Chapter 4
CHELSEA
“Ms. Burke?”
Chelsea looked up from the pamphlet she’d been flipping through. She hadn’t taken in any of the information printed in it. All she could focus on were the pictures of happy mothers with babies in their arms. That could be me.
She got to her feet, reaching out to shake the doctor’s hand. “Thank you for meeting with me, Dr. Montgomery.”
“Of course.” Dr. Montgomery smiled, shook Chelsea’s hand, and walked around to sit behind her desk. She straightened a few papers, adjusted her glasses on her nose, and folded her hands in front of her. “So, I understand you want to talk about conceiving using an anonymous sperm donor?”
Chelsea nodded. “I’ve been feeling like it’s the right option for me.”
“And may I ask what makes you feel that way?”
Chelsea sat up straighter, her brow furrowing. “Why?”
“Don’t worry. This is a question I ask all my patients,” Dr. Montgomery smiled reassuringly. “It’s just to make sure you’re doing it for reasons that are your own, that you aren’t facing any outside pressures. I hate to see women get into things like this because they feel as if they have to.”
“Oh, it isn’t like that for me at all,” Chelsea said earnestly, her face relaxing as she sat forward. “I’m dying to become a mother. It’s what I’ve always wanted. Nobody is pressuring me about it.”
“Not your parents?”
“No, not at all. My father isn’t even in the picture.
” Chelsea was aware she hadn’t been asked for this much detail, but suddenly it was all spilling out.
“I think that’s part of the reason I’m confident I can do this on my own.
My mother was a great example to me of a single mother.
The part I never thought of was that I could go ahead and conceive the child on my own, that I didn’t need to wait for a man. ”
“And you don’t want to wait? What if you meet the man of your dreams a month after you’ve been inseminated?”
Chelsea laughed. “I’m thirty-five years old.
The man of my dreams hasn’t shown up yet, and I see no reason to believe he’ll be doing so anytime soon.
I can’t keep waiting around. I have to make a life for myself at some point, and this is how I’m going to do it.
I’m going to have the baby I’ve always wanted and start my family before the best years of my life are gone for good. ”
Dr. Montgomery nodded. “You do sound like you’ve thought it through.”
“I promise you, I have,” Chelsea said. “This is what I want, more than anything. I can’t wait to be a mother.”
“Well, hold your horses,” Dr. Montgomery said with a smile. “Even if you’re sure this is the right path for you, there are no guarantees. Science has come a long way, but even so, it doesn’t always work. Are you prepared for the fact that you may not get the result you’re hoping for?”
“I still have to try, right?” Chelsea said. “After all, no matter how you’re doing it, you can never be sure that you’re going to get pregnant. Trying is all you can do.”
The doctor nodded. “That’s right. But doing it this way is considerably more difficult than conventional methods.”
“Is it a dangerous procedure?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. But it is a costly one. I don’t know what your resources for something like this look like, but many people find that aspect to be prohibitive.”
Chelsea nodded. She had known that it would carry a cost, and she also knew that her health insurance wasn’t going to do her any good here. “How much does it cost?”
“It varies, based on a number of factors,” Dr. Montgomery said.
“The procedure we recommend you start with is intrauterine insemination, or IUI, which starts at around two and a half thousand. That’s just for the insemination procedure; you would also need sperm.
If you have your own donor, it can be cheaper, but using a donor from the sperm bank has variable fees, depending on your choices and any sourcing and screening required, which can add considerably to the cost. That’s for one round of insemination.
Many of our patients require up to six rounds of IUI.
“You will also require medical testing to monitor your fertility and identify any issues that may be present, and any medication needed to help with these and ensure ovulation. If multiple rounds of IUI are unsuccessful, or fertility issues are found, then we would recommend you try IVF. This is much more physically demanding for you, as we need to stimulate your ovaries to produce multiple eggs for harvesting, before we can make embryos for implantation. It may also take several rounds before a successful pregnancy is achieved. The average for a single IVF attempt might be around twenty thousand.”
“Dollars?” Chelsea gasped. Her head was reeling as she calculated the spiraling costs. She had been thinking more like five thousand dollars, and even that had been a stretch, considering the costs of having and raising the baby.
“Fertility treatment is an expensive process to carry out,” the doctor said.
“I wish it didn’t cost as much as it does, because that means it’s inaccessible for a lot of people.
It also means a lot of people who come to me are only able to try once.
And unfortunately, as I’m sure you know, on a single attempt to get pregnant, the odds are far from guaranteed.
Of course, we’ll track your cycle and do all we can to make sure you’re as fertile as possible, but even so…
many people require multiple attempts at this. ”
“Dr. Montgomery… I teach third grade,” Chelsea said helplessly.
“I don’t have that kind of money.” She couldn’t comprehend how much this might cost. Twenty thousand dollars was a very large chunk of her annual salary, and to spend it all in any one place would have been devastating.
The fertility treatment could wipe out her savings…
for something that might not even work, something that might result in nothing at all…
“I understand,” Dr. Montgomery said quietly.
“Some people get help from a loved one for something like this, or there’s always the possibility of getting a loan.
But those are serious considerations, not something to be undertaken lightly, and I’m going to suggest that you spend a few weeks thinking about it and then come back again.
I hope you are able to get the financials sorted out, Ms. Burke, because you seem committed, and I’d like to help you achieve this dream if I can. ”
She pushed a box of tissues forward on her desk as if expecting that Chelsea might start to cry. It was a kind gesture, but it left Chelsea more determined than ever not to resort to tears. She wasn’t going to let that happen.
“Do you have any other questions I can answer right now?”
Chelsea shook her head. “I think… I have some thinking to do.”
“All right,” Dr. Montgomery said gently.
“I don’t have any more appointments this morning, so you can sit in here for as long as you’d like, and if you think of anything else you want to ask, stop by the nurses’ station on your way out and leave a note.
I’ll be happy to call you and discuss anything you want to talk about.
” She got to her feet, gave Chelsea a small smile, and left the room, pulling the door closed quietly behind her.
She really thinks I’m going to sit in here and cry, Chelsea realized. That’s what all that was about. The tissues, the reassurance that I can stay as long as I want to… She thinks I’m in here crying right now.
Suddenly, to her mortification, her eyes were full of tears. She grabbed for a tissue and dabbed them away, surprised at herself.
How can I be so upset about this? A week ago, it hadn’t even occurred to me as a possibility, and now I’m reacting like a lifelong dream has been taken away.
But… well, what if it had? She had come here because she had come face-to-face with her doubts that she would ever be able to have a child with a partner.
She was thirty-five years old, and no partner had yet emerged.
Until now, she had always taken it for granted that somebody probably would eventually.
She had never really thought about her age as a limiting factor.
But she was thinking about it now.
I’m already getting a little old to be having babies.
In a few years I’ll be forty, and this conversation will start to look very different.
What if it’s already too late? The tears were starting to spill over now.
What if I never meet a man I want to do this with?
What if I can’t afford round after round of treatment?
What if I send myself into crippling debt to try to do it, and then it doesn’t work and I’m left with nothing?
These were terrible decisions. Terrible facts to face.
Of course nobody was entitled to have a child.
She knew that. It wasn’t something the universe owed to her.
But it was the thing she had wanted most as long as she could remember.
When she had been little, she had dreamed of the day she would become a mother.
She’d played house every day with her dolls, daydreaming about holding a real baby in her arms. When she’d gotten a little older, she had spent her time babysitting, getting involved with children as much as she could.
And then she had become an elementary school teacher, pursuing her biggest passion.
I’ll still have my students.
It was a desperate thought, a way to cling to the idea of having children as part of her life.
But, of course, that wasn’t the same thing at all.
Her students were with her for a year, and then they moved on and so did she.
Having a child of her own would be an entirely different experience.
It would mean knowing a child through every age and stage of their life, knowing them better than anyone else in the world.
It would give her life purpose in a way teaching just didn’t.
And now maybe it was never going to happen. It was the first time she had really let that possibility enter into her mind, and it left her breathless, choking back a sob.
Maybe it will never happen.
Some people were happy to be without children, but Chelsea wasn’t one of them.
To her, it would always feel like a monumental loss, and she didn’t know how she would ever be able to recover.
Anything else she did in her life now would feel like a consolation prize, a way to make up for the fact that her dream wasn’t going to come true.
It’s so unfair.
Suddenly, more than anything, she wanted to get out of this office.
It was unbearable, sitting here, knowing that she had come in so full of excitement and hope and that everything had turned so quickly.
Thinking about the way she had woken up this morning, expecting today to be the day that would change her life, was like holding her hand in boiling water.
It was a shocking hurt, and she flinched away from it.
My life is changing, all right, but not in the way I expected. Just about the furthest thing possible from that.
The tears were flowing more heavily now, and though she would have liked to wait until they subsided to try to leave the building, she had a feeling that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
It would be better to get out quickly. Then she could sit in her car and cry this out until she felt together enough to drive home.
She gathered her purse, shoving the pamphlet she’d been reading inside, even though she was tempted to leave it behind.
She didn’t see how she could bear to look at it after today.
And yet, there was a part of her — a stupid, incautious part — that still hoped.
That still believed this would all work out in her favor somehow, that her dream would still come true, even though right now it seemed impossible.
That part of her couldn’t throw the pamphlet away. She still might need it.
Unable to raise her eyes from the ground, she opened the door and let herself out of Dr. Montgomery’s office.
The fertility clinic was a small one, thankfully, and quiet.
The waiting room had been empty when she’d come in, so she had hope that she would be able to get out of here without anyone seeing her, without having to explain her tears.
If any of the staff saw that she was crying, surely they would leave her alone.
After all, if Dr. Montgomery was anything to go by, they saw this sort of thing every day.
“Do you need to set a follow-up appointment?” a nurse asked as she hurried past.
“N-no, thank you,” Chelsea stuttered, hating the words, hating that she had to say no instead of yes.
“Give us a call if you need anything,” the nurse called after her, and Chelsea felt sick. Just get me out of here.
She rounded the corner into the hall that would take her back to the waiting room — and collided hard with someone.