by Sara Connell
The sanitary paper crackled beneath my body. I tried to find a position where my spine was straight and I could stay still. I counted my breaths. Inhale, “one.” Exhale, “two.”
I made it to twenty-six before a knock on the door jolted me out of the quiet. I sat up fast, blood rushing to my head. Dr. Bizan entered the room. She was trim and athletic-looking, with honey-blond hair pulled back into a low ponytail.
“I’m terribly sorry for the wait,” she said, shaking my hand and then, as if deciding more was needed to apologize, moving in for a hug. “The practice has just exploded, and I’ve delivered twelve babies this week so far.”
She took a seat in a chair next to the exam table. I liked hearing about the babies Dr. Bizan had delivered that week. The high volume perhaps explained the lack of organization in her office. I wondered if Dr. Bizan worked by herself and if she was a mother, and if she ever got a complete night of sleep.
Dr. Bizan scanned the files I’d had sent over from Dr. Angelli.
“I see here that you haven’t had a regular cycle in a couple years, and that you and your husband would like to start a family,” she said.
I braced myself for a reprimand, but Dr. Bizan moved right along.
“And you’ve tried acupuncture and herbs,” she said, looking up at me from the folder. I nodded.
“That’s great. A lot of my patients become pregnant incorporating alternative therapies. They can be very effective.”
I relaxed further. I uncrossed my legs and laid my hands next to me on the table as Dr. Bizan continued.
“Since you’ve been trying for a while and have not started having a cycle on your own, I’d like you to see a reproductive endocrinologist.”
I felt unnerved at the immediate referral to another doctor. Dr. Bizan continued speaking, but I felt distracted. I watched her lips move, but I heard only one out of every few words.
She handed me a business card. “I recommend Dr. Colaum. Her office is in Evanston, which is a drive, but I believe she’s worth the commute.”
Anxiety prickled in my chest. I thought Dr. Bizan would at least examine me and give some kind of assessment. I felt comfortable with her; I didn’t want to go see someone else. I asked if Dr. Colaum would see me exclusively or if I would see her and Dr. Bizan in tandem.
“Dr. Colaum can advise you on that—after she gets a sense of what’s going on,” she said. “Before you see her, though, I want you to have a test for something called empty sella. Have you heard of it?”
Empty cellar? Sella? I shook my head no. Was empty sella an illness of some kind? Aside from not having a period, I felt healthy and strong in my body and hadn’t had even a cold in three years.
“Empty sella is a condition affecting the pituitary gland that prevents it from signaling the ovaries to ovulate. The first drug many fertility doctors prescribe is Clomid, which is pituitary focused. And if the pituitary isn’t functioning properly, Clomid won’t work. The condition can be detected by MRI.”
Dr. Bizan wrote an order for the test on a notepad and handed me the paper. “Go for the MRI first, and then you’ll go see Dr. Colaum.”
Before she left, I asked if a reproductive endocrinologist (RE) was the same as a fertility doctor. She told me it was.
“I know your focus up to this point has been menstruation and ovulation,” she said. “An RE is the right doctor to help you with that, as well as assisted fertility, if”—I liked that she paused there, at the word “if,” suggesting to me that nothing was for sure yet—”you should need it.”
I said goodbye to Dr. Bizan, not sure if I would even see her again and feeling somewhat depressed by the thought. I remembered a client from the clinic in London who had undergone cycles of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Timed intercourse, artificial insemination, frozen eggs—was that where Bill and I were headed? Were we skipping right over trying to conceive naturally?
I knew Bill would take a practical approach to the appointment with Dr. Colaum. It’s just a consultation, I imagined him saying. But I was shaken anyway, and still light-headed from not having eaten lunch.
It was after four o’clock when I reached my car.
I thought of what I would recommend that a client do in this moment. First: eat something. Second: go home. Maybe take a bath or a walk. Then talk to Bill. I would tell him about Dr. Bizan and the MRI and Dr. Colaum when he came home, and together we’d figure out what we wanted to do.
Chapter 2
I scheduled my MRI for the following month at St. Joseph Hospital, where Dr. Bizan was a resident OB. St. Joseph was a smaller hospital with a branch in Lakeview—not far from our house and Elaine’s acupuncture clinic. I took the first available appointment, on a Saturday morning in April. The next day, my parents called and said they were coming to Chicago for a conference the same weekend.
When Bill asked me if I was planning on telling my mother about the MRI, my immediate response was no. Over the past four or five years, I’d developed a policy of not sharing many personal details with my family. I hadn’t confided in either of my parents about not having a period, or that Bill and I might have a fertility issue. They knew, from comments we’d made, that Bill and I wanted and planned to have children, but they’d never directly asked about the status of our procreative endeavors.
Our relationship had not started out this way. I was the oldest of three girls, and my mother told me she had been ecstatic to have a baby. She had wanted sons—six boys, to be exact, like Jo March and her “little men.” Still, she and my father said they took joy in the shining bundle that arrived at 1:15 PM on February 25, 1975. For the first four and a half years, my parents and I lived in a town house on Hickory Street in Alexandria, Virginia.
There is a picture of me in the back yard of our house; I am about three years old, wearing a navy corduroy dress under a blue-and-red cape my mother had made for me on an old Singer sewing machine. I am in midair, jumping off the top of a slide, arms outstretched, fingers extended, a look of uninhibited exhilaration on my face.
The picture was sent around to the grandparents and great-aunts and uncles that year and is still considered the quintessential photo of my youth. For a time, I could not bear the photo: The image seemed to capture both my spirit and the problem. The bubbling exuberance and the intense thirst for life with which I came into the world became, I felt, a source of conflict between my parents and me.
“Where do you even come from?” my mother would say regularly, mystified at some or other behavior or personality trait. Although she had been a conscious and willing participant in my being there, she seemed unable to understand how something so different from her own introverted self, which craved containment and solitude, could have come from her body, her own DNA.
That I was biologically my parents’ child was clear. I was pale, with light eyes, small and athletically built, like the Irish Caseys of my paternal side. I had my mother’s mouth that turned down at the corners and the dark, wavy hair of her relatives in the Languedoc region of France. So, while there was no question that I was genetically of this family, I began to wonder at times, too, if there wasn’t some other way of being misplaced or adopted, metaphysically perhaps, and whether I might, indeed, have come from someplace else.
It’s not that my mother and I didn’t try. The Mother’s Almanac, a tome that came out the year I was born, states: “For a child to become an interesting adult, they must have an interesting childhood.” My mother embraced this idea. She took my sisters and me on field trips and outings; we were touring the Smithsonian before we could talk. She didn’t mind a mess and let us build forts in the back yard and in the house; when we wanted to play hospital with our dolls and stuffed animals, she brought out real Ace bandages and made “blood” with Karo syrup and food coloring. When I was four, she bought me blank books and journals that I filled first with poetry, drawings, and little stories. She encouraged me to memorize sections of poetry and perform them at home. When I wanted to start acting
in plays, she took me to auditions and rehearsals and avidly attended performances. Day to day, though, our energy seemed mismatched. We would return from a movie and she would be ready for a nap, while I wanted not just to talk about the film, but to be a Jedi Knight, be Black Beauty, galloping around like a horse, neighing and asking to be fed sugar cubes from my mother’s palm.
My sisters arrived two and six years after I did, with personalities that fit more snugly into the familial pod. As we grew, they mirrored the family bewilderment as to why I was so dramatic, so sensitive, so much.
Much was made about the way I would lie listless on the couch for several days after a play closed or, when I was quite young, would work myself into such a state at Christmastime that I would throw up from excitement.
On those Christmas Eves, the duty of caring for me was always left to my mother, who, after having put together the bikes or the dollhouse or whatever bounty Santa had brought us that year, would guide me to the hallway bathroom, hold my head over the toilet, and wrap me in a blanket on the couch.
“You feel things so deeply,” she would say. “It’s exhausting.”
With my father, the issues were different. In some ways I was too much like him—the perfectionism and rigid self-discipline—and in other ways we failed to connect. Why did I have to prefer such activities as rowing and Shakespeare in the Park to something like basketball, which he liked and would have happily coached? “I feel like you don’t love me as much as you love Ellen and Laura,” I told him once, when I was seven.
“I love you,” he said. “Just not the same.”
As a child, I couldn’t hear the difference between “as much” and “not the same,” and I internalized my differentness as abnormality. I responded with compulsive achievement and approval seeking, eventually starving myself in my teens. When my efforts for validation appeared unsuccessful, I withdrew. I knew there was love in my family, but I wasn’t always sure of acceptance.
It was a revelation to me when I moved to England in my twenties, in training to be a counselor, to read Carl Jung and Caroline Myss and to learn about the ways in which families unconsciously play out roles and archetypes. In my family I played the scapegoat—the one with the problem, archetypally; the ugly duckling. My joke nickname, even, for several years in my family, was Ug.
In England, I began to find my voice and my place. This rebirth seemed to require facing past traumas, and seeing and then changing the roles I had played. The healing work I engaged in left me feeling tenuous and raw. I limited family phone calls and visits. I feared that sharing what I was uncovering would be seen as another problem, that my new career in counseling and holistic medicine would be treated as another weird thing I was doing that no one really understood. When Bill and I flew home every year or two to visit my family, we stayed in a hotel.
“We don’t understand why you won’t stay at the house when you visit,” my mother lamented over the phone before Christmas the second year we lived abroad. “What’s wrong with our house? I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t, Mom,” I said, choking back tears. It pained me to hear the hurt in her voice. “I think I just need some time.” I didn’t know for sure how or when I’d be back, but I believed the best chance we had for something real was for me to continue down the path I’d embarked on.
If I ever believed the hotel boundary was unnecessary, it proved its importance to me the only time I denied it, laughably early, only months into our time in England, when my grandfather died.
Bill was in Portugal for a client meeting, and I flew to the funeral on my own. Fragile and unsteady in the earliest stages of my own rebuilding, I descended into the swirl of grief and extended family dynamics. Two days in, I buckled under the criticisms about my appearance (still too thin), and the jokes about my new “so-called” career path. That the comments came mostly from my extended family didn’t matter. I went under as if caught in a riptide.
While my grandmother grieved with her sisters, I offered to clean up the kitchen. I ate off the plates, out of the trash, and shoveled fistfuls of food into my mouth from the gift tins and casserole dishes that caring friends had brought to the house. The sounds of my grandmother’s angst, the French songs she sang with her sisters, the occasional wail, matched the churn of my own inner tumult. When I reached the point where I could no longer force anything else down, I went into the bathroom and vomited over and over and over again, jamming slick fingers into the back of my throat, hard, like the barrel of a gun.
A large mirror ran wall to wall over the toilet and sink. I caught the reflection of my eyes and watched, perplexed, as if someone else were committing this act. I felt sad to dishonor my grandfather in this way, for the desecration of my grandparents’ bathroom. I could hear my therapist’s voice reminding me that perceived criticism from others was a projection of my own self-hatred; how I needed to develop my own sense of worth and validation from within. I could conjure up these ideas in my mind but had no access—as if they were inside a clear but impenetrable balloon. I’d rarely been bulimic, but I now welcomed the violence of the act, the opportunity to taste and expel the self-loathing and the rage I was feeling.
When Bill picked me up from the airport, he found me broken. My eyes were underscored with dark purple semicircles, and I still felt drugged from the binge. “This is why we stay in a hotel,” he said, leading me to a taxi, where I curled into a ball in the back seat.
“Where are your parents going to stay?” Bill asked the week before my parents’ scheduled trip. The visit would be their first to Chicago since we’d moved back from London, almost five years since my grandfather had passed. In the past three years, our relationship had improved. Over phone calls, we had started a gentle process of reconnection. I remembered often the guidance of my therapist in London, who reminded me, “The goal is not to change them. It’s to change you.”
During the two years I’d seen her, I’d made strides. I was eating normally, writing every day, and in training for my licensure in holistic medicine. Before Bill and I moved back to the States, I went to see her for a follow-up session and to say goodbye. She offered me a challenge.
“You are clear about having wanted unconditional love and acceptance from your family growing up, but have you offered the same in return?”
I thought about the ways in which I had focused on what I hadn’t received, the hurts I’d experienced, my longing for certain childhood needs to be met.
“Let that be your practice now.”
I told her that I would try.
The reason for my parents’ upcoming trip to Chicago was a restorative-justice conference that my father wanted to attend. He had just retired from a thirty-five-year career at a government agency and was treating his first year of retirement as a sabbatical, using it to explore his next steps. My mother, who planned to continue at her job writing contracts for a technologies firm for another year or two before retiring, had decided to come along for the weekend.
“Only your father would devote an entire year to personal discovery and spiritual retreat. Other people retire and play golf,” my mother told me over the phone before their visit. I imagined her in the kitchen of our family’s house, putting away baking pans from a batch of lemon squares she’d baked for their book club that night. She relayed the information about my father’s sabbatical with a mock tone of exasperation, but I thought I detected admiration in her voice as well. I wondered if she was in some way living the year vicariously through him, looking to see what wisdom my father might glean and for clues to how she might structure her own sabbatical year, should she ever choose to be so audacious.
The plan for the weekend was for my parents to stay at the hotel downtown where the conference was being held. My mother and I and my aunt who lived in Milwaukee would have a touristy day in Chicago exploring Millennium Park and the Art Institute, followed by lunch at one of the nicer restaurants off Michigan Avenue. Bill and I would see my parents again on Sun
day afternoon, after the conference ended, for tea or a late lunch at our house before they flew home to Virginia.
My MRI at Saint Joseph was scheduled for seven o’clock the Saturday morning of my parents’ visit, but the week before they were due to arrive, the hospital called and offered me the same time a week earlier. I took it, grateful I would have the test out of the way before they came.
On the morning of the MRI, I gave myself plenty of time to drive to the hospital. At six fifteen, the sun had already risen high in a clear sky. Spring, which in Chicago can come as late as May or not at all, had arrived in April that year, and the young pear trees and azalea bushes were bursting with flowers. A good number of people were already outside, watering tulip beds and tending dutifully to their small city yards.
I’d chosen to go to the MRI on my own. The hospital’s confirmation letter didn’t mention bringing a support person, and I didn’t see any reason for both Bill and me to spend the morning inside.
“It’s a good thing I’m not getting an MRI,” Bill said, kissing me goodbye before I left. “I’d freak out in that thing.”
A doctor friend had told us at dinner the night before that some people had to stop the test and be sedated in order to proceed. I tried not to think about it as I parked in the hospital’s lot and followed signs to Radiology. I had never been to a hospital for any outpatient procedure. I felt odd walking through the sliding doors feeling healthy. I had always thought of the whole hospital as the ER—full of crisis and fear.
Taking an early-morning appointment boded well for being seen on time.
I came prepared anyway; I’d brought a book, my journal, and my iPod, onto which I’d downloaded a variety of guided meditations.
