INFERTILITY: A woman's point of view

For Doreen (last name withheld), having children was a given. Even as a little girl, she told The Evangelist, she dreamed about her wedding and the children that would come soon afterward, who would be lovingly home-schooled by their mother.

She never expected as a newlywed to end up in a hospital emergency room, doubled over with abdominal pain that doctors couldn't diagnose. (Doreen has since speculated that the pain was caused not by her fertility problems, but by lactose intolerance.)

Pharmacy list

For an entire year, Doreen faithfully took the pills and filled out the charts, telling herself, "Maybe it'll happen this month. Maybe I'll get pregnant this month."

She did not get pregnant. The couple tried a second doctor, who advised birth control pills. "But I want to get pregnant!" Doreen told her and went on to a third doctor.

This one looked at Doreen's inch-high stack of temperature charts and exclaimed, "They stopped using these 20 years ago!" Instead, he optimistically prescribed Clomid, a drug that causes the body to produce extra eggs.

Back and forth

For four years, Doreen took the Clomid and Provera, assuming that eventually, the drugs would work. Without results and with the cause of her fertility problems still undiagnosed, she and Tom finally made the decision to try artificial insemination.

"We didn't have trouble with each other until the inseminations," Doreen said. "Then tempers flared."

In conflict

"He hated sitting in that doctor's office while I was doing that!" Doreen exclaimed. "He never came in with me. He'd say, `I don't want to see that.' But he did come in with me once, and he annoyed me the entire time. He asked so many questions I already knew the answers to!"

Because Tom disliked the procedures so much himself, Doreen said, "I don't think he understood how much I hated going to the doctor's office. Everything I had to do was gross. He usually went to work, but I was the one who had to be in the chair. I don't think anyone could understand what it was like unless they were going through it."

Withdrawing

"I had to quit, because I couldn't stand the kids that would come in with bad parents," she said. "One girl was my age and had six kids already with six different last names. Another one didn't have a hat on her baby [in the sun], and the baby's head was turning red."

Eventually, Doreen isolated herself from other people. She had begun to hate going to the grocery store and wishing she was pushing a cart with a child in it, and hated going to church because of all the children she saw there. With pills to take and medical tests to undergo, "my calendars were full and I never left the house," she said wryly.

Bargain with God

"You think of these crazy things," she said. "I thought God was saying, `You're not going to get pregnant.'"

Then, their third try at insemination worked.

Pregnant a while

"I was happy when I thought about it," she admitted, "but it was kind of like, `It's about time!' Just, `Oh, okay, I'm pregnant.'"

Still, she noted, "When I finally got pregnant, so much was lifted off me. Before that, it was like, `What's wrong?' You didn't know what was going on."

Her husband, she said, immediately started worrying. "He went from worrying about how we were going to pay for all these inseminations to worrying about `how are we going to pay for a baby?' I'd say, `I think we have it covered.'"

Losing a child

"I honestly don't know how I felt," Doreen told The Evangelist. "The only thing I remember is laying on the table and the doctor telling me, `There's no heartbeat,' and crying. I remember trying to figure out why it happened."

She consoled herself by thinking that relatives who had died would take care of her child in heaven. "I guess I was quite down, but not for too long. It was good to know that it was a plain old miscarriage, something nature does on its own."

One thing that angered the couple were unintentionally cruel remarks by friends and relatives. One person told her she hadn't gotten pregnant because she worked on her computer too much; another continues to inform her when people who don't know about the miscarriage ask about her and her child.

Retiring

Part of the reason, Doreen said, was that she and Tom had found other things to focus on besides having children. Doreen joined a gym and began her own craft business, traveling to craft shows and creating her own internet web site. Having children became one thing to think about, rather than the only thing.

But another aspect was that her body had reached its limit on the amount of Clomid she could take, and the drug was having no effect. The couple's next step would have been shots of a drug called Metrodin, which can result in multiple births and requires frequent blood work and sonograms because it can actually cause a woman's ovaries to erupt.

"I'm not interested in that," Doreen said, laughing.

What if?

She noted that having been pregnant, even briefly, eliminated a lot of the pressure of whether she could have a child.

"If I wanted to go through the really drastic stuff, I could have a baby," she said. "But we chose not to do that, because I don't want to have seven babies!"

Sometimes, she admitted, she thinks about trying insemination again -- "but I don't know if I want to go through that [infertility treatment process] again: the headaches, stomach pain, remembering to take my pill and call the doctor's office."

Web supporters

"On the internet, I met people in their 40s trying to have babies. I said, `People do that?'" she remembered. "Living in a small town, all the girls I graduated from high school with had married and had kids."

Still, she feels at peace with the decision to stop fertility treatments. "I still look at things [i.e. baby clothes in a store] and think of getting them," she said, "but if I could have [my great-aunt's] life, I'd be happy. She didn't have any kids and wanted them badly, but she found other people to dote on, and she went on vacation. As long as I'm busy, I think I'd be happy."

A few weeks ago, Doreen said, Tom turned to her and asked, "Why are we so happy all of a sudden?"

"I said, `Because we've stopped trying to have kids,'" she recalled. "It still annoys us, but instead of dwelling on it, we're finally happy. My cat, she's the one I spoil now."

(Catholic couples who would like information about Church-approved methods of dealing with infertility should contact the Albany diocesan Family Life Office at 453-6677.)

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