It's My Parody and I'll Cry if I Want to

Lying down spread-eagled, clothes slumped haphazardly over a chair, brimming with hormones and ready for a large object to be inserted into your nether regions may sound like a perfectly delightful, deliciously lustful way to start a 31st birthday. But when you are lying on your back in that most compromising position in a sterile doctor's office, your feet inelegantly splayed in stirrups, and the object in question is an ultrasound device designed to assess how your eggs are growing, you don't exactly feel like Bringing Sexy Back. Nor are you, at that very moment, particularly into doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel. But you do feel a lot like an animal. Like a fish that has been pumped with hormones to produce enough caviar to feed a small country. Or like a chicken injected with drugs to generate extra, extra large eggs. Or like a cow given a boost of chemicals to enhance its milk supply. You get the point.

And when the plan is to have your eggs fertilized and then frozen until you are in remission from a relapse for Hodgkin's Disease, assuming remission is even achieved, the ultimate goal of these fertility treatments, which is to produce a Baby-Gap clad bouncing bundle of joy, feels virtually unattainable and almost ethereal.

Between getting cancer and worrying about related fertility issues, and now having what by all accounts appears to be a relapse, things have not exactly been looking up for me. To make matters worse, on this particular visit to the McGill fertility clinic, I was flying solo, since my hubbie had a meeting back in Toronto and had to miss my appointment. Having no desire for my doting parents to accompany me to the exam (I have my pride...), I went to the clinic alone.


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To top things off, it was my birthday. As I lay down with my loins spread open, the doctor carefully measuring the size of my follicles (the sacks that contain eggs) on the computer screen, making vague attempts to engage in polite chatter, I made the decision that this year, I was going to have a non-birthday. Because most of my thirtieth year had been spent in hospitals enduring mildly unpleasant to downright painful procedures, and feeling like a toxic waste site (and one that is, moreover, dangerously back-up) from all the chemotherapy and radiation and anti-nausea medication, I concluded that this year would simply have to be a re-do, at least from an emotional perspective. Like a major tax write off, my 30th year would simply be wiped out and I would have another go at it.

At the end of my appointment (which had been interrupted by a fire alarm), I asked if the doctor who had been following me would be available for the final "collection", the procedure where the eggs are all sucked out through a small needle aspirate. The day of collection is timed to precision based on the exact point when the eggs reach maturity but before ovulation, and for me, that day would fall on a Saturday. The doctor explained that he would be away that day, so a colleague who was on call would perform the procedure.

I left the hospital, simultaneously inflated with dozens of ripening eggs and deflated by the final blow I had received, that some unknown doctor was now going to be responsible for sucking out my potential future children. As I walked down the hospital hill towards the street, the icy February chill numbing my fingers, the daily fertility injections causing me to feel at times totally erratic, and at times strangely erotic, I did the only sensible thing to be done under the circumstances: have a good long cry and wallow in self-pity.

Back in May, 2007, tests were well underway to determine the cause of the mysterious lump on my neck. I spent weeks looking like the Michelin Man with a huge bandage plastered on my neck from my biopsy, and went through a round of fertility treatments once the diagnosis had been established and chemotherapy was imminent. Now, nine months later, I have another ominous lump on my neck and the test results do not look good. It must be some cosmic joke that I am getting these lumps at the right intervals but in the wrong places - how much nicer it would be if they had only been larger and on my tummy...

So I have found myself going through another round of fertility treatments in order to gather some more eggs before receiving the aggressive chemotherapy it is expected that I will need, and about to embark on another surgical adventure to remove the brand new node from my neck. This whole thing feels a lot like Groundhog Day anyway, so why not just have another go at being 30?