Inconceivable (24 page)

“I understand. But it’s such a private moment. Also, it’s going to be a C-section, and there are many variables with your health and the baby’s health.”

“I think to surrender to giving this gift, I have to remove myself mentally from the scene. This is not about us or me. Maybe if they were there, I could focus on their joy, not our loss. This is our gift of life to Paul and Shannon.”

“Regardless of how we do this, it is a gift. We really have to think about how this will play out in reality. The range of emotions in that room will be tremendous. I think we need that moment with you and me and the baby.”

“I just don’t know. I mean, it seems wrong to deny them that.”

“The entire situation is wrong. Carolyn, if Paul and Shannon are in the delivery room with us, it will be like a birth and death in the same room at the same time. We may never get over that memory. I believe there needs to be separation.”

“Can’t we all celebrate this birth together?”

“I do not think it is possible to predict how everyone will react, including ourselves.”

“I don’t know. I have to think about that, Sean. You might be right.”

Carolyn was so gracious to give this further consideration. I just had a gut feeling that the solution was two deliveries. The first would be with Carolyn and me, followed by a second delivery when I brought the baby to Paul and Shannon just minutes later. If that upset Paul and Shannon, I’d share with them that it was my decision, not Carolyn’s.

I pedaled harder as the sun beat down and sweat soaked my shirt. This process had been beating me down mentally. For the past five months, I’d felt like I had slowly cut off blood flow to the optimistic part of my brain. When people asked how I was doing, I just said, “Okay.” Not “good” or “great.” “Okay” was no way to live life, and even that response was a white lie. Nothing I was experiencing seemed okay. It seemed like a living hell, actually.

After my workout, I walked through the silent house and upstairs to shower. In the mirror, I saw my weary face. These five months seemed to have aged me five years. The groom in the wedding picture in our bedroom appeared younger every time I looked at him. That’s what I should have been saying when people asked me how I was doing. I could truthfully say, “I understand now how one ages.”

As I settled in bed, Carolyn called. The conversations we had while she was away were always brief because they simply reminded us of our separation. Earlier that day, they had all gone to the beach, and the boys swam and played baseball while MK played with toys on a blanket. I felt my loneliness mitigated by how glad I was that Carolyn was finding some comfort around her mom and dad.

It was when I turned out the light that I missed her most of all. I thought about what life would be like if I had no family. Each night just before I fall asleep, my mind turns to prayer.

God, thank you for today. I am deeply blessed with a wonderful family and loyal friends. Please give me the courage to get up tomorrow and embrace another day and the strength to carry our cross a bit further. I need to search for more empathy for the clinic and the Morell family. Keep safe the unborn child and Carolyn and our children. Please forgive my shortcomings of the day and help those who had tragedy hit today. Please allow peace and understanding to someday enter my being.

Could I someday find peace and understanding on this journey? The silence of the empty house did not calm the turmoil within me but instead forced me to address it. I regretted all those times I had
opposed Carolyn on the infertility treatments. I knew this opposition hurt her. I should have been more supportive during that part of our marriage. Family really was the most important thing in my life; I wouldn’t know how to define myself in the world without it. The joking around of the boys, Mary Kate’s squeals of glee—this was everything Carolyn and I wanted in the world. As I finally drifted off to sleep, I was comforted by the idea that we were trying to have another child and Jennifer was there to help us.

C
HAPTER
15

Managing Two Pregnancies

CAROLYN

W
HEN THE KIDS AND
I returned from my parents’ house in the second week of August, I found that I was suddenly managing two pregnancies: one with someone else’s baby and the one we hoped for with our surrogate. I was well into my third trimester, while Jennifer was in Atlanta getting ready to have our embryos transferred into her. We’d had them shipped to our new fertility doctor in Atlanta in a cryopreservation tank. We knew so well what was happening to Jennifer that I could picture it. The incredible reality was that a transfer was taking place at the same time that I was having my weekly prenatal visit. Sean and I prayed that our embryos would survive the thaw and be of good quality. Before I entered Linda’s room for my ultrasound, I checked my cell phone to make sure I hadn’t missed a call from the doctor in Atlanta. He had pledged to report on the progress.

I was literally of two minds—my thoughts split right down the middle—as I watched the heartbeat of Little Man on the ultrasound screen and saw Linda take his measurements. The other half of my mind was imagining a lab technician in Atlanta carrying our embryo straw into the room where Jennifer lay on the operating table.

“You know, your placenta is still covering your cervix,” Linda
said, pulling me away from my imagination. “We would have hoped it would move by now. Let me get Dr. Read so she can take a look.”

Linda left the room, and I looked at Sean.

“Is this bad?” he asked.

Before I could answer, Dr. Read was in the room taking a look at the ultrasound screen.

“Yup. That’s a complete previa. Man. Usually placentas move off of the cervix as the baby gets bigger,” she said. “This little guy is breech, and he is probably going to stay that way because there’s no room for him to go head down. I’m a little concerned that we could be looking at a placenta accreta.”

“What’s that?” Sean asked.

Dr. Read explained that a placenta accreta is when the placenta, which usually detaches from the wall of the uterus during childbirth, remains intermingled with the uterus.

“If the placenta is too deeply attached to the uterus, we might have to perform a hysterectomy when you deliver this baby,” Dr. Read said. “The danger is that giving birth to the baby would force me to cut out the placenta too, and Carolyn could hemorrhage severely, a life-threatening condition.”

Sean gasped, but oddly enough, I didn’t. My childbearing days were done. We all knew that. I had mourned that months before. My thoughts were on the lives we were shepherding this day. I was more worried about my embryos and Little Man.

“Could this hurt the baby?” I asked.

“Only if you start to bleed through the cervix. I am going to order an MRI to rule out the accreta. We can’t do that until thirty-two weeks, so until then we will just watch and pray that we get good news from the MRI.”

Dr. Read excused herself, and Sean and I exchanged befuddled expressions.

“Boy. You two just can’t catch a break, and this little guy, he needs to be more cooperative,” Linda said. Apparently Little Man
was positioned in a way that was making the rest of the ultrasound difficult for Linda.

“Okay, little boy. You are in the wrong place,” she said to my belly, and I burst out laughing.

“Linda, what do you expect? He has never been in the right place. Not from the get-go. In fact, I bet he is going to be the kid in the class who is always in the wrong place. ‘Where’s Little Man?’ the teacher will ask when he is missing from the library. ‘He went to gym, teacher!’ the kids will shout back. He’s going to need a map, a GPS, and a lot of directional assistance to get through life.”

We were all laughing, which was a nice reprieve considering the news we had just been given and the news we were waiting to get.

As Sean and I left the office, my phone rang, and I recognized the Atlanta area code immediately.

“Carolyn, I’ve got good news. We thawed three of your five embryos, and you have two good-looking ones.”

“Two? Does that mean one didn’t survive the thaw?”

“Yes, but the two you have are looking really good. I just want to clarify. We are transferring two, right?”

“Two it is. Thanks, Dr. Straub. That is the best news I’ve had all day.”

I hung up, looked at Sean, and smiled. Two embryos survived the thaw, and now I had two more unborn lives to pray for. I felt incredibly lucky.

After the transfer, the clinic e-mailed me an image of the embryos. When I got the images, I studied them.

I rummaged through my files and found the pictures of Mary Kate’s embryo. They didn’t look anything alike.

MK was a five-day-old embryo. These were two-day embryos, which were smaller and had far fewer cells. MK had over one hundred cells at the time of transfer. These embryos only had two cells. I couldn’t compare them. What about Little Man’s embryo picture?

I opened Sean’s CF binder and right away I found the picture of
the embryos transferred into me in February, thanks to my husband’s handy organizational system. I removed the picture from the plastic sleeve and stared at it. I hadn’t seen it since the embryo transfer, when I held it and prayed for my potential babies. I took note of the label attached to the bottom that had all of our personal information on it, including my date of birth, which I recognized—again—as wrong. And once again, I also wondered about what could have been, what should have been.

The embryos kind of looked the same, I realized, although my embryos had less fragmentation than Little Man’s. Because he’d been a five-day-old embryo, Little Man had ten to twelve cells at the time of the transfer.
Well, if he can come out of a poor-grade embryo
, I thought,
surely one of these could turn into a baby for our family
.

I printed the picture, cut it out so that it was the size of an index card, labeled it “Carolyn and Sean Savage’s Embryos,” and hung it on the bulletin board next to my computer. They represented hope. Human potential. I was glad they were in Jennifer and thanked God for bringing her into our lives. She was truly an angel to us, and I would never, ever forget what she was doing for our family.

Two weeks later, the nurse called to tell me that Jennifer’s pregnancy hormones—her beta HCG—measured 90. Definitely pregnant! As I heard the words come out of the nurse’s mouth, it was as if my world righted itself. I had never been so thankful for a phone call in my entire life. Maybe this was the way it was supposed to be. A baby was coming to our family.

Two days later, Jennifer underwent another blood test to make sure her pregnancy hormones were still rising. This time the nurse’s tone was guarded. “The HCG level is going up, but not as quickly as we would like to see. We are going to test her again on Friday.”

The blood work was acceptable, though, so there was still hope.

Two days later, the nurse’s tone was cautionary. The HCG was still going up, but again, not at the rate they would have liked to see.

“The doctor will test her again on Monday.”

It was a long wait that weekend, but like a trooper, Jennifer went in for a fourth blood draw, and we both waited anxiously that Monday afternoon. The call came to my cell.

It’s going to be okay. Have faith.

“Carolyn, we have terrific news for you. The beta level was 700 today. That is right on schedule. Congratulations!”

I thanked her for calling and hung up to call Sean.

“Hey. All is perfect. Her levels are right where they are supposed to be!”

“What a relief!” was all he could manage.

“They are going to check it again next Monday, and then she’ll have an ultrasound on September 3, to check for a heartbeat.”

I rubbed my belly, talking to Little Man. “You are going to have a buddy, Little Man! Thanks for pulling some strings for us!”

As my pregnancy progressed, Dr. Read thought it would be advisable to involve a perinatologist, a high-risk obstetrician, in my care. The new doctor suggested that I have appointments twice a week to catch even the most subtle changes immediately. Sean and I were happy with the plan, even though it required a lot of me. My mom had moved in with us for the rest of the pregnancy, no matter how long or short it was going to be. Having her around freed me up to rest and to attend my appointments without dragging Mary Kate around. The perinatologist said he’d probably schedule my C-section at thirty-seven weeks.

Thirty-seven weeks? I couldn’t imagine that I would get that far.

The following Monday I got another call from the nurse in Atlanta. “Well, the news is not good. Jennifer’s HCG is only 3,500. We would have expected it to be over 5,000 by now. The ultrasound is on Thursday. Just know, we are all pulling for you.”

I hung up the phone feeling like I had been sucker-punched. How could this be God’s plan? I ran the test results by Dr. Read at my appointment later that day, and she expressed concern. On the bright side, Little Man passed his nonstress test with flying colors,
and he looked great in the ultrasound. All we could do with regard to our baby was pray and wait until Thursday.

Jennifer’s appointment on September 3 was at 2:00
P.M
. I had a 1:45 appointment with the perinatologist. I was so nervous waiting for the results of Jennifer’s ultrasound that I couldn’t concentrate on anything else, and I was surprised to notice that my anxiety was not reflected in my blood pressure reading.

“We are going to start with the nonstress test!” I lay back on the table while the nurse positioned the belts across my rather large pregnant belly. “You have to stay hooked up for at least twenty minutes,” she explained. “So, lie back, relax, and try not to talk.”

I pressed my phone to my chest, closed my eyes, and prayed.

Please, God. Please let my baby live. Please let my baby live.

A few minutes passed as I listened to Little Man’s heart beat strongly on the monitor and pondered the ridiculousness of this situation. I wondered if, in the history of mankind, a woman had ever been hooked up to a fetal monitor while waiting for a call from another woman about her own baby’s heartbeat? I continued to pray for both heartbeats, and when the phone rang, both Little Man and I jumped.