Exploiting My Baby (9 page)

six

CVS: Order Now and Enjoy Six Months (Worry) Free!

 

 

 

I
don’t want to say I get the hard sell on having a CVS test, but when I go to my mandatory pretest genetic counseling session, it feels a little like being on a used car lot on the last day of the month taking a recession test drive with a salesman one vehicle short of his quota.

The facts: The CVS (chorionic villus sampling) is often offered to women who will be over thirty-five on their due date, who have a family history of certain birth defects or who tested positive for genetic disorders. I will be thirty-nine on my due date, and am a carrier for both Tay-Sachs disease and cystic fibrosis, so I qualify for the procedure, which involves removing some cells from the placenta for diagnostic testing. It’s similar to an amniocentesis, but can be done earlier, between ten and thirteen weeks. There are risks involved, namely miscarriage, which some sources say occurs in one out of every hundred procedures. On the other hand, the statistics are murky, because miscarriage rates are higher during these weeks anyway, and in the hands of a skilled practitioner the risks may be lower.

Amniocentesis is also supposedly risky, but it’s almost impossible for me to gauge the exact numbers, so I Google myself into a tizzy and end up sitting in the geneticist’s office jumping through all of the hospital’s hoops so I can leave my options open before the window of opportunity slams shut on the CVS for good.

We review our family histories, the usual cancer and heart disease type stuff, before the counselor breaks out the
Big Book of Genetic Disorders
, which he flips through to show us what we might be facing blindly should we forgo the CVS, scheduled for the following morning.

For almost every chromosome, there is some possible abnormality.

In essence, as he pushes the book toward us, he’s asking, “What’s it going to take to get you into these stirrups?” And he isn’t going to let us walk without closing.

I’m sure the information is medically sound, responsible, factual, but this is pretty much how I hear it.

Sold.

My husband is against it. He feels confident that, based on the noninvasive screening we already had, the baby is fine, that the risks aren’t worth it.

Sure, even if one in a hundred of these things causes a miscarriage, we still have a 99 percent chance of coming out fine, which sounds so promising when you look at it that way, like an A+ grade, unless you are that one in a hundred, in which case you get an F, for Fucked.

I am up all night making lists, weighing pros and cons like I did before we conceived. If this test harms the baby, I won’t be able to live with myself, but if the baby has problems, I want to know about it. Moreover, I want to rest assured. I never rest, and I’m rarely assured, but maybe this will help set my mind at ease. I just don’t know about six months of not knowing for certain; I don’t think I can hack it. It’s the most difficult decision I’ve ever made and I wonder if parenting is just going to be more of the same: high-stakes choices that make you wish for gut instincts, but leave you with only the conflicting advice of experts.

With just enough time to get there and park, I decide to go for it.

When we arrive, there is a preliminary ultrasound. I’ve always known it’s a girl, and now I’m positive, because of her pretty fetal cheekbones and my newfound mommy juju. They can’t tell until they look at the placenta cells, but I know. Now I just have to get through this test, to make sure she’s okay. My husband and I wait for the doctor, who breezes in, distracted, looking at his watch.

“Um, good morning. I might need to step out. Got a nonviable pregnancy next door. Waiting to hear from their doctor,” he says, looking down at a chart.

I don’t want the guy scooping my ice cream cone to be distracted, because he might give me an undersize portion, or place it on the cone insecurely. But the guy who is about to stick a needle in my placenta? I would really like him to be totally focused.

What’s more, as my legs get cold and purple in the stirrups, it dawns on me that “nonviable fetus” is a nice way of saying dead baby.
Dead baby.
That nice couple we saw in the waiting room, the guy with shaggy hair under a baseball cap and the lady in a long brown sweater nibbling on crackers, their day started just like ours, only their routine ultrasound ended up revealing a dead baby, nonviable as a door-nail, which now needs to be removed by their ob-gyn, who can’t be located. I imagine them huddled under fluorescent lights, trying to process this hideous turn of events, just on the other side of the wall, just a few yards away from us.

I’m filled with pregnancy-hormone-soaked grief for these strangers, and the thought of them stops me nonviable in my tracks.

“Do we start now or wait until this thing gets resolved? You know what? Let’s just do it. Let’s make hay while the sun shines,” the doctor announces, and a few nurses snap into action. “Knock if their OB calls,” he yells out to the receptionist.

Next thing you know, he’s inserting a needle into my body to biopsy the placental tissue and making small talk.

“Where are you from? San Francisco? Do you know the biggest city in the Bay Area?”

Let me think. Dead baby? No, that can’t be right.

“Oakland?” I croak, trying to show how casual I am, how easy-going.

“Relax. The worst thing you can do is tense up. The only thing that can go wrong is if you’re not relaxed, you move a little, the muscles tense up in there and I can’t get the needle in, so I really need you to relax. I do a lot of these, and the only problems I run into are from women who tighten up,” he warns.

Can’t be one of these “tighten up” types, women who ruin it and kill their babies because they can’t settle down.

That’s when I will myself into stillness, attempt a mind-over-matter swami thing where I clear my mind and force my body into a state of calm.

“San Jose,” he says. “Can you believe it?”

Usually, I couldn’t care less about geography, or whether I’m good at trivia, don’t mind intentionally throwing party games like Celebrity so we can all be done and play an even better game called Drinking and Conversing, but I’m intensely bothered that I guessed Oakland. The doctor is black. Oakland has a large black population, and I start thinking that he thinks I guessed Oakland because I’m racist and was just thinking black because of my black doctor and I start getting paranoid that he is going to dislike my Oakland-guessing ass and unconsciously play fast and loose with the placenta poking. This delusional level of discourse is calling the shots in my frontal cortex, but still I relax my pelvic muscles.

Dead baby
, my brain tries to shout, but gets muzzled by the swami.

He gets what he needs without incident. In seconds, he’s out the door and I’m instructed to get my clothes on and everyone is going about their business wrapping up when I realize I can’t move. Something is very wrong. I’m clammy and faint. I don’t want to alarm my husband, but I’m so hot all I can think about is getting to the bathroom floor, where I can sprawl out like a dog and cool down my body temperature. I need to throw up. My shoes, skirt and panties are across the room and I calculate correctly that I really need only the skirt, which I pull on and attempt a nonchalant jaunt to the bathroom.

On the cool linoleum of the bathroom floor, I apologize to god for making such a huge mistake. I make lots of deals about the saintly way I’m going to live if god lets me keep this baby. I’m not very religious. I just use the word “god” as shorthand for the universe, or a power greater than myself, or the force, or whatever thing I pray to when I’ve just run out of options and figure it can’t hurt. Daniel will never forgive me for doing this, I tell god. I just couldn’t leave well enough alone and I am so sorry. However conflicted I may have been about procreating, I want this baby.

I start to cool down. Not because of divine intervention, probably, but just my blood pressure normalizing.

Forcing myself to get up because I know my husband must be panicking by now, I stumble back toward the room, where a couple of nurses tell me I am looking green. “It’s not easy being green,” I reply, because you don’t come up with your best material when you’ve just been on a germy floor making deals and choking down vomit.

My blood pressure has plummeted. The nurses give me some juice and instruct me to get back on the table. The doctor is called. He rushes in and takes another look at my insides via ultrasound and informs me that I am having a uterine contraction, points it out on the screen, explains something about my vagus nerve flooding my body with adrenaline, which caused the contraction. Apparently, this isn’t an uncommon response to stress; the body sometimes maintains equilibrium until the threat passes, after which it’s safe to spaz out.

“Everything is fine. The procedure went perfectly,” he says.

“Why isn’t the baby moving?” I ask, craning my head to stare at the sonogram screen.

“It’s asleep.”

“Can you wake it up?”

He jostles my stomach. Jostles it pretty hard. The kid won’t budge.

“That’s okay. As long as you swear the baby is fine.”

“It’s fine.”

They send me home with instructions to stay flat for twenty-four hours, just get up to pee and that’s it. We pay extra to get the results sooner, and when the lab finally phones, I miss the call, but I recognize the number and my vagus nerve starts doing its thing again as I retrieve the voice mail.

“This is Jen from the lab. The news is good. Give me a call.”

I know leaving these messages is a delicate task and I don’t know this Jen, but I want to hug her and fill out some kind of comment card about what a great job she is doing, what a perfect tone she strikes. When I get her on the line, she simply says, “Everything is normal. Do you want to know the gender?”

Of course I do, because I really just want to confirm that I’m getting my girl, the one we are going to name Harper, after Harper Lee. My world is transformed. I know my baby is healthy and I know she is a girl, and that I’m going to give her cute Suri Cruise bangs and that we’re going to paint the town pink together and that I won’t force her to take ballet, but that she’ll probably insist on wearing her princess outfit to the supermarket, where the butcher will remark on her gorgeous eyes and give her a lollipop. A pink lollipop.

“It’s a boy.”