When I tell people how I met my husband, they are quick to comment: “Just like in a movie!” I was recovering from a breakup and not interested in dating; he traveled to Germany for the first time on his own, staying at my friend’s place. She asked me if I could take care of the ‘American’ while she was out of town.
I preferred to get to know him before spending an entire day sightseeing, so we all met in a beer garden. And there he was, we shook hands, looked each other in the eye, and experienced the very definition of love at first sight. When I reach this part of my story, people usually sigh, and some feel a tinge of jealousy. I don’t want to spoil their romantic vision of us living happily ever after, but the honest truth is that our lives are full of happiness and love despite what happened after. Only rarely though they let me tell my whole story…
I was 32 and my husband 29. We fell in love on the day we met and started our long-distance relationship when he went back to California for grad school and I stayed in Germany to finish my master’s. After graduation, I moved from Berlin to Santa Cruz to start a family - getting married, having children; the whole thing. Not right away, at least not the children part, because I wanted to avoid turning into a housewife and stay-at-home mom. Building up a life of my own turned out to be much harder than expected, but over time I connected to like-minded people and even found a full-time job to kick off a professional career. I started to feel more settled and ready to become a mother.
I went to a gynaecologist who told me rather bluntly: “If you want to have children, you better start right away.” I hadn’t realized that I was rapidly getting too old for my life plans. So my husband and I started trying. Everybody around us was getting pregnant, but not me. Then, many months later, my period didn’t happen on time. I was pregnant! For two weeks.
My doctor saw it as a good sign and recommended IUI to increase my chances of getting pregnant ‘naturally’. Several normal periods after two unsuccessful IUIs, I got pregnant again and found a new gynaecologist. Everything around my appointment supported the feeling of finally belonging. I was asked to fill out different forms, the ones for pregnant women, and was treated like a mom. It was almost embarrassing to tell the staff that I had started bleeding again. The doctor urged me to consider egg donation and to try out a real fertility clinic.
There, a whole team of experts tuned up my body for peak performance. Blood tests confirmed what my gynaecologists had suspected all along: I was old. It didn’t matter that I didn’t look my age, since it showed clearly in my fertility markers. My two previous “chemical” pregnancies were a plus, but I learned that it’s one thing to get pregnant and another thing to stay pregnant. Ultrasounds showed a fibroid that could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. To optimize my body, I went through surgery before continuing with IUIs.
Previously, I had taken pills, now I injected the hormones into my belly fat. The clinic offered classes on how to administer the syringes at home and even a support group. Everybody’s eyes were focused on success, on crossing the finish line at the end of a bumpy ride. It was only a question of how long it would take each of us and how much intervention was needed; there was no if.
After five rounds had failed, the experts recommended IVF to take care of the getting pregnant step for me. When it was time, I was informed that they had been able to get four eggs growing and asked if I wanted all or freeze some of them? “Wait”, I thought, “all this time, I can barely get pregnant with one baby and now you want me to consider the potential of multiple?” They somehow convinced me to insert all of them to increase my chance of pregnancy; if I had been in my right (statistical) mind, I could have seen how much the odds were against me.
Even before the pregnancy test came back negative, I felt concerned about my children being created in a petri dish, and this was reason enough for not considering a second round. I was 42 and, despite spending so many years of my life with just one goal in mind, still unable to reach the finish line. I had moved to a kid-friendly neighbourhood and stayed in a job for the medical benefits but put my career on hold. I had paid experts to make my body run like a machine. I was racing against my biological clock, raging against nature, and all this in secret.
I had snuck out of work countless times for appointments and put on a poker face when the clinic called to let me know that, unfortunately, I was not pregnant. Only my husband and our closest family knew of our desperate attempts. Hiding part of my life was painful, but less than being hurt by other people’s desperate attempts to create the happy ending to our romantic love story. I just needed the right mix of supplements, needed to relax, needed to want it more, or needed to adopt.
Four long years after stopping infertility treatment, I felt strong enough to consider a Plan B. Then, just weeks after interviewing for a new job, I was diagnosed with cancer. This came as a shock to me, but what shocked me almost more was people’s response. Support was flooding my way, from family, friends, neighbors, work, and I thought: “This feels great, and where was this when I needed it during my suffering from childlessness?”
Cancer certainly doesn’t belong in a romantic story, but there is a kind of protocol people can follow and a badge waiting at the end of the struggle: Cancer Survivor. Telling my story and being heard for who I was made such a difference, and so many treatments later, I could proudly claim that I had survived cancer.
I also realized that my childlessness didn’t go away, that, in fact, even in these incredibly welcoming support groups I never mentioned my childlessness! I continued to hide this part of my identity and silently suffered through all the chatter about other cancer patients’s children and grand-children.
I needed to pick up the pieces and knew that I couldn’t do it alone anymore. In the Online Bee program I found the company I longed for: Compassionate women who help me creating my own version of recovery, and are willing to listen and stay with me where my story hurts the most. Cancer, childlessness, me, the whole story.
Gisela Haensel