Egg Hunters

Making babies goes high-tech

published in DukeMed, Fall/Winter 2005. Download PDF file here.

Even now, Debbie Greer can’t help but visit the infertility message boards online. Nowhere is there quite so much hope and love mingled with such heartache and desperation. It flows out from the multitude of acronyms and abbreviations: IVF, ICSI, BFP. It blinks passionately from emoticons that flash smiling icons and sobbing symbols. There are women here who suffer from polycystic ovary syndrome, women whose husbands have severe male factor infertility, women who speak of egg retrieval and follicles and embryo transfers with the familiarity of a scientist. Women who have tried every assisted reproductive technology available, over and over again, for as many as 11 years.

Only a few months ago, Greer was one of those women, and like a member of some secret society, she continues to read the message boards to remind herself how fragile the journey from infertility to parenthood is. Because in July, she became one of the lucky ones. After undergoing in vitro fertilization at the Duke Reproductive Endocrinology and Fertility division, she received what she had wanted for more than four years: a BFP-Big Fat Positive pregnancy test.

Babies on Board

Published in The New Physician, March 2005

Even Sethina Edwards was amazed when she attended the “Welcome to Medical School” gathering at the University of Bristol in England last fall. One would not expect Edwards, a mother of two and a former freelance publicist, to be surprised by the fact that a whopping 75 percent of her classmates were women. After all, for the past six years, aspiring women physicians around the world have been turning to her for support.

In 1999, when Edwards decided to seek a career in medicine, she was pregnant with her first daughter. Training to be a physician is difficult enough without the complications of motherhood. “People thought I’d gone mad,” Edwards says. “Lots of people told me it was impossible.”

When to have kids

Published in The New Physician, March 2005

(sidebar to “Babies on Board“)

If all goes according to plan, by this time in 2007, Meredith Hancock will have a 1-year-old child and will be nearing the end of her first year of medical school. For this to happen, Hancock must first complete the prerequisites she needs to apply to medical school, take the Medical College Admission Test next month, get pregnant sometime after that, get accepted, have her baby and start training in fall 2006.

If, if, if.

“That’s my hope,” says the Sacramento resident. “I’d like to stay home a little bit before I actually start school. But I know there’s no good time, so I’ll just have to take it as it comes.” Indeed. Hancock and her husband may have plans for a family, but her medical training is the only thing she has certain control over, assuming she’s accepted. Visit the online chat forums of the Student Doctor Network or MomMD.com on any given day, and you will be bombarded with the question: When is the best time to have kids?

And it’s one, most women say, that not even a soothsayer could pinpoint. That’s because no matter how controlling you may be, Mother Nature is in charge when it comes to having children.

My Mother, Who has Cancer …

Written in August 1998, copyright 1998 Beth McNichol

When the lights went down in the icy movie theater and my family surrounded me — all of my family — everything was normal again. Of course it was. Six months had passed. I drew a long, cold sip of Coca-Cola from my straw and thanked God for simplicity, for days of nothingness. I was 19 years old. What did I know? I tossed my feet up on the back of the chair and looked beside me. Her head was covered with more than stubble now, though she still wore the wig, and the angry little bumps that once scattered the baldness, ugly and knee-weakening, had found someone else to pester. The villain was behind her; he had come and he had gone and as far as my father and my sister and myself were concerned, he would never call again. That’s how it works, right? That’s the sequence of events: biopsy, surgery, crying, chemotherapy, health. Cured. That’s how it works.

The nurse in the movie Best Friends inserted an IV needle into Jack Lemmon’s unwilling skin, fishing around for a vein, for some response. My mother shivered. She shivered and her left hand, the swollen one, went to catch the right hand that clasped over her mouth to stop the nausea and maybe the tears, too. Who knew this was what the film was about? I cursed the director, the screenwriter, the cameraman, Lemmon himself. Even as my heart told my hand to find my mother’s in the darkness, I knew that I could not do much to help. Not like Julia.

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