Everyday Stranger

Egg and Bacon

Two years ago Partner Unit and I decided to spend a week driving around Ireland. The truth is, we decided to go as an effort to fix our relationship, since we seemed to be absolutely unable to spend five minutes of our time together without wanting to tear each others’ heads off a la cheeky 90's horror movie. So clearly spending one week in a tiny piece of tin hurtling around unstable Irish roads in search of a good Guinness and authentic diddly-diddly music was a good idea.

Anytime you are trying to fix your relationship, perhaps it is not a good idea to spend a week in a car driving on roads that aren’t even on a map.

We had a massive falling-out one day while in the middle of Kiss My Arse, Ireland, and the one thing that kept us together was the unfailing “we-hate-you-although-we-pretend-to-like-you” attitude of British Airways, as they were unable (unwilling!) to change our tickets. We were prepared to fly back to Sweden and split up. We were even dividing our furnishings and figuring out how to proceed.

Basically, bureaucracy kept us together.

Ooh, sounds like that could’ve been a Sonny and Cher song.

Walking on pins and needles, we came back to Sweden wondering if our relationship would survive. We lived in cold polite formalness, unsure of how to proceed. And then something (Fate? Bureaucracy? Socialism?) intervened.

See, I cannot get pregnant. There are no herbs I can take for this, no surgery to fix this. Trust me when I say it cannot happen. So we had signed up to be on the list for IVF-in vitro fertilization. The waiting list was two years long, and the state pays the whole cost. We had signed up two years ago, and our number was up. We had a choice. Split up, or try for kids.

We did what most stupid adults do.

We tried for kids.

And actually, it helped our relationship for a while.

There are a lot of reasons why I love my Partner Unit, and there are also a lot of reasons why I think that he and I aren’t going to make it. Above all, Partner Unit is much, much more keen on having children than I am. I do very much want children and I really would like to be a mother but I have always wanted to adopt, I have never wanted to give birth. He will not adopt. Perhaps you see an impasse.

I didn’t even really want to do IVF. I had massive reservations. But somehow we went ahead with it, and he became the most considerate man on earth, a drastic change from the vicious monster I had to ride around Ireland with in a Nissan Micro. The treatment, it is safe to say, is absolute hell on earth.

You start with a nose spray. This spray sends your body into a state of menopause-your ovaries don’t produce an egg, instead they close up. But your body pulses with hormones, you positively drink the stuff. It oozes from your pores and suffer the early effects of menopause. You get hot flashes. You sweat like mad.

And above all, you are a mental sicko nut from Hell.

Three weeks of this. I was a complete and utter bitch. I was a fucking terror. I was something that should not have been unleashed on the public. They made horror movies about me. I shouldn’t have even been at work-I remember screaming at a colleague about an option for a product that was actually a GOOD idea. Anger was displayed not in frustration or tears, but in absolute tantrums that would wreck whole rooms of the house. I could feel myself going crazy, but couldn’t do anything about it.

21 days after the nose spray you start taking injections in the stomach to send your ovaries into overdrive, which start producing eggs like mad. And the mood lightens up-a weird calm comes over you, a relaxed peace. You feel as though you are the mother of the world, the reason for light and life, the bearer of life, and all kinds of other strange egoistic and granola-crunchy weirdness.

Then you go in for an ultra-sound to check to see how many eggs you are developing. I had 21 eggs on the go at once. Take about fertile. God, if you’d gotten me around the US Navy fleet the pheromones would have been enough to produce foreign chemical warfare.

Two weeks after that, once your stomach is swollen to roughly the size of Moby Dick beached on the Jamaican coast for a few weeks, you take a final shot to make follicles develop around your eggs so the doctors can remove them. It happens over 24 hours, and suddenly you are in the greatest feeling of discomfort that you have ever experienced. Forget stilettos. Forget that strapless bra that is grabbing hold of your breasts and holding on like a piranha with an attitude. It feels as though you are carrying around blocks of concrete packed nicely around your womb. It’s pure agony.

We made our way to the hospital, me barely able to stand. They hook in an IV, and start preparing for the egg extraction. Partner Unit has to go to another room and find a plastic cup very attractive, oozing into it under the fluorescent lights and using sticky porn. He comes back in by my bed, looking embarrassed and telling me how stressful that was.

Fuck you, dear. You try making yourself a human pincushion pumped full of hormones, then we can talk about stress levels. All you had to do was catch what you would usually dump down the shower drain.

They wheeled me into the room that was full of people. At this point I was mostly unconscious, but still in a lot of pain. They go in with a long needle, and remove all the eggs, and start fertilizing with Junior Partner Units. Then I recover on the bed, and go home.

Only I didn’t go home, I left that afternoon for an overnight business trip to Ireland.

Ireland. *Sigh* it all comes back to Ireland.

I was so swollen I couldn’t even wear regular clothes but had to resort to my weird and creepy collection of "fat clothes". I checked into the hotel and went straight into the bathtub. My Dear Mate, also in Ireland for the same meeting, came and knocked on my hotel door. I let him in and flopped back into the tub, covering myself with a towel for a modicum of modesty, but I barely felt like it even mattered. He sat on the other side of the tub and held my hand, while I talked and cried.

The next day, after the meeting, I flew back to Stockholm, and Partner Unit and I went back to the hospital for implanting of the babies. In Sweden, you can only have a maximum of 2 eggs put back in. Of my 21 eggs, 14 of them conceived. 6 of them became cells that kept dividing, so those were the ones that were kept and put into cold storage. The others were given for stem cell research (which Partner Unit and I opted them to do, only now I must confess I feel a bit strange about).

So it was that two weeks before Christmas, two fertilized eggs were put back into me. Along with a prescription of hormonal vaginal suppositories, which I called my “waxy bullets”, we were given a hyper-sensitive pregnancy test to take in 14 days.

It was the longest wait of my life. I thought about those eggs constantly. I even named them-Egg and Bacon. Although I had gone into the process with severe reservations and trepidations, after they had been planted back inside of me all I wanted was for them to work. I took a dozen pregnancy tests, which went from positive (since the drugs they give you just before they extract the eggs will show up as a positive result) to negative (meaning said drugs were out of my system) to positive.

Positive.

I was pregnant.

A few days after that (and on New Years’ Eve), we went to a hardware store for some things. I went to the bathroom (since I have a bladder the size of a quarter) and noticed blood all over the place. I bled all evening and into the morning, and in the morning, I took a pregnancy test.

It was negative.
Egg and Bacon were gone.
I was crushed.
Devastated.
How…?

I did what any distraught woman does-I took it out on my hair. I had been dyeing my hair Julia Roberts’ red for 12 years, and I went back to my original nearly-black color.

We tried again with another egg in May, 2002, whom I named Twiglet. I never got pregnant, and I never thought I would do.

We still have 3 eggs in the freezer, and they will be kept there until October 2005, at which point Swedish law dictates they be destroyed. But not only am I still freaked out about losing Egg and Bacon, I may lose my job in three weeks, Partner Unit and I haven't been getting on so well, and I am not sure what to do about my life. Not to mention that I am as excited at the prospect of taking the pregnancy hormones as I am about being put in the elevator of a 65-floor building and then having the cable cut.

Maybe I am stupid, and certainly I am a hypocrite since I am agnostic, but I like to think that someday, when I die, I will be met by the loving arms of Kim, my Grandfather, and Egg and Bacon.

In the meantime, I am simply grateful for the time that I had in which I was not one person, but three. Moments like that come once in a lifetime.

That was my once.

-H.

Posted by Everydaystranger at October 29, 2003 08:52 AM | TrackBack