In Vitro Fertility Goddess

Miscarriage Support

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"I just wanted to say I 'L O V E D' In Vitro Fertility Goddess with a capital L. I myself have had 3 miscarriages this year and I am at it again for the fourth time. I don't know what I would of done if I hadn't of read your book because in a way it has saved me and slowed down the tears. No-one around me really and truly understood my pain but when I read the book I knew someone did - at last! You've got no idea how truly grateful I am Jodi to have read your most deepest feelings about the horrendous memory or memories of miscarriage.

IN VITRO FERTILITY GODDESS 

CHAPTER I

‘MISS CARRIAGE'

April.

Was it the dishevelled refugee-looking couple with the newborn baby at the Japanese restaurant or my indulging in a large celebratory sip of twenty-five dollar Cabernet Sauvignon that somehow pre-empted the loss of this, my first pregnancy?

M and I were out having a pregnancy - finally after-fifteen-months-of-trying - congratulations dinner with friends when two people staggered in, unshaven, rumpled, dead-eyed and carrying a tiny baby in a capsule. They were directed to the table next to us and the female (took a while to distinguish which was which) nodded off whilst looking at the menu and was awoken by the glassware-shattering cry of the baby. For a minute I thought they must be junkies but junkies aren't plump and dozing in Japanese restaurants, they're skinny and dozing in alleyways behind Japanese restaurants.

We watched, fascinated and horrified, as she spent the rest of the night jigging it up and down in the courtyard between running in and swallowing bits of sushi her partner had ordered. Whilst the baby was being silenced with bottles of milk, he kept downing bottles of beer until he also nodded off and had to be woken by her to leave. The whole scene had been quite scary and, as pointed out by the non-pregnant couple we were with, a kind of omen. Like the investment ads where you are walking on the beach and meet yourself as a thirty years older person, we had been seeing ourselves in twelve months time.

Later that night I couldn't get to sleep, partly due to sub-human couple but then everything was quite bizarre since I'd found I was pregnant six days ago. For a start, the reactions of people when told our news were not normal, at least nothing like I'd imagined. Some friends were so shocked and disbelieving, it was as if instead of saying, "Guess what we're pregnant!" I'd said, "Guess what, I've decided to become a man!"

Once the news had sunk in, the offers to celebrate indicated to us that the majority of our friends had no idea about pregnancy. I was personally invited to nightclubs, bars, drag shows etc. as celebration venues (all of which I politely declined). Instead, I sent M out with one of our girlfriends in place of myself and it turned into a kind of weird Sex And The City thing, the father-to-be with a gang of single women on the prowl and shouting him so many drinks he can't recall how he got home.

This had happened the previous night whilst I stayed home watching TV and sipping herbal tea, thinking it was going to be a lonely pregnancy. When I had turned down the offers of partying, nobody offered any alternatives and when I suggested they could pop over for a cup of tea they were all too busy with previously unmentioned projects. Suddenly I had become a kind of castaway on my own inner city island. That's why the next night I had agreed to go out and even have a sip of wine, so as to be reconnected.

Through the night afterwards kept waking up in cold sweat, thinking I was ninety years old, shrivelled up with no hair or teeth and suffering from incontinence. In the morning discovered incontinence was real - was bleeding a little. I didn't worry, just put a pad in my underpants and forgot about it. By night the bleeding seemed to have stopped.

For the next few days the bleeding came and went but each time it happened it was more severe. Still I was oblivious to any danger. It had taken me well over a year to conceive this baby and was in an utter state of euphoria that it had happened at all. Even on the fourth night after dinner, when I was lying on the couch in substantial pain with two tampons inside me to try and stem the bleeding, it didn't occur to me that I was miscarrying. Possibly this was due to the highly misleading First Aid book at work, in which the Miscarriage section had ‘Haemorrhage from Vagina' and ‘Expulsion of Foetus from Vagina' as symptoms, and treatment such as ‘Wrap in Shock Blanket' and ‘Put foetus and contents of womb in plastic bag and secure', I didn't equate it at all with what was happening to me. I wasn't expelling foetuses or requiring shock blankets. Besides, I wasn't one of those women who'd digested an entire library of pregnancy books and organised suspended giraffes and Humpty Dumpty friezes on bedroom walls before I'd even started trying for a baby. And I never knew anybody who had a miscarriage (or admitted they had).    

What possessed me to reach into the toilet early the next morning when I was gushing the equivalent of Niagara Falls I don't know, some prehistoric Simian urge like the one compelling me to reproduce. (I have a friend  who firmly believes the whole push to get pregnant is not based on anything rational or irrational but a deeper more Stone Age-like primitive urge that surfaces, and I have to agree. Would also explain all the Neanderthal types reproducing in large numbers). It wasn't a foetus I found, just a scrap of flesh - a tiny embryo. Instead of putting it in a plastic bag and securing, on impulse I flushed it down the toilet, an action I instantly regretted. "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! WHAT HAVE I DONE?" I screamed, before commencing to wail uncontrollably and fling myself at objects in the manner of a black-clad Mediterranean widow at a funeral.            

"Come on, we're going to hospital," said M shakily, grabbing my two flailing hands and leading me to the car. All the way to the hospital I was a madwoman, thrashing around in my seat and sobbing wildly that I had flushed my baby down the toilet.

When we arrived, I was jolted out of my demented state by the scene at Casualty. It was exactly like a kind of nightmarish Departure Lounge, rows of dirty plastic seats stuffed with borderline humans trying to out- groan each other, some with eyes rolling in their heads, others semi- conscious. Was awful, awful! Instantly felt about ten times worse then found there was about a six hour wait to see a doctor. The only seat free was next to large sweaty wildebeest emitting alarming guttural bellow/pre-vomit-and-possibly-explosion sounds. Every time he did one the whole row of seats vibrated. I looked around wildly, why wasn't he being forcibly removed for the safety of other patients? I couldn't bring myself to sit within ten-metre radius of him so instead crouched in urine- odour area near Exit door, trying to avoid stray droplets from tuberculosis sounding cougher on other side of doorway.

After about twenty minutes of disease prone horror M could stand it no longer and demanded the whereabouts of a private hospital as we had insurance. This had the effect of animating the waxwork behind the desk who promptly shoved a phone book under his screen and even said we could call them from his phone.

Another twenty minutes and I was in a wonderful non explosive-wildebeest infested place, surrounded by caring nurses all focused on me, and on a bed with a drip in my arm. Ultrasounds, blood tests and unspeakably painful probing followed before I was admitted for the night. They gave me a bed in of all things the maternity wing as it was the only area with beds (apart from the birthing suite). So I got to cry all night in unison with the newborns.

The next morning after another probe by a friendly doctor in golf pants, I left behind the world of maternity: mad-haired  melon-breasted women tiptoeing around wearing stained nighties and clutching their stomachs. One caught my eye and was about to break into a smile but obviously changed her mind when I glared murderously at her from beneath my well-fitted street clothes.

The advice from the kindly golfing doctor as he discharged me into the world (residents of which inexplicably all seemed to have acquired children since yesterday) was to just get on with it and try again.

May.

Just had a follow-up visit to Doctor's offices to make sure I had no after effects, of which homicidal urge towards mothers with babies apparently didn't count. Due to these dangerous tendencies I was spending free time in all types of places where it was unlikely that anyone would be stupid enough to bring a baby, e.g. bridge walks, gay cocktail lounges, hip night clubs, 6am business flights interstate.

So it was like landing on some intergalactic planet when entered his waiting room decorated in wall-to-wall denim. Then realised denim was actually material of the stretch overalls being worn by most of the room's occupants. Even stranger, most had their hair done in bob style and all had protruding stomachs. Some were actually clutching their stomachs in manner of the women in the maternity ward, some were clutching tiny babies. None of them looked happy, which was also odd, as in public they invariably waddled around in total smug state. Maybe when all together they let their guards down and showed their true feelings, i.e., ‘there I was, innocently getting the roast chicken out of the oven and wham! bam! the bastard snuck up from behind and got me up the duff again.' It was ironic that whilst I felt very jealous of their bellies they were all glancing enviously at my totally flat belly. And it wasn't just that, the ones holding babies and vomit cloths in one hand and chewed Parents magazine in the other were obviously resentful that I had the luxury of uninterruptedly  reading a nice clean Vogue which I held with two hands.

What a lot of ungrateful bitches I thought. With that, I turned to the woman next to me who was about ten months pregnant and looked like she'd been eating cream buns for the entire time. "That's it - I've found what my husband's buying me for my birthday next month!"  I indicated a skimpy size 6 Collette Dinnigan beaded number that wouldn't have fitted on one of her arms. She kind of glared at the dress then me. For the next ten minutes she squirmed and humphed, clearly upset. I had permeated the denim fortress of denial that she like the others had surrounded themselves with. I was delighted - from my point of view I had discovered the kryptonite with which to destroy the super smug Pregnants - GLAMOUR. In fact, maybe it would be worthwhile buying the dress especially to wear to any occasion where there would be Pregnants and New Mothers.

June

As the months pass we do everything to get pregnant again, including a trip to the romantic city of Paris. Unfortunately, M's closest friend lived in Paris with a ten month old baby and another's partner was six months pregnant despite both women subscribing to the so called High- Miscarriage-Risk-Lifestyle of smoking and drinking alcohol. If this were true, surely Paris should be the miscarriage capital of the world.

When I asked the glamorous Parisienne C, mother of the ten-month-old about her pregnancy she said , ‘I ‘ave never been so relaxed. I just smoke and carry on, you know and everything will be all right.' This attitude had also carried over to motherhood as one night I had a hair-raising two-hour drive with her and the baby on the French equivalent of no-speed-limit Autobahn. For the duration of the trip she had a cigarette in one hand, the smoke of which was blowing straight in the baby's face, and waved her other hand in European expressive way so effectively was driving at 160km/h without the life-preserving benefits of hand steering and sticking to allocated lanes.

What C saw as normal life, I saw as a series of small miracles, for example her pregnancy and the survival of her son and myself after that car trip. Maybe I needed to adopt more of her attitude, maybe this is what people meant about stress being the worst thing for achieving and maintaining the state of pregnancy. Indeed after three days in the country with C and family, passive smoking, eating copious amounts of buttery croissants, drinking and hooting around country roads in Grand Prix manner, I started to adopt the ‘laissez-faire', shoulder shrugging ‘c'est la vie' attitude of the fertile French.

In the middle of the trip, feeling smugly devil-may-care - my new attitude - I took the train to London to hang out with an old gay friend for a few days, leaving M with the baby and the smoking drinking kamikaze Parisians. Seeing Dolly again was fantastic, the best anecdote yet to the whole miscarriage thing.

He was very sympathetic over a few vodkas, although am not convinced he knew exactly what I was talking about and didn't want to irk him with the details. After more vodkas (French legacy - drinking to my fertile health) he said that actually miscarriage was a great drag queen name,"You know, introducing, Miss Carriage! Perfect!" Love the whole gay scene and the humour, the way they turn horrible things into hilarity. Made me feel a lot better. Yes, the whole European trip was the best thing I could have done, teaching me to relax and see the funny side of my problems.

Unfortunately, think it was here 700 km away and under the relaxing influence of numerous vodkas that I ovulated on the dance floor of a gay club in Soho . (As my cycles were all over the place there was no way of timing these things).

So that was the end of any conception possibilities then or back in Paris. Instead spent last days of visit bursting into tears at Left Bank restaurants or drinking too much champagne at restaurants like La Coupole where French pioneer of feminist thinking and rights not to have children Simone de Beauvoir hung out.

July.

Somehow to smoke and drink my way into and through pregnancy does not seem right now that am home and away from continental influences. What seemed glamorous and fine over there somehow seems downright stupid here. Also have happily concluded that this whole first miscarriage thing was just a hiccup, a kind of ‘renovation of the womb'.

After all it was a pretty dated womb, having had nothing done to it for thirty-seven years. Besides I could do it, I could fall pregnant, that was the main thing even though it had taken well over a year. Because I was never one of those girls who got pregnant at university (or indeed at any time in my single years) and snuck off for a weekend ‘over the border' where these things were taken care of, I had wondered  if there was something wrong with me. And I'd been off The Pill for years and did not go straight off The Pill and into the Birthing Suite like all the Fertility  Goddesses.

Actually will no longer listen to Fertility Goddesses or Laissez-faire Parisiennes. Will try to do this reproductive thing my way, just have to find out what that is…

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