Chapter Fourteen #2
I looked at Moth. His mouth was moving a little bit, but if he was saying something, it was too low to hear.
So much did not line up. Even allowing for unpredictable destruction and experimental drug combinations and the infinitely vast permutations of both chaos and humanity, something wasn’t right.
It was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t find it.
“But how come …” I stopped and waited for my brain to work, but it would not.
Then Moth said, still quietly but loud enough to hear, “How come she’s the only one.”
Yes. That was it.
“There are a couple hundred patients in a study like that, right?” He had a still-wrapped Milky Way liquefying, forgotten, in his fist.
“Today a phase two trial might have that many participants.” Dr. Kim nodded. “Back then, they were smaller. This one had about half that many.”
“Still, if extended fertility is a side effect,” he insisted, “why haven’t we seen forty years of elderly pregnant women? Why haven’t there been dozens of cases of pregnant seventy- and eighty-year-olds?”
“Ahh. Well. Lots of reasons.” Dr. Kim seemed to breathe a little easier—maybe relieved to be making progress through this conversation—and I envied her.
“Mostly, side effects don’t manifest in everyone and certainly not in the same way, not even with drugs and drug combinations which are proved safe and effective, never mind ones like these which were ruled too dangerous and unpredictable for approval.
Some people suffer some side effects. Others do not.
And fertility like this is particularly difficult to measure. ”
“It is?” I’d have guessed the opposite, at least relatively speaking. What exactly was causing any particular symptom was so often unclear, how it might progress less knowable still, whereas the causes and results of pregnancy both seemed fairly obvious.
“Well, as you said before, chemo often dampens fertility. But not always. You were using birth control for many of those intervening years, were you not?”
For a while, Roger and I had used what he called Max Control.
We were too hectic and too tired—with two small daughters plus an infant—to have any need to take additional precautions.
And then cancer had continued that job. After the trial, after all the treatment, the idea of a fourth child had dropped like a stone.
So yes, despite ever-widening cracks between us, eventually Roger and I started having sex again, and yes, we had used birth control.
When we separated finally, when he moved out, a colleague gave me a box of condoms as a welcome-back-to-singledom present.
I was fifty-two and had never used one, having been lucky enough to come of age as the Pill did.
The condoms in that box got used over the years, but only by my kids.
I didn’t regret not needing them myself, though.
I was busy at school. I was busy helping my students, my children, my grandchildren.
But mostly, I was ecstatic, rapturous with relief, not so much to be rid of Roger as to be alone for the first time in my life.
I’d gone from my parents’ house to my college dorm, from college to marriage, from marriage to a house full of kids.
I had never lived by myself—I had never lived for myself—so by the time I finally did, I was disinclined to give it up.
Extremely disinclined. It wasn’t that dating—or hooking up, as my kids called it (as all kids call it)—would necessarily have meant giving up that independence.
It was that I didn’t particularly crave any of it.
Dating, romance, sex—it all seemed like more effort than it was worth.
It wasn’t that my needs were all sated in those years between Roger and Vista View.
It was the fact that I was the one both needing and sating.
No one was asking when dinner would be ready, or why their uniform was or wasn’t in the wash, or could I pick them up after one club and drive them to another, or how was it even fair Max always got to choose the movie just because he was the baby.
I ate when I was hungry, did laundry when I needed clothes, watched whatever movie I pleased, turned it off when I preferred to read.
Washed my car, back when I had one. Lola once showed me what she called a “meme” that was variations on the theme “Yeah, sex is cool, but have you
tried _____?” The blank was filled with things like “just eating popcorn for dinner” or “rearranging your bookshelves by color” or “staying home and reading instead.” I have never, as Lola says, felt more seen.
All of which explained a lot about Moth, who was wondrous enough to fill—and then obviate—that blank. Maybe it even explained why I hadn’t been sitting here before now. But it didn’t explain why I wasn’t joining a club, at least a little one.
“But I’m the only one?” I managed. “The only pregnant old woman?”
“ ‘Old’ is a relative term. Over the last forty years, did some of the trial participants experience increased levels of fertility beyond what they would have, had they not participated and/or had they not had cancer? That’s an incredibly complicated question that—”
“But I’m seventy-seven,” I interrupted. Everyone likes to say age is a state of mind and you’re as young as you feel and if you tell yourself you’re too old to learn a new language or go roller-skating or wear jeans, the problem isn’t age but attitude.
But no matter your attitude and however you interpret seventy-seven, I was far too old to be knocked up. I was too old even to say “knocked up.”
“We’re making some calls, but yes, so far you’re the only one.” Dr. Kim spread her hands. “You’re an outlier.”
“Way, way out.”
“By definition, there’s always an outlier.
You were an outlier to begin with. Among other things, you were young to get the kind of breast cancer you did.
You were also at the low end of the age range for that trial, which means its participants are old now.
Older than you. Many of them …” Dr. Kim paused then went on, “Well, we can guess that most of them are no longer sexually active.”
I felt myself blush, but when I glanced at Moth, he seemed to be thinking of something else.
“It’s also true that more patients back then underwent oophorectomies or hysterectomies, either because of the cancer itself or because the treatment increased their risk. So those patients couldn’t get pregnant anymore regardless. Does that make sense to you?”
“I guess but—” I began.
But then Moth said, very quietly, so quietly I wasn’t sure he had spoken at all and thought maybe it had been whispered by some small walled-off part of my own mind, “And lots of them died.”
I felt woozy, winded.
“Yes. A lot of them have died,” Dr. Kim amended slightly.
“Some perhaps because of the drugs’ side effects.
Some because neither Protocol 183 nor any other treatment regimen was able to successfully cause their cancer to enter remission, or because that remission did not last. And some because that remission did last, but they have since died of other causes.
As I said, you were at the low end of the age range for that trial.
Some of the other participants died at the time from cancer.
Some recovered from cancer and died much more recently. Of old age.”
“I need some air,” Moth said. Mumbled, really. He got up, dropped the melted Milky Way, knocked into his own chair, righted himself, and left the room.
But I had more questions—so many more questions—though most pressing, by far, was “So now what? Now that we know all this, what do we do?” Because if Dr. Kim and her team had spent all this research time and effort tracking down forty-year-old documents and piecing together clues from forty-year-old, since-debunked, treatments, there had to be a reason.
And that reason had to be that solving this mystery—learning how I’d become pregnant at this ridiculous age, learning why this had happened to me (and only me)—led to more answers. The useful kind.
Like now that they knew how this had happened, maybe they would let me have an abortion. I was only nine weeks pregnant. It was still so early.
Like now that they knew how this had happened, maybe they also knew how it would unhappen, when the pregnancy would terminate.
Like now that they knew how this had happened, they knew what could be done, not just to help me but to help me out, out of this absurd, appalling, impossible situation.
But Dr. Kim answered, “We do what we’ve been doing. Knowing this answers so many important questions. It gives us so much useful information.”
She stopped so I pressed. “But?”
“But at the moment, it doesn’t give us many more options than we had before.”
When young people cry, everyone feels sorry for and worried about them.
When old people cry, everyone looks away, awkward and embarrassed.
So I tried not to. After all the tests and blood draws and probing, after a breakthrough in the mystery and an explanation for the unexplained, a reason for the unreasonable, we had no more than the nothing we’d had to begin with.
“So we just wait?” I said when I could speak again.
“Not just wait,” Dr. Kim said. “Wait and see what happens.”