A Time for Grace Read online

  A TIME FOR

  GRACE

  A DOCTOR'S UPLIFTING JOURNEY THROUGH LOVE, LOSS AND THE IVF CURVEBALL

  A TIME FOR

  GRACE

  DR MARK NETHERCOTE

  First published in 2017 by Impact Press, an imprint of Ventura Press

  PO Box 780, Edgecliff, NSW 2027

  AUSTRALIA

  www.impactpress.com.au

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Dr Mark Nethercote 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Author: Nethercote, Mark

  Category: Non-Fiction, Memoir

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-25-3 (print)

  ISBN: 978-1-925384-26-0 (ebook)

  Cover and internal design: Working Type Studio, Melbourne

  The paper in this book is FSC® certified. FSC® promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

  For all those who want what we so desperately wanted.

  Contents

  PART ONE: Trying

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  PART TWO: Pregnant

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART THREE: Trying Again

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART FOUR: Trying Harder

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART FIVE: No More Trying

  Postscript

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  Trying

  Chapter 1

  By the end, you will know us as 93846.

  But for now, you can call her Suse, and me Mark. It’s probably easier that way.

  On a rainy, overcast Melbourne day, Suse walks in the back door, grocery bags in hand. She starts unpacking, and with an enthusiastic grin presents me with a box. Before I can read the label, I know what it is. The pink packaging, the company’s logo of a woman holding an infant, the bold letters stating ‘TWO TESTS’ gives it away. The picture on the packet looks more like an electronic tongue depressor than a pregnancy test.

  “Best on the market,” Suse says.

  “Great,” I reply. Four bold ticks down the side of the packet claim its features: an Easy-read Result Line, Clinically Proven, Patented Sensorflow Technology — presumably to stop you from urinating on your own hand — but most importantly, the ability to Test Six Days Before Your Missed Period.

  Suse pulls out the leaflet.

  “The woman in the pharmacy told me all about it.” She clears her throat. “‘In clinical testing,’” she reads, affecting a serious tone, “‘the in-stream pregnancy test detected hormone levels consistent with pregnancy in sixty-two per cent of women five days before their expected period, in seventy-eight per cent four days before their expected period, in eighty-seven per cent of women three days before their expected period, and in ninety-eight per cent of women two days before their expected period.’”

  “And when are you due?”

  “I’m not sure, my whole cycle’s been a bit mucked up since…” she trails off. “Maybe two or three days? Should I test today, do you think?”

  “If you’re negative, will you want to check again tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Then just check in the morning,” I say, trying to stay light.

  Suse nods.

  We continue unpacking groceries, lost in our own thoughts.

  “I’ve been nauseated for the last few days. If it’s not from being pregnant, then what would it be?”

  “I don’t know, Suse.”

  I spot another box on the counter. This one, by the same company, is wrapped in purple. The label reads the ‘Seven Day Pregnancy Planning Kit’. A subtitle lets me know that it’s ‘To Help Get Pregnant Sooner’, and that it ‘Predicts Your Two Most Fertile Days’.

  “You got this one too, hon?” I ask.

  This packet has only one bold tick. Its sole feature worth mentioning is that it has been ‘Laboratory Tested’. Not even laboratory proven. Just tested.

  This one lacks Sensorflow technology. It requires you to dip a stick into a bucket of your own piss. It’s as if they’ve stripped back the features for this base model — if you’re seeking help in finding out your peak ovulation days, if you’ve begun to tread that path, I guess they figure that you won’t mind getting your hands dirty.

  A grinning mother and infant decorate the lower half of the packet. She holds this adorable, giggling baby up to her face, nestling in close, rubbing her nose against the baby’s, and our nose directly in it.

  Screw you, lady, I think.

  Suse wakes early, snuggling in to me. I find her there, breathing softly into my neck. I feel the condensation forming, one of those things that you can only find comforting from a person you love.

  I look at her, trying to read her face.

  “Have you done it?”

  “Not yet,” she says.

  “Should we?”

  She sighs, nodding. We both get up, and she goes to the toilet and sits. I stand there, trying to be supportive, trying to re-enact that moment, 122 days ago.

  “Can you leave me to do it?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  I stand in the bathroom for a moment or two, waiting for her to finish. I hear her flush before I walk back into the toilet, to find her holding the stick in an outstretched hand.

  “Keep it horizontal,” she says urgently.

  “Okay.” I return to the bathroom and place it down gently on the sink. I stand for a minute as I watch the line light up, clearer and clearer. I stoop down low, looking for something. Anything.

  “You’ve got to leave it for three minutes,” Suse calls out. I nod, calculating that we’re probably already at two. She paces in, and then out, and then in again. We both stare at the stick.

  It’s negative.

  She sighs, rubbing her eyes. We both return to the bedroom and lie back down on the bed. She snuggles into my neck once more, breathing moisture in and out. I wonder if she is going to cry.

  She doesn’t.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “Sad,” she says in a hollow voice. “Just sad.”

  I hold her.

  “How are you?”

  “Sad too.” I pause. “But maybe not as sad as you.”

  We lie very still.

  “I love you,” I say.

  “I love you too.” Pause. “I’ve gotta get up,” she says, squeezing me tight.

  In bed alone now, I think back to the last test, the last time we did this, watching one line slowly appear, and then another. Watching it with Suse. The excitement. The shock. The lack of expectation. That was what you’d call innocence, I suppose.

  I wait a moment longer before I get up too. I walk down the hall and into the bathroom, the light bright, as if at pains to highlight the plastic contraption on the sink. I move in close, examining the single pink line, glowing, almost fluorescent, with not a hint of a friend beside it.

  The last test — the first one — had blue lines. Two blue lines, less garish than this, one intersecting the other, making a blue cross. A symbol. Literally, a positive sign.

  I liked the blue model better.

  Suse and I met over a wooden bench, j
ust like the clairvoyant said we would. I’m not exactly into that kind of thing, but five years earlier, while dating a sweet, alternative kind of girl in Canberra, I was invited to meet Angel.

  “Sure,” I said, just like I did before sky diving, and bungy jumping, and trying to cross the Russian border with an expired visa. Each time, there followed a moment of regret. On this occasion, it was as I sat in Angel’s room, her arthritic finger wagging at me, warning me not to stomp on this poor alternative girl’s heart. But understanding very little about the universe, I took a further month to heed those warnings, recorded for posterity on a TDK cassette, and mastered in Dolby.

  Quickly enough I forgot this encounter. It wasn’t until Suse and I were preparing for our wedding years later, as I was designing the little booklet thingy, that I remembered Angel the clairvoyant and that wooden bench.

  I rummaged around in the drawer in the middle of the night, through a forgotten collection of cassettes that included a recording of myself and my two brothers singing along with my deceased grandpa, a copy of ‘1984 Out Now’, a tape that occasionally worked to load Frogger onto our family’s first computer. And then I found it: the recording of Angel.

  As I stood in the garage, rubbing my legs to stave off the cold, I listened for a while before I hit gold.

  “Do you know where?” I ask.

  “Where? Well, the funny thing is you get invited somewhere that you would never ordinarily go. But for some reason you go to this venue, and there’s trestle tables with the white table-cloths, and food, and plastic glasses with wine and — well, you know — she doesn’t usually go to things like that either.

  “And it’s like: ‘Yeah, I’m sort of into it, but I don’t usually come to it.’

  “And she’s like: ‘Yeah, I know, I came with a friend.’ You start chatting, and you’re into the same music, and you both pick out something that you like that nobody else does. Anyway, you’ll know about it when it comes, and — when it comes, you’ll be like, ‘Mmm, that’s what Angel told me,’ or you know, something will just trigger, and you’ll just know it.”

  A chill went up my spine. I flipped the pack and looked at the date: 1 September 2004.

  It took me a while, Angel, but I remembered.

  It’s hard for me to know exactly what it was that I first noticed about Suse across that bench. Maybe it was her long blonde hair that went to the waist of pants made by her own fashion label. Perhaps her delicate hands, fingers and nails, long and perfect enough to belong to a hand model, yet failing to hide the goofball within, the one as likely to trip over her own feet as a tripwire. Maybe it was her infectious smile and that deep, resonant laugh, the kind you’re not supposed to emit on first meeting. Or more probably, her raw honesty, a faint veil over her vulnerability.

  Whatever it was, something grabbed me, this first time over a wooden bench. She would later say that first meeting caused her a physical reaction, like she’d been hit in the stomach with a baseball bat.

  Eight months after that first meeting, we kissed for the first time. And six months to the day after that, I wrote every single text message we’d ever sent, on 180 metres of calculator tape. I strung it through six rooms of our house, with a bunch of flowers for each month, the tape ending in my proposal.

  All of this happened on a day Suse unexpectedly took a sickie, making the subterfuge all the more crippling. But I’d already asked her father, and while I’m not what you’d call a classic romantic, I’m pretty big on gestures. And besides, I had a deadline to meet. So, cowering in my back room, hiding the hundreds of metres of tape in a box every time she approached, I sweated like, well, a man on his proposal day whose wife decides to chuck a sickie.

  So much so, that three months to the day after I proposed, we were married.

  So much so, that at the age of 33, I declared that I would marry her, have children with her, and be with her forever. All of this before we’d even kissed.

  Fourteen months from first meeting to proposal, and then another three months to the wedding, and we were already on the fast track. Kids were the next step: we barely needed to talk about it. I was so certain about it all.

  I sit there munching on Vita Brits, each bite a metronomic tick. I note that this is a recent phenomenon: to be so acutely aware of the march of time.

  I know this has been something Suse has been feeling for the last few years — naturally, as women reach their thirties, their mid and then late thirties, and then their forties, they feel the impending cessation of their fertile life.

  Men, on the other hand, have the innate luxury of being able to procreate well into their second half of life, even if it is ill advised. We don’t answer to the same clock. Procrastinate and then procreate. It’s like a mantra for men, a badge of pride, a pan flute: the exact opposite of the way it is for women. To my mind, it is exactly because men have the option available — as we head towards and beyond our mid-life crisis — that it is an increasing trend. It is the very proof, the very evidence that we are, indeed, not ageing, or if so, at not quite at the same rate.

  It’s yet another item in nature’s bottomless bag of ironies: men are slower to reach puberty, slower to develop their prefrontal cortex, and then much slower in their decline towards infertility. Recent brain imaging techniques confirm that the limbic system, the reward and emotion centre of the brain, develops ahead of the prefrontal cortex, the planning and inhibition centre of the brain; in other words, the accelerator is put in place far before the brakes are fitted. This is why teenagers are so disinhibited and since the male brain lags behind the female one, why men are stupider for longer, well into their twenties. As such, for the modern woman, nearly half of her fertile golden years are spent waiting for her evolutionarily delayed counterpart to book in to the mechanic for a pair of ‘settle down’ brake pads. And there she stands, at the Auto Shop, staring at the clock: the fairer sex, which in this case, is absolutely, the unfairer sex.

  So as I fill my days, in this last year of my paediatric training, surrounding myself with children, I’ve started to hear a faint tick. I see them in Emergency, I follow them up in Outpatients, I look in their ears, I have them spill their snot down my shirt. I see the fertility window is open, perhaps a little less wide than it was. I counsel parents, I order tests, I listen to worried voices while results are waited on. As a prefrontal-cortex-in-hibited man, who’s onto his second or third set of brake pads, I find myself doing the calculations. Suse is 35. Even if we had managed to get pregnant this month, she would be 36 before our first child was born. Give it another year before you try again, and she’d be 38 before we had our second. As soon as you add in nine months for gestation, the figures bloat quickly. A third? Wouldn’t even be possible under 40.

  And that’s best-case scenario. That is without bumps. And we’re the couple driving down a potholed road in an East German car with flat tyres.

  For the first time, given the road we’ve travelled the last few months, I now see the bumps and the faded lines, rather than the road itself. And suddenly, the tick is very loud in my ear. It stays muffled if I spend enough time at work, stifled by the noisy sound of young life. It’s when it’s quiet, when it stops at night that you hear the tick the most loudly.

  Men may not feel their biological clock with the same urgency. But, by proxy, we can. As I’ve said to myself, over and over, if Suse can’t have kids, I can’t. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter that I’m 34. My age doesn’t count. We’re in this together.

  Today, I distract myself from this knowledge by sorting through a vertiginously high stack of bills, spreading it into multiple piles throughout the lounge room, like a poor man’s game of Twister. As lunchtime hits, Suse walks in and slumps on the couch. Her period has arrived.

  “It’s uncanny the number of women whose period starts minutes after peeing on a stick,” she says. “There’s something biological that they’re playing on here, that fools us into spending ten bucks on a pregnancy test just be
fore we spend ten more on pads.”

  She lets her head falls into her hands. I step through the literal paper trail, and sit with her, my hand on her back. I want to say something, but quickly realise there is nothing to say.

  It’s 2.20am. I am dreaming deeply, something about my Year Two teacher, and how he could never get anything right. He stands at the board, writing up and rubbing out the word ‘separate’, with various versions of spelling. I feel that pull, a wrench from deep sleep, away from Mr Forrest’s quivering moustache. It is a raw feeling, a confusion, a fear, something hot and emotional. Deep from nowhere, from somewhere, from another place, I know there’s a danger, something that needs protection. I look at the school desk to my left and right, in struggle with it, and breathing in sharply, I am awake.

  I turn, confused, adjusting to my eyes. The first thing I feel is the movement, up and down in a soft shake: chug, chug, chug. The darkness clears as I begin to see the movement in time, bobbing up and down. And thirdly, I hear it. The sobs. Big, deep sobs.

  I pull the earplugs from my ears, the treble echo coming through clearly now, and the scene adds up. There I see my beautiful wife, silhouetted in the dark, her shoulders heaving while she weeps.

  “What’s going on, honey?” I ask, hearing someone else’s cracking voice. Definitely not mine.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” she gets out between gasps. “I just can’t stop.”

  “Oh, Suse.” I lift my arm, pulling her into my neck. I feel the wet against my skin.

  “How long have to you been crying?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t sleep.” Her shoulders shake. “I don’t know.”

  In a past life, I would have asked what this was about. I would have sought explanation, a reason, some information I could use to fix the problem. How very male of me.

  I’m a slow learner, but a learner all the same. This time I just let it be and hold her close.

  “Define: infertile”. Type it into Google. See what you get; it’s a hoot.