by JT Lawrence
Fortunately (for me) she then turned her attention to Mike. She took some of the freezing water and, wait for it, POURED IT INTO HIS EAR. He wasn't expecting it (obviously), and certainly wasn't expecting it to be so damn cold, and he screamed. A proper scream that reverberated on the close clay walls. Oh my God, I laughed so much I almost wet my shorts. I laughed and laughed. I was practically hysterical. Trying to not laugh made me laugh more. He tried to shake the water out of his eustachian tube (this is where his surfing experience should have come in handy), but the magic (read: filthy) water was there to stay. After all the commotion she still wanted to pour water in his other ear. And he let her. And he screamed again. I was finished.
Then it was my turn again, giving Mike a moment to shake and smack his head like someone deranged. She gave me the whole bottle of water, told me to drink it all (thankfully not right there and then, but rather as homework) and then put a shiny plastic tiara on my head. I will never forget that picture in my mind of Mike trying to get the water out of his ears and me, in a tiara, cuddling and kissing a picture of some stranger's baby, trying to stifle my maniacal laughing. If it had happened anywhere else, I'm sure we would have been given straitjackets and our own padded cells.
At last, we were let out into the sunshine, and we scrabbled in our pockets for cash. We weren't expecting an actual person or ritual, just an old cave, so we didn't bring our wallets on the hike. We only had a couple of notes and coins (certainly not enough for a miracle, we were sure) and handed them over sheepishly. I think she had expected more, explaining that the money was for ‘the angels', but we didn't have anything else to give.
The little boy had waited outside for us and was happy to see us again, but when he realised we were going home, he started crying. We both gave him a hug and told him not to cry, which made him cry more.
We said goodbye and ran down the hill, our spirits high from all the strangeness and laughing. We passed a bliksem-drunk man on his way up, tried to give him a wide berth, but that didn’t stop him from shouting some slurry profanities in our direction. Nothing like a dirty drunk to bring you back down to earth.
In the car, Mike was, like, ‘I can't believe you drank that siff water.'
I was, like, ‘Me neither!’
‘That was not a good idea.’
‘I think I’ve got Hepatitis.’
‘You’ll be lucky if that’s all you’ve got,’ he said, and I agreed, and we laughed some more as we tried not to run over any sheep on our way out.
NO CRYING OVER BAD EGGS
I had some more blood tests done. I thought that even though the rest of my fertility was trash, I hadn’t yet heard anything TOO bad about my eggs, and happily (naïvely) assumed that they were A-okay. Or at least okay enough to be able to conceive. Dr G had other ideas.
‘Look, guys, there is no delicate way to say this.’
‘Spit it out, doc, we can handle it. Probably heard worse.’
‘You’re old.’
‘We’re not old! We’re thirty-one! That’s like the new twenty! We’re still shiny!’
‘You’re old on the inside. Not shiny on the inside. Old and shrivelled.’
‘That’s a bit harsh.’
‘Have you seen the state of your babymaker? I have. And it’s Not Pretty.’
‘Wow, feel free not to sugar-coat the truth.’
‘We don’t have time for sugar. We don’t know how long you have before your endo comes back. Plus, your eggs are running out. They’re not great eggs by any stretch of the imagination, but at least while you’ve still got some, we’ve still got something to work with.’
My baby cannon cringes. She’s had enough of the barrage of insults. No wonder she is feeling hollow-cheeked.
So my eggs, apart from being rare, are past their sell-by date. Not a good combination. It's not the end of the world, it just means that whatever we plan to do, we need to do it as quickly as possible. There is no time to cry over bad eggs. There's been plenty of crying over dodgy uteri and tangled up nether-organs: no more tears now. It's time for action. Every month that passes literally lowers our chances. He recommends three timed cycles starting now (a month after the surgery). I've a had a bit of a spring-clean down there and a septum snip, so there's a chance they'll work. If they don't, we'll go straight to IVF.
Without even discussing it between ourselves, Mike and I both nodded decisively at the doc. All the conversations we have had about reasons not to do IVF from our collective memories. Yes, we nodded, let’s get on with this thing.
‘Okay,’ we agreed, ‘we don’t want to wait too long.’
Dr G looked at us. ‘You’re here because you already waited too long.’
BABIES EVERYWHERE
I’m feeling better about everything, actually. I’ve had the surgeries, I’m all cleaned up Down There, I’m definitely going to ovulate, and I have an amazingly good-looking sperm donor on hand. This might be the month I fall pregnant. I know, I know, it’s a long shot, but there is a chance. Every day this month is brightened by that glimmer.
Have you ever seen the Starbucks espresso ads? They won an award at Cannes a while back. I cannot watch them without laughing. Something about the over-the-top humour appeals so much to me.
I love the ‘Glen' (Eye of the Tiger) execution. My favourite is the one in the open-plan office where everyone is entirely hopped up on caffeine. Hilarious! My copywriter at Jupiter used to joke that I was like the broody female character (crazy-eyed: "Babies Everywhere!" she shouts, while stuffing her cardigan full of office supplies, to look pregnant.) He used to act it out in our office, and we'd piss ourselves. I loved working with him, he'd always make me laugh. He did especially good impersonations of Doctor Evil from Austin Powers. We did some good work together and were very close. "Babies Everywhere!"
All of which reminds me of one of his (many) pearls of infinite wisdom, which has stood me in good stead:
“If you don’t laugh, you cry.” — Stephen Anderson
The humiliation continues. Part of this first medicated cycle is to have a PCT: Post-coital test. This does not involve, as you may think, a pub-like pop quiz after a good shag. Instead, we are to ‘do our homework’ during our ovulation window, and go to the clinic first thing the next morning (without showering) to witness how Mike’s swimmers are faring up the creek.
Apparently, there is such a thing as ‘hostile cervical mucus'. It means that the cervical environment is acidic and, as you can guess, not suitable for sperm.
A test! I feel completely unprepared. Should I be eating more yoghurt or something?
TMI: PROJECT DOUCHE
I’m going to go out tonight to drink a vast amount of whisky. Okay, I’m in the middle of a medicated cycle so I’ll just have one and make my friends do the rest of the drinking for me. As you have probably gathered, the PCT did not go well. In fact, it couldn’t have gone any worse.
So we're there in the room at the clinic, blinking weary eyes, so early that neither of us has even registered that it's morning. The doc takes a swab and smears it on the little glass slide and puts it under the microscope, which shows us what is happening on the big screen adjacent to it. That woke me up.
I think my jaw hung open for a while, as Dr G sort of gathered himself and started talking. I didn't hear anything for those first few minutes. My attention was wholly focused on the massacre before my eyes: all I could see were hundreds of dead or dying sperm. The fallen soldiers were one thing — ghost-sperm! — but watching the others writhe and struggle and swim in wounded circles was just too much. And I was the one who had maimed and killed them. I could almost hear them groaning in agony. In my imagination, one particularly brave tadpole, shivering at the beginning of his death throes, urges the rest of his squad to go on without him.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. WTF.
I had given the poor things an acid bath — they never stood a chance.
‘Never’ being the operative word that makes t
his difficult to accept: Of all the months of ‘not trying,’ followed by the months of ‘really trying’: taking my temperature, prodding my body for signals, the carefully-timed ovulation-window sex … of all those months (18 failed cycles), all that hope that was dashed, over and over again, and all that pain, and actually, there had never been a chance. THERE HAD NEVER BEEN A CHANCE.
I feel like I’ve been swiped sideways. I feel like (emotionally-speaking) I was walking down the street, perfectly alive, and some asshole in a BMW skipped a stop sign and sent me flying. Irrationally, I felt the need to apologise to Mike. I thought that if someone had killed thousands upon thousands of my soldiers, I would at least expect a card and a fruit basket.
‘Wow,' I said when I finally regained my ability to speak. ‘That's not good.'
I expected Dr G to don a hazmat suit and usher me out of his building. It was clear that I was radioactive and a hazard to the general population.
I expected him to say: ‘Holy Moses! I've never seen such a gruesome slaughter. Who would have guessed that a seemingly benevolent vagina could be responsible for such annihilation?' and then: ‘Would you mind if we took you and your cervical environment along to our next PCT WTAF conference? I'm sure the fraternity will find your mucus entirely fascinating.'
Instead, he recommended I douche with bicarb. I was, like, do what with what-what? I have never douched in my life. I thought douching had gone the way of trepanning and toothbrush moustaches. I thought the last people to douche were promiscuous French women in the 1800s. I thought only people with a severe form of OCD would even consider douching nowadays; it's an old wives tale that I have absolutely no interest in trying. He said the alkalinity of the bicarb should neutralise the acidity of the CM, creating a less hazardous playground for the swimmers. Those poor guys. I don't want to be the fertility version of Idi Amin. It looks like I have no choice but to try it.
Project Douche
Tools required:
1x (larger-than-expected) douching instrument (syringe with bulb) (Strange-looking thing - I think I may have gasped when the nurse whipped it out of her supplies cupboard. I was, like, Holy Moly! What the hell is that thing?)
1x warm bath
1x box of bicarbonate of soda (or, in Afrikaans, Koeksoda! Koek, get it? Hee.)
1x teaspoon
1x glass beer tankard that you will never drink out of again. Not because it goes anywhere near your — ahem — hostile mucus, but because every time you see it, you will be reminded of the not-romantic exercise of irrigating your punani.
Also handy: supreme gymnastic talent, or, lacking that, a highly developed sense of humour.
Method:
1. Run a shallow bath. Not too hot. Hot baths are bad for fertility. Don’t you know anything?!
2. Mix one heaped teaspoon of bicarb with one tankard of warm water. Don't be distracted by the logo on the flask. This is not the time to think about having a nice cold beer.
3. Get in the bath.
4. Use the bulb syringe to suck up bicarb solution from the tankard.
5. Kind of angle yourself backwards, on your haunches, while simultaneously holding on for dear life and squirting the solution up your nethers. This requires a reasonable amount of dexterity and determination.
6. Relax, and let it out.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 as many times as you need to, to finish the solution, trying to not pull any muscles or slip and brain yourself on porcelain.
8. While practising your unique form of douche-yoga, accidentally knock over the box of bicarb so that it lands in a puddle of spilt bathwater. Swear a little. Crave a cigarette, even though you haven’t smoked in five years.
9. Try again. In the middle of a particularly challenging pose, you hear footsteps outside the bathroom. As if caught in a lewd act, you immediately drop everything and start whistling.
10. When your husband comes in, you sit on the bulb syringe to hide it and pretend to drink the bicarb solution out of the tankard.
11. ‘Staying hydrated!’ you shout at him, in case he doesn’t buy it. You add an enthusiastic thumbs-up and smile with all your teeth.
12. He looks at you as if you are insane. There is a little fear in his eyes. He backs out of the bathroom door, perhaps even the front door, grabbing his toothbrush and sleep shorts on his way.
13. When it is over, lie back in the cold, quimmy water and wonder what the hell your life has come to. A pre-sexy-time bath used to consist of a glass of red wine, baby oil, and scented candles. Stare at the brightly-lit bulb syringe and feel suitably depressed.
14. Now snap out of it! Time to feel sexy! Forget that you just used a common baking ingredient to neutralise your acid bath of a vagina, and hope that your husband decided to stick around.
15. Hubba-hubba, bow-chick-a-wow-wow, etc.
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (with apologies to Robert Rodat)
Another PCT today. (Waking up when it’s still dark to sit in traffic to come to a clinic to wait in a waiting room to have your babymaker swabbed and then put under a microscope is so awesome.)
I watched the screen through my fingers, not being able to take another battleground scene — I sense that the first one will forever haunt me, to the soundtrack of ‘Saving Private Ryan’ — but yay for old wives tales and bulb syringes: the swimmers were alive! I felt like high-fiving my cervix.
ANGRY VAGINAS AND SANGRIA
Mike has taken to calling my CM ‘The Hostiles’ (from the TV series ‘Lost’).
So now, douching has become ‘taking out The Hostiles’. Sometimes, during sex, I picture a tribe of creepy island survivors camping out on the dirty upside-down hill of my cervix. It’s them against The Swimmers.
My female friends and I refer to hostile cervical mucous as ‘Angry Vagina'. The first time I heard the phrase, I spat sangria out of my nose.
‘I also have an Angry Vagina!’ says an acquaintance at a party, chinking my glass of wine. Forget the First Wives Club, we’re the Angry Vaginas. And there are a lot of us. Does naturally sperm-friendly CM even exist? we wonder out loud to each other in someone’s kitchen at a party. If it does, I bet it’s as rare and difficult to harness as a unicorn’s fart.
I referred to my Angry Vagina the other day in company not yet familiar with the term, and she sprayed her drink out of her nose, too.
Nose-irrigation: the initiation ceremony for Angry Vaginas all over the world.
Then I told her about my visit to the Fertility Cave and Mike shrieking when the witchdoctor poured freezing water into his ear. I had to pour her a new gin and tonic.
5
Throw Her to the Wolves
“Throw Her to the Wolves” was originally written as a radio play.
The grey-haired headmistress kept her voice low. "Is it essential to keep the pupils here? What kind of questions do you have? Who do you need to speak to?"
“We don’t know yet,” said detective Seko.
“Let’s talk in my office,” Grashawn says, already striding in that direction. “Miss Simpson, you come, too.”
The young woman looked startled. “Me?”
Headmistress Grashawn stopped. “Has no one told you?”
“Er—”
“She’s in your homeroom,” said the headmistress. “Jessica Steyn. The poor girl Mr Damster found—”
The woman began to wring her hands. "Oh, dear. I didn't know."
“It’s why we need you as a temp today. The class’s regular teacher couldn’t handle coming in. Thank goodness for your agency; I’d be stuck without them.”
“Not the easiest way to start your first day at Wolverhampton,” said the detective, and Angela Simpson gave him a tight smile. They reached the headmistress’s office and spilled inside, closing the door behind them.
“Please,” said Grashawn. “Have a seat.”
“Thank you, headmistress,” said detective Seko.
Grashawn looked amused, despite the dread that painted her face pale. “You don’t have to call
me headmistress.”
“Sorry,” said the detective. “It comes naturally to me. I also went to a boarding school like this. Well, not quite like this—”
“Of course,” said the headmistress.
“Our school certainly wasn’t the top school in the province,” he continued.
“In the country,” murmured Miss Simpson.
The detective looked at the fidgeting teacher. “Sorry?”
"Wolverhampton High School for Girls is the top-performing school in the country. Well, it used to be, anyway, until this—"
They were all jolted by the sudden loud ringing of the telephone on Grashawn’s desk. She reached over and cancelled the call.
“Mrs Grashawn,” said Seko. “Jessica Steyn was your top swimmer, correct?”
The phone rang again, and she cut off the sound with a stab of her large-knuckled finger. “Damn press,” she muttered. “They’re like barracudas at a sardine run.”
It immediately rang again, and Grashawn whipped the line out, leaving the three of them in silence. Detective Seko cleared his throat. “That’s what her father kept saying. That Jessica was such a strong swimmer, that she’d earned her national colours three years in a row. They had high hopes for the Olympic team.”
"Yes," said the headmistress. "She was the best swimmer we've ever had. We were very proud of her. That's why she was in the pool enclosure. It's out of bounds—and locked—for pupils from 6 pm till 6 am, but we had a special arrangement with her. She had her own key so she could train at any time."
