One Way or Another
To stay pregnant, my friend travels to Mexico — on foot.
by Ondine Galsworth
August 6, 2007
They implanted her eggs on Sunday. Now all Caroline has to do is fly to Arizona from New Jersey, then drive three hours to the border town of Nogales to meet the doctor's assistant at McDonald's. The assistant will then escort Caroline, her husband Guy and their ten-month-old son across the border into Mexico, by foot. Once there, Dr. Flores will withdraw blood from Guy and inject it under the skin of Caroline's forearm. After this procedure, called Lymphocyte Immune Therapy (LIT), they will walk across the Mexico/U.S. border again, drive back to Phoenix, fly back to Newark airport, and get home to Hoboken, N.J., around midnight — door to door (to door), twenty-two hours.
Over a Caesar salad the next afternoon, Caroline, junkie-style, pulls up her sleeves and shows me the weird quarter-sized welts all over the inside of her arms. I am fascinated and horrified and hoping to God that this IVF three-ring circus will work. I find myself in the position of trying to be very supportive of a treatment that really makes me flinch. One could even say I'm against it. But I never had to consider fertility treatment, and that's a big difference between Caroline and me.
Let me quickly state how I went about having a baby: I had intercourse. Once. November 5th, Sunday, around 3:00 p.m., 2005. My ten-month-old baby boy is the product of that copulation. I only wanted one; I'm done. Bully for me.
Caroline tried that same method of reproduction many times with her husband of fourteen years. "First of all, "How crazy is that?" Caroline says. "I'm allergic to Guy!"I thought I had all the time in the world," she says, "so we didn't start that early. It's not like I was trying to have a baby at twenty-eight, but I wasn't forty-five and trying either. I just couldn't get pregnant."
Finally, at the age of thirty-eight, she got pregnant. She miscarried. Then she got pregnant again, and miscarried. Then, at the age of forty, she went to a fertility doctor, Dr. Rosen. Right before treatment, she got pregnant again, naturally, but miscarried again. "We were like, oh shit, this baby may never happen!" she says. "It was time for us to do whatever it took."
After three rounds of IVF, none of which worked, Dr. Rosen sent her to Dr. Gary, a cutting-edge research doctor on the other side of New Jersey, who is aggressive and enthusiastic. At their first meeting, Dr. Gary listened to her story, and hinted at something about Caroline's immune system failing to recognize the fetus.
The first IVF treatment, a fresh transfer (retrieve eggs, sperm, fertilize in dish, implant three days later) works; she is pregnant! She miscarries. Dr. Gary wonders why — the conditions were ideal. The subject of Caroline's immune system comes up again. What Dr. Gary is talking about is LIT: a broad-based, controversial treatment that is believed to help prevent maternal intolerance of the fetus. This intolerance is suspected when there are three or more consecutive miscarriages with the same partner, as in Caroline's case. It appears that her immune system has failed to recognize and protect the fetus created by Guy's sperm, so her body instead produces antibodies to attack it.
"How crazy is that?" Caroline says. "I'm allergic to Guy!" I ask her if she believes that diagnosis. "Hey, why not?" she says. "We keep losing these babies. There has to be some reason. I'm healthy as a horse!"
©2007 Ondine Galsworth and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Ondine Galsworth is working on a novel about her experiences as a go-go dancer
and a book about her new addiction, the rodeo. A New York native, she now lives in
New Jersey.
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