Day 19: Illness

Leah is not at all well. She is prone to hypochondria and will complain about minor ailments and ask aloud whether she should consider seeing the doctor. This morning was different. She was very sick. She stayed in bed 20 minutes after her alarm. When she rolled over so I could give her her new shot, it would not stop bleeding. I had to put a compress on it for two minutes before the bleeding stopped.

Leah seemed weak but well after the egg extraction. Lately, she has been eating like a bird. Last night I made a pasta with quick tomato sauce with extra salt, and she maybe had two bites before turning her plate over to me and rolling onto her side. She says that she's not hungry at all and is only eating because she knows that she has to. She hasn't moved her bowels since the Monday before the egg extraction. She feels stuffed.

Before I left for work this morning, Leah was crying in the bathroom. The rule that I follow is that if Leah's complaining, she's probably all right, but if she's weeping on the toilet, it is probably time to spring into action. She says that she feels nauseaous. It is clear that something is wrong.

For the fifth or sixth time I check the checklist that they gave us at the Outpatient Surgery Center regarding Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS). The MILD and MODERATE symptoms are diarrhea and vomiting. Leah can keep food down, just not get it out afterward. Leah is not thirsty; there has been no change in urine amount or color.

Lynn, our IVF coordinator, doesn't usually come in to Fertility Treatment Center until 9, so I wait until my class is over until I call. Usually, the receptionist says that she'll see if Lynn is available and then send me directly to voicemail. I call on the drive back home and don't expect a call back for an hour at least. This time, Lynn picks up immediately, and I'm totally thrown. For some reason, this makes Leah's pain feel like a real crisis.

I tell Lynn Leah's symptoms, and she doesn't sound particularly worried. But Lynn always sounds just busy. She doesn't laugh at my jokes of sympathize with our setbacks. Lynn is short and clipped and speaks in purely declarative sentences. She says that Leah's symptoms are "classic" for Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome. She assumes that Leah didn't go in to work today (she did). She makes an appointment for that afternoon, after Leah's out of work. She gives me specific instructions.

I am calm. I do not panic. I make a careful list of the things that I need to do, and then execute that list. I do not hurry through my dressing. I do not speed to the grocery store. I do not make egregious spelling errors on the text message I send to Leah.

At the grocery store, I pick up the high-sodium food and drinks that will help to pull the fluid out of Leah's abdomen, where it is gathering. I do not know what flavor of Cup O' Noodles is Leah's favorite, but I'm pretty sure that it isn't shrimp. I buy one beef and one chicken and the total cost is fifty cents. I pick up a six pack of the eight-ounce cans of V8 that I know Leah will hate. I buy four bottles of Gatorade blindly guessing which ones Leah might like (yellow, red, orange, purple). All of this food costs less than ten dollars.

Carefully I drive to Leah's school and sign in at the front desk with fifteen pounds of food crooked against my chest. When I reach her classrooom, Leah is teaching reading to her students. A parent helper is in the corner, and I call her over. I ask the parent helper, who remembers me from some school functions earlier in the year, to make sure that Leah always has one of these drinks in her hand as long as she's there.

When I finally turned to Leah, she smirked at me and said, "It looks like you talked to someone." I loaded the small refrigerator in the corner of her classroom with the Gatorade and five of the cans of V8. The sixth one I shook and opened and handed to Leah. She frowned at it. Her students didn't understand what was going on. When Leah first sipped from the can, she grimaced at it dramatically. The children asked her what was in the can, and when she told them carrot juice, more than half the classroom groaned in disgust. I told Leah about her appointment and showed her the Cups O' Noodles.

She couldn't have looked more appalled at her new lunch. I promised her that she didn't have to eat the noodles, but that the doctor said she had to at least drink the broth. This didn't make her feel better.

That afternoon I met Leah at Fertility Treatment Center and she looked much better. She still felt tender sitting down and standing up, but she wasn't crying on the toilet. We sat in the waiting room for maybe twenty minutes, and I knew Leah was feeling poorly when she didn't even want to play Burger Time on my cell phone.

Eventually they called us in and asked Leah to undress on the table again. There were still a pair of socks hiding in Leah's purse that she slid onto her feet. Before Leah sat on the table, she showed me how she had used a safety pin on her pants to keep them closed. She said that even her "fat pants" were too small for her stomach.

The doctor came in and gave Leah the ultrasound. He saw a small amount of fluid in Leah's abdomen, but nothing really to be worried about. He thought that she was doing great. He said there was another patient down the hall who didn't want to freeze her embryos and she was as sick as a dog right now.

The doctor didn't seem prepared to see patients. This was the first day that I could remember where he wore the traditional long, white coat, but it was buttoned further than he buttons his dress shirts usually. Denim pants peeked out from the bottom of the coat, and he was wearing expensive dark brown leather tennis shoes that no one would ever do anything athletic in.

When Leah was still on the table, she asked the doctor if we were for sure going to freeze the embryos and not do an implantation. He said we were definitely freezing the embryos. He said he'd go check on the embryos right now.

This was one of the real moments of wonder that I've experienced through this whole process. Our doctor was going into one of those harshly lit labs that are hidden from the patients and look at a bunch of cell clusters that would someday be our children.

"Are you really going to look at our embryos right now?" I said. I was practically lifting myself out of the chair.

"No, not really. I'm going to go look at the embryologist report."

Leah looked at me. She was tired. "Honey, you wouldn't open the oven while your cupcakes are baking, would you?"

The doctor put his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. "That's the basic priniciple. I'll be right back and you can get dressed."

The doctor was back in two minutes. He said that nine of the embryos looked really good, but that number could move up or down "a little" between now and Saturday. Also, Leah could go off all the drugs. Could she take tylenol? She could take whatever she wanted.

Nine!