have a lot of eggs, guys.”
And just as quickly, he was gone.
“Did he say . . . ?”
Drew cut me off. “Yeah.” He buried his face in his hands.
“What does that mean? He did the ultrasound. Her follicles were so healthy. She could feel her ovaries swelling. How many eggs do you think he means? Like twenty-five?”
Drew didn’t want to play my guessing games. “I don’t know!” he snapped.
A minute later, Dr. Saroyan appeared again, walking just as purposefully back toward the operating room. Once again, he wasn’t stopping.
“How many eggs does she have?” I called out.
“We’ll have to see,” he said, in passing. “Looks like seven.”
Seven? Seven eggs? I didn’t think that was possible. What did it mean? Could we still have seven babies?
The look of concern on Dr. Saroyan’s face was nothing compared to the one he had when he returned a few minutes later. This time, he stopped. He sat down next to us and sighed. “We need to talk, guys.”
The expression he wore wasn’t one of concern or empathy. It was something I never would have expected: guilt.
“I said something I shouldn’t have said,” he confided.
“What?”
“Didn’t you tell me she had kids of her own?”
“No. She’s not even married.”
Dr. S buried his face in his own hands now. “I was just trying to make a joke. She was waking up from the anesthesia, and I . . . I said it’s a good thing you have your own kids already, because your ovaries are a mess.”
We stared blankly at the doctor, hoping the joke was on us. But he wasn’t faking. He was devastated.
“Her eggs are just . . . it’s not good.”
Drew didn’t want to hear any more. He just wanted to see his sister.
Susie’s smile might have been more convincing if she’d wiped away her tears first. She was lying in a recovery room underneath a TV that was tuned to CNN on low volume. She looked over as we entered, trying to put on a brave face. “So I guess he told you?”
“He told us he made a bad joke,” Drew said.
“It’s fine. He didn’t know. He thought I had kids already.”
“You okay, Suz?” Drew asked, stroking her arm gently. He was trying so hard not to cry. It was almost too much to bear, knowing that half an hour ago, Susie had walked into an operating room to do the most selfless thing she had ever done, only to be blindsided by the worst medical news she’d ever received.
“I’m fine,” Susie assured us.
We could see she was anything but fine. Her lip started to quiver, and Drew couldn’t hold back his tears anymore. I could see him searching his mind for an inappropriate joke to make, but for probably the first time ever, he was coming up empty.
Now Susie was comforting him. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Drew caught his breath. “What on Earth are you sorry about?”
“I feel like I let you guys down.”
Both Drew and I were speechless for a second. It was so typical of Susie, at a time like this, to be concerned with everyone but herself. Or, as I chose to put it at that moment, “You’re insane, Susie. Shut up.”
“I just want you guys to have a baby.”
“We’ll have a baby, one way or another. I mean . . .” I didn’t want Susie to think I had already written her off as an egg donor.
A nurse came to check on our patient. She asked her if she was ready to get dressed. Susie nodded, and as the nurse pulled the curtain, Susie glanced at the TV above her bed. On it, Sarah Palin was waving eagerly to reporters.
“Who the hell is that?” we heard Susie say.
From the look on Dr. Saroyan’s face, it was clear that he wasn’t about to launch into his comedy routine. Susie’s low yield had caught him off guard. Nothing in the tests indicated she was anything less than freakishly fertile. He turned toward Susie, and his first question was not encouraging. “Are you dating anyone?”
Susie laughed. “Nah.”
Dr. S turned to Drew and me. “You guys need to find her somebody.” He was only partly joking. “I can’t say for sure you won’t be able to conceive, but I’d highly recommend you try as soon as possible. Your ovaries right now are the best they’re ever going to be.”
Drew groaned. “I feel so bad that we put her through this.”
“Don’t,” Dr. S scolded. “If not for this, we wouldn’t have known she had any fertility issues. She would’ve waited to have kids, and it would’ve been too late. At least now we can plan.”
I had an idea. “Should we forget about our transfer and freeze these eggs for Susie to use instead?”
“No!” Susie blurted out. “These are yours!”
Dr. Saroyan shrugged. “We could do that, Gerald, but I’ll learn a lot from seeing how many of these eggs fertilize. If everyone’s okay, I think we should proceed as planned.”
“Yes.” Susie decided to answer for everyone. Drew and I nodded along.
“When will we know if they fertilized?”
“In three days.” Dr. S sighed. “Guys, I want to be very clear about where we stand. If we don’t get at least two or, better yet, three quality embryos, I’m going to call off the transfer. I don’t want to waste your time.”
Susie had refused to accept any compensation for her eggs. We offered her the standard $8,000 fee, we offered to buy her a car or to rent her an apartment so she could move away from home. She was changing our lives, as we saw it, and we wanted to do something potentially life changing for her as well. But she wouldn’t take a penny, wouldn’t even let Drew buy her an iPhone for her birthday. I understood perfectly why she was so reluctant. Any reward might have cheapened the gesture.
Now I had a new idea. What if, when this was all done, we paid for Susie to freeze some of her eggs for her own use? Then, years later, if she had any trouble conceiving, she would have a safety net. It was perfect. We would pay Susie back for her eggs—with her eggs. Finally, something made sense.
Three days later, Drew, Susie, and I huddled around the phone to call the doctor’s office. Aida, the nurse, answered.
“We’re calling to see if our embryos fertilized?”
“Can you hold a minute?”
It didn’t sound good. It sounded li
ke Aida was putting us on hold so she could find the person whose job it was to crush people’s dreams.
“You have three embryos,” she said, a minute later and a bit more chipper. “The doctor would like to do the transfer this Friday.”
“Wait, Dr. Saroyan said he might cancel the transfer. Have you checked with him? Are you sure this is happening?” I was suddenly skeptical. I wasn’t anticipating good news.
“Oh, for sure it’s happening.”
In an instant, all our attention shifted to Tiffany. We were determined to make the next few days as smooth and comfortable for her as we could. Dr. Saroyan liked to do transfers first thing in the morning, at 7:00 a.m. So rather than have Tiffany leave home at 5:00 a.m. and fight Orange County traffic, we booked her a room in a hotel near the fertility clinic.
We put together a care package full of magazines, fresh cookies, and other assorted treats, then dropped it off at the front desk of the hotel. As we walked out, Drew muttered, “Kristen Lander doesn’t know how good she would’ve had it! Her IPs probably didn’t even say thank you.”
When we arrived at Dr. Saroyan’s office for the transfer, he presented us with a picture. Against a faint gray background were three translucent blobs, almost perfect circles. These were our embryos. I’m very progressive about women’s reproductive rights, and I agree that life begins at birth, not at conception blah blah blah, but I have to admit a strange feeling overcame me as I stared at that picture. They had no defining characteristics whatsoever and I knew they might never be more than blobs on a sheet of paper, but as I stared at them, I saw my children. I would have taken a bullet for those blobs.
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, obviously, because both Drew and Susie were weeping like they were watching the end of Shawshank Redemption.
“Wow, Susie,” I said, looking at the embryos. “It’s like you and I ‘did it’!”
When Tiffany arrived, the doctor took us all into an exam room. I’d heard that embryos were graded for their quality, much like schoolchildren, and I couldn’t wait to see if we had any A students on our hands. Dr. S told me he didn’t normally give letter grades, but that we had “three gorgeous, gorgeous embryos.”
“C’mon,” I said. “Can you rank them?”
“One is a nine out of ten,” he said. “The other two are ten out of ten.”
The mood in the room was electric. “So Susie delivered quality over quantity then?” I asked.
“Yeah, who knew?” Dr. S said. “Maybe we shouldn’t write you off just yet.”
Susie had never looked prouder or more relieved. The same could be said of Drew.
“So we could really be dads?” I asked.
“I mean, there are no guarantees, but I’m a lot more optimistic now than I was after the retrieval.”
“Then how many are we transferring?” Drew asked.
“Given the circumstances, I think we should be aggressive,” Dr. S informed us. “I recommend you transfer all three.”
Drew clutched my hand anxiously. “Three?”
“I just want to increase your odds, but it does mean there’s an outside chance you could have triplets.”
“Let’s do it,” Drew said. He turned to me. “Right?”
I wanted to say no. Triplets terrified me, and so did the thought of reducing three fetuses to two once they’d taken hold in Tiffany’s uterus. Then again, what if we transferred one or two embryos and ended up with no baby at all?
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do all three.”
12
Breeders
Infertility isn’t the kind of subject people tend to talk about at work. “Hey, Frank. How was your weekend?”
“Pretty good. Saw the new Batman movie, tried that new Italian restaurant downtown, found out my sperm count is zero.”
“Oh yeah, how was the food?”
In my case, though, it was a source of endless fascination among my coworkers.
I was in the middle of a six-month freelance gig on a TV show called Smash Hit Video. Each weekly episode was a compilation of shocking caught-on-tape clips featuring anything from bull gorings to runaway speedboat crashes. It was like a sizzle reel of human suffering. On a daily basis, producers would swing by my desk to drop off screeners and say, “This driver flips over nine times and smashes through a concrete wall. A-minus.”
“Does he survive?” I’d ask.
Shrug. “Make sure you say he does.”
If I overlooked my contribution to the decline of humanity, it was a decent job.
The writers’ room at a place like this is probably not all that different from that of a network sitcom because in a better life, that’s where we all imagined ourselves. At any given time, the staff consisted of me and between three and seven straight guys, along with between zero and one woman. We’d goof off, crack jokes, play darts, anything to take our minds off car crashes for a few minutes.
For months now, no topic had been as fascinating as how two dudes could make a baby without having sex with a woman. Nothing was off limits—the cost, the gory details of the procedures, the sperm. On a daily basis, I provided comic fodder and teachable moments for the Smash Hit Video writing staff, and I loved every minute of it.
That all changed once the procedure was finished. Drew and I would have to wait ten days before we’d learn if Tiffany was pregnant, and I wasn’t in the mood to share how I was feeling.
We texted with Tiffany regularly, and her responses were encouraging, which is to say, she felt like crap. “tiff thinks its morning sickness,” Eric wrote once. “she had it real bad when she was preg w gavin.”
I didn’t share these messages with the writer’s room, but I did have one friend I confided in privately: Bernie. He and I had a complicated relationship. We’d known each other forever, which meant since I first moved to L.A. We were classmates in the USC screenwriting program, and we’d kept in touch through a series of weird jobs like this ever since. He was a good guy, so good that he could tell for sure that I was going to hell. I know this because he told me so. “Yes, Jerry,” he said. “You’re going to hell.”
To be fair, this followed about five minutes of me badgering him with, “Just tell me if I’m going to hell! C’mon, just tell me!” Of course, I knew what his answer would be because Bernie believed you only got into Heaven if you accepted Jesus as your savior. Still, I wanted to hear him say it out loud.
Bernie’s very religious, but incredibly, that’s never gotten in the way of him being my friend. We hung out often, and he laughed more than most people at my jokes, which made me like him even more. He even made me a groomsman in his wedding. It always surprised me how he could look past what his religion said about me and be my buddy. Maybe he was just trying to maximize his time with me on Earth because he knew that in the next life, we’d be long-distance pen pals at best. I guess he’s what the nicer Christian people call “a true Christian” in that he tries to love everyone and not judge—unless, of course, some little snot like me really puts him on the spot.
Bernie had always been uncharacteristically quiet when we talked about surrogacy in the office. For a while, I assumed it was because the idea of two men reproducing made the crucifix around his neck quiver and emit smoke. Then, one day, he spoke up.
I’d just informed the room that the success rate for in vitro, as Rainbow Extensions quoted us, was approximately 98 percent.
I’ve never seen anyone do an actual spit take in my life, but that moment was the closest I ever came. Bernie was just sitting down at his desk, and he nearly fell out of his chair. “What? I hope you don’t believe that!”
“Well, it might be a little inflated . . .”
“You think 98 percent of couples who try in vitro get pregnant? It’s more like thirty, forty percent. Tops.”
“Well maybe. If you mean straight couples. But our situatio
n is different. A straight couple going through in vitro has already had problems conceiving naturally. For us, everyone’s healthy. Our surrogate’s already had a baby of her own, our egg donor is young and fertile, and if either of them fall short, they can be replaced with someone else. Gay couples even have two potential sperm donors.” Bernie had been an engineering major in undergrad, so I knew I could make my point using math lingo. “Straight couples are locked into who’s providing the egg and the sperm. In our equation, everyone’s a variable.”
Bernie got quiet. This was one argument he didn’t want to pursue further, although clearly I had hit a nerve. I could tell this was more than just a hypothetical area for him, that he’d pulled his 30 to 40 percent statistic from personal experience.
That’s the good news about breaking through the “you’re going to hell” barrier in a friendship. After that, nothing’s off the table anymore. The next time I was alone with Bernie, I asked him what was going on.
It turned out he and his wife were on their third in vitro attempt. They’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars into procedures, with no luck. This would be their last try.
I told him about Susie’s egg yield and how nervous we were. In a weird way, I guess I was hoping to cheer him up, but he didn’t take any comfort in my story. “Making eggs was never our problem,” he confided. In fact, his wife produced dozens of them. The resulting embryos, though, just weren’t making the cut. Where we got nines and tens, Bernie and his wife were getting twos and threes.
We both wished each other the best of luck and made a silent pact not to bring it up again. It was good to have someone to commiserate with, but I knew the odds of both of us getting pregnant were extremely slim. This was bound to end in heartbreak, at least for one of us.
Finally, the waiting was over. Ten days had gone by, and Aida at the fertility office told me to keep my phone close by because there was no telling when they’d hear back from the lab. The test results wouldn’t come in the form of a “yes” or “no,” just a number that corresponded to the hormone level in Tiffany’s bloodstream. If the number was over one hundred, Tiffany was definitely pregnant. If it was under one hundred, it was a “maybe,” and in that case, there would be a second test, three days later.
Mommy Man Page 14
