Wait, aren't I infertile?

While I was nosing around online today, I came upon an article on the psychiatric needs of the pregnant post-infertility patient.

"Infertility," it said, "creates a crisis at the individual, relational and social levels."

Well, no shit.

I have spent the past 30 years as an infertile person. While I was strapped down as a 2 year old to better facilitate the gamma-blasting and obliteration of that ugly lump in my spinal cord, the doctors took my parents aside. Radiation cones out and bounces around in the body, they said. It will affect her reproductive organs and she'll be sterile. But we're just trying to add a few months to her short little life and it'll never come up anyway.

Some of their predictions didn't come true (I lived after all, I developed a functional lower jaw, my teeth were damaged but came in on schedule), but the infertility always held. As a child, it was a matter discussed behind my back. It emerged more and more the older I got. I became Poor-Amorette-Who'll-Never-Have Children, a built-in pathetic, tragic figure who was always good for clucking and gossip, a relief-inducing nonfactor in the little dynastic intrigues. I was aware of it, I resented it, but what could I do? It was completely out of my hands and that was the most frustrating of all.

I was doubly cursed because I really loved kids. I babysat during most of my free time, worked as an au pair, tutored Korean toddlers in English. When the well-meaning parents told me I'd make a good mother someday, I went home and cried. By that time, the cancer treatment wasn't the only element at play...I also had some genetic infertility issues that were pretty much a double whammy. When a high-school Home Ec teacher asked me if I planned to have kids, I hardened myself and told her no, I didn't want to take a chance on my child having cancer like mine. Then I began worrying that I'd cursed myself and that I'd get exactly what I asked for, even though it wasn't true.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm attending a family baby shower, trying my best to get through it. Everyone's playing a game. Tiny plastic babies are frozen in ice-cubes, and the person who melts their cube fastest and "gives birth" wins the game. Someone has handed me an ice cube and I'm cupping it in my hands with the rest of them. The other players giggle and shout as plastic feet emerge, or the sharp little ends of plastic hands. I look down at my ice cube and don't see anything inside. I don't have to melt it very far to realize that someone accidentally gave me a cube without a baby in it. I was keeping myself pretty much under control, then someone saw it and joked loudly about my "false pregnancy". It took all I had not to burst into tears on the spot. As I told Jeanne, it was all rather on-the-nose (and in-the-teeth) to me. Once again, I was Poor-Amorette-Who-Can't-Have-Kids, fulfilling my role with yet another pity-worthy situation to cluck over.

At family gatherings, people stopped handing me babies to hold.

The way my weight is distributed, combined with the stiff-backed way I have to get out of a chair, I looked pregnant at times. If I was wearing loose-fitting clothes, someone invariably asked me when I was due. Then I had to laugh and say "No, I'm just fat." Of course, they always felt bad once I said that, and the same person never asked me twice. But usually I'd get asked a couple of times a month.

First, my doctors said it'd be no problem, they'd just throw me on Clomid. But they got less optimistic as I neared the end of my twenties. I'd had a number of episodes that might have been miscarriages (there was no way to tell, due to my weird history), and they weren't playing well with my mental health. When I went in to my OB/GYN a few months ago, she joked about my eggs being "fried" (a joke I didn't particularly appreciate) and sent me to a genetics counselor to see if I should even bother trying fertility treatment. That appointment got me nowhere, since the counselor never followed up and the physician there became preoccupied by a professional pissing-contest with my endocrinologist.

Finally, thoroughly frustrated, I made a complete and total disconnection from any hope of having children. I forced it down my own throat, and it was hard. It was like deliberately eating poison. I resigned myself to adoption being my absolute only hope, and began to check into it. Know what I found? "Disqualifying factors: history of cancer."

I wanted to scream and trash the house. Was I not being punished enough, being infertile? Did they have to throw this in on top of it? I had absolutely no choice in the matter, and once again that unsheddable history was going to ruin everything. It controlled my childhood, it ruined my chosen career. I hate it more than anything; it's been the deciding factor in absolutely everything that goes on in my life. It's like an evil little gremlin that's always standing off to one side, jumping up and down gleefully, pointing and cackling, "I got you again! You thought you slipped past me this time, but I got you again!"

And then, suddenly, after a routine endocrinology appointment, I was told I was pregnant. I refused to believe it. I was certain that there was some vicious little tumor in me somewhere, pumping out hCG (as they do sometimes), and it would be the final kick-in-the-pants before I was put back in my place once and for all. Then I believed that if it really, somehow, was true, something suitably tragic would happen, because that's how it works for me. I was sure it was going to be ectopic, before I got the hard copy of the sonogram in my hands. Then I was sure I was going to miscarry. The study I was reading today says:

"Two extreme reactions in relation to the pregnancy might appear in some patients. Denial might occur in women who are not capable of developing an attachment to the fetus because of the anticipation or fear of negative events during pregnancy (e.g. miscarriage). Others might develop an exaggerated worry about each 'normal' physical event in the pregnancy...the fact that pregnant patients do not feel extremely happy about their pregnancy, as they feel they should, produces feelings of guilt and shame, which further reinforce feelings that may have developed when the infertility problem was first discovered."

I'm there. I'm so there. Only, I know how an infertile person would react to this whole post of mine, because I know how I would have reacted. It's a raw pain that cuts to your very core, and it gets worse with each happy story and each baby you see. You can smile at someone's news, you can exclaim over someone's cute new baby, but you feel like your heart is being ripped right out. It's got to be one of the worst pains in the world. The sentiment might be, "Oh, boo-hoo, bitch. You have a baby now and I don't. I never will."

And that brings me to the last part of this, the part of the lifetime of infertility that has completely hobbled me today. I feel guilty. I feel as if somehow I've overstepped my assigned role as Infertile Person. When the news first spread, everyone was stunned, and I felt uncomfortable. No one seemed happy. There were cautious inquiries regarding my health, certainly in no small part due to the fact that my health is going to make this a nightmare pregnancy. But I still have this nagging feeling as if... as if something did happen, if I miscarried or it was a stillbirth or something was otherwise wrong, the reaction of everyone around me would be relief. "Well, glad we don't have to worry about that foolishness anymore, everything's back the way it should be, she knows her place now."

It's keeping me from being truly happy about this, and it's making me feel as if I'm betraying every infertile person out there who is struggling with the completely real, completely horrible pain. I want to apologize for being pregnant. I want to keep from talking about it too often because I know how much it could hurt someone. It hurt me, and I still haven't transitioned out of my status as Poor-Amorette-Who-Can't-Have-Kids. How can I? It's the role I've been assigned my entire life.