Inconceivable Read online

  Inconceivable

  A Medical Mistake, the Baby We

  Couldn’t Keep, and Our Choice to

  Deliver the Ultimate Gift

  Carolyn and Sean Savage

  Contents

  A Lesson of Love

  Prologue

  The First Trimester

  1. The Call to Character

  2. In the Name of Family

  3. Shaking Off the Shock

  4. Our Cup Runneth Over

  5. Heartbeat

  6. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

  7. Keeping the Secret

  8. Maybe, Maybe Not

  The Second Trimester

  9. Charting a Course

  10. An Anxious Introduction

  11. Sharing the Hurt, Feeling the Love

  12. The Elephant in the Room

  Photographic Insert

  13. Turning Toward Hope

  The Third Trimester

  14. Reaching Out

  15. Managing Two Pregnancies

  16. Facing Fear

  17. The Best Way Out Is Through

  18. Reaching Toward Joy

  19. A Broken Hallelujah

  The Fourth Trimester

  20. Wrapped in Love

  21. Good-byes and Grief

  22. Ambiguous Loss

  23. Godspeed

  Epilogue: A Letter to Logan

  Afterword

  Inconceivable Choices

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Lesson of Love

  We have our beliefs.

  They may be different from yours.

  That’s okay, as long as respect endures.

  Our story is absent of arrogance, as are our lives.

  We realize we may not have it all right.

  In fact, that is the only thing we are certain of.

  Whether you believe in God, or you don’t,

  Whether you study the whole Bible, or half the Bible,

  Another holy book, or no holy book,

  We hope our story will be meaningful to you.

  We believe the one thing that we all have in common

  is the need to love and to be loved.

  Perhaps the purest love on Earth is the love of a child.

  Our story is about that kind of love:

  Our love for a child,

  And the lesson of love he gave in return.

  PROLOGUE

  WE HAVE THREE CHILDREN. Or do we have four? A strange question, but the kind that parents who have lost a child ask themselves from time to time. That absent child is always with you, a loss you feel some days as yearning and other days in a gasp of pain. My husband Sean and I still grieve the son we lost, despite the unusual way he left us. Or rather, we still grieve him and the circumstances that forced us to give away a baby we thought of as our own. This was a child whom I nurtured and we both protected from the forces conspiring against his survival. Yet I understand that I may never hold him in my arms again and that the next time I see him, he will think of me as a stranger. Perhaps I will never be able to heal the ache that is the place he occupies in my heart. At the same time, I know that if Sean and I had this decision to make again, we’d do exactly the same for Logan.

  For us, having children has been the biggest challenge in our sixteen years of marriage: twenty ovarian stimulation cycles, three in vitro fertilizations (IVFs), two frozen embryo transfers, and four miscarriages in the twelve years that we tried everything we could to expand our family. We knew that our struggle was coming to a close on the morning of February 6, 2009, when we entered the fertility clinic for one last try. I was nearly forty years old, and if this attempt at transferring our last embryos did not work, we were done. We would thank God for our three beautiful, healthy children and move forward. Two of my three pregnancies had been difficult, and one nearly lethal, but we were determined to fulfill our pledge to give every embryo a chance at life. Our beloved fertility doctor, who had helped us conceive our third child, Mary Kate, when other doctors had failed, would perform the transfer that morning. Little did we know that, because of a terrible mistake, I would receive another couple’s embryos and eventually give birth to a baby we would not be allowed to raise.

  All through the Christmas holidays of 2008 and into the New Year, I had been anxiously preparing for this day: taking estrogen pills, injecting lupron and progesterone, and enduring the bloating and grumpiness brought on by those drugs. Although I had started out thinking that I didn’t want to go through all of it again, that I was tired of all the anxiety surrounding our infertility treatments and pregnancies, when Sean and I arrived at the clinic we were hoping for a second miracle. I had just slipped on my hospital gown when the fertility doctor entered the examining room. He was brusque and efficient, a man who clearly had many things on his mind as he described the condition of our thawed embryos.

  “The five that survived all have developed to between nine and twelve cells. How many will you be transferring today? Remember, I don’t do selective reductions.”

  He meant that if he transferred all five and they survived, he would not eliminate any in utero to give me and the others a better chance. His policy on this was one of the reasons we chose him as our doctor. Besides, I wasn’t sure any of these embryos were going to make it. Nine cells after four days in a Petri dish was not robust growth.

  “Can you give us a moment?” I asked.

  “I’ll see you in the operating room. Let me know then.”

  “Sean, they should be eighty to a hundred cells by now. They are very, very behind. I think we should transfer three. I actually don’t think any of them will take.”

  Sean knew how well I had educated myself about pregnancy, miscarriage, and the science behind IVF these last ten years.

  “What happens to the other two embryos?”

  “They’ll watch them until tomorrow, and if they are still alive, they’ll refreeze them. The ones we aren’t transferring probably won’t survive.”

  “Okay. Three it is,” Sean said.

  Before the nurse led me into the operating room, she had me check my wristband to confirm the information there. “Carolyn Savage.” “Yes.” “Social security number…” “Correct.” “Birth date…” “Wait…actually, the day and month of my birthday are correct, but my birth year is wrong. It’s 1969, not 1967.”

  This didn’t seem like a serious error, so I didn’t think anything of it. The nurse wrote a nine over the seven, fastened the bracelet to my wrist, and escorted us down the hall.

  In the operating room, I lay down on the table and placed my feet in the stirrups. Sean came in a few minutes later, gowned in surgical attire.

  “How many are we transferring?” the doctor asked me.

  “Three,” I said.

  “We’re doing three,” he called back into the lab. A few minutes later, the embryologist entered the room holding a catheter.

  “You are Carolyn Savage?”

  “Yes.”

  He flipped my wrist over and confirmed my answer with a glance at my hospital wristband, then handed the catheter to my doctor. Sean held my hand tightly.

  The nurse squirted ultrasound gel on my stomach and rubbed the wand over my abdomen. Up popped a vivid image of my uterus on the screen.

  “There’s the catheter entering the uterus through your cervix,” the doctor narrated. “Now watch. Do you see that?”

  I could see the catheter moving into my uterus, and although I couldn’t see the embryos as he released them, I thought of them as light and graceful orbs. I pictured them nesting gently.

  “Congratulations. You are now officially pregnant.”

  I looked at Sean and smiled. N
ow that our embryos were back where they were supposed to be, they might grow happily.

  “That’s it, guys. All finished. Good luck. I’ll talk to you in ten days, after your pregnancy test,” he said as he exited.

  I lay still, standard procedure immediately following a transfer of embryos.

  “How does it feel to be pregnant with triplets?” Sean said.

  I laughed. “Don’t look so worried! I know that however this turns out, we’ll be able to handle it. Triplets? That would be scary, but we’d survive. Twins? No sweat. A singleton? Perfect! No pregnancy? We’ll be okay with that too!”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Savage?” A gowned man asked as he entered the room.

  “Yes?”

  “For your baby album!” he said as he handed me a picture. Sean and I marveled at this snapshot of our three embryos, labeled with my name, Sean’s name, and our personal identifying information.

  “Their first picture, you know? Congratulations,” the man said to us.

  Sean and I looked at the picture and beamed at each other.

  The First Trimester

  CHAPTER 1

  The Call to Character

  CAROLYN

  I ROLLED OVER and glanced at the clock. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, I felt like hell, and I was pretty sure I knew why. I had been pregnant often enough to recognize that I was experiencing those symptoms, but considering my history, I couldn’t allow myself to feel certain. Not yet. I knew a virus was going around. The dizziness and nausea from the flu was about the same as what I felt with morning sickness. Soon enough I would get the results of the pregnancy test I’d had that morning. Why hadn’t they called me yet? I thought for sure I would know by lunchtime.

  That morning I’d rallied long enough to drag myself out of bed, throw on a bra and some sweats, and make a pathetic attempt at doing my hair before hauling myself to a lab for my pregnancy test. It was a chilly February morning in Sylvania, Ohio, and the cold air boosted my spirit as I drove to the appointment at a lab, leaving our sons Drew, fourteen, and Ryan, twelve, to sleep in on their day off from school. Sean had taken our one-year-old, Mary Kate, to his mom’s so I could rest. As I entered the laboratory to have my blood drawn, the happy thought that I was about to give her a sibling close to her in age brought a skip to my step at a time when normally I would have been dragging.

  Home from the lab, I discovered the remnants of the feast of biscuits and pancakes the boys had made before they went to play with some neighborhood friends. The house was quiet when I drifted back to sleep in our bedroom, enjoying the familiar hormones of pregnancy coursing through my body, with the cell phone and the house phone resting on a nearby pillow.

  When I woke at 3:30, there had been no call from my clinic. I felt eerily out of sorts and a little disturbed, as though someone were with me in the room, even though I knew I was alone in the house. Then I had a rush of energy, as if something important had just happened and I needed to attend to it. By the time the clock passed 3:45 and there had been no call, doubt started to creep in. What if I wasn’t pregnant? I shivered and pulled the covers tighter around me. I wondered if my shakes were the flu. I rolled onto my left side and felt acid reflux. Why was that there? And I remembered…because I was pregnant. Again. I grinned as I nodded off to sleep.

  When I woke again as the clock edged toward 4:00, I wondered if I should call the clinic. Surely they hadn’t forgotten.

  SEAN

  In February 2009, the atmosphere at the financial services company where I work was frenzied. I had been putting in long hours since the markets began collapsing the previous summer, trying to contain the panic virus that was spreading among investors, including some of my clients. Each time my phone rang, I heard my clients’ fears; every time I glanced at the computer, the graphs showed global assets in a freefall. On February 16, Carolyn and I were hoping for some good news for a change: the results of her pregnancy test. Carolyn had been ill the night before and early that morning. Perhaps it wasn’t the flu, but morning sickness. It was past 3:30, and a call from her was long overdue. My cell phone rang, and I answered it.

  “Sean, do you have privacy?” It was our fertility doctor, his voice trembling. This can’t be good, I thought as I rose to shut my office door.

  “I have bad news, but it is not the type of bad news you would expect,” he said. “Carolyn is pregnant with another couple’s genetic child.” My mouth fell open, but words escaped me. How could that be true? How could that happen? The hand that held the phone started shaking.

  The day before, he said, his clinic’s embryologist discovered the error and called him into the clinic, where the embryologist tearfully confessed that he had mistakenly pulled another couple’s embryos from cryopreservation. Without knowing, the doctor had transferred them into Carolyn. Our doctor had decided to wait for the outcome of the pregnancy test before letting us know about the mistake. He said he did not have the words to express how sorry he was for the error.

  I thought of the day of the transfer, of those embryos floating down to her womb, and then of Carolyn lying sick in bed this morning.

  “Does the other family know?” I asked.

  “Not yet. I wanted to see what you and Carolyn were going to do. I didn’t know whether you would want to continue with this pregnancy. Actually, I thought I would reach Carolyn at this number,” he said. “Can you give me her number?”

  “No,” I said. No way was I giving the doctor that number.

  “I think you must consider carefully if you want to continue this pregnancy,” the doctor said. “With Carolyn’s health at stake and the emotional toll….”

  “Call this number in an hour,” I said.

  After we hung up, I sat at my desk, unable to move. My mind bounced from one urgency to another, like a super ball trying to find a spot to settle. I had to relay this news in person. Carolyn had been my rock, my soul mate, for more than twenty years. We had always done the heavy lifting together; neither one of us shouldered big burdens alone. It was a partnership in every sense of the word. Thinking of how much this would hurt her made me sick to my stomach.

  Stand up, grab your keys, and get home, I thought.

  I had made the sixteen-minute drive home so often that I could do it in my sleep, which was good, because I wasn’t focusing on the road. This is a life-changer, I kept thinking, but I couldn’t process much beyond that. Mostly I was trying to decide what words to use when I told Carolyn.

  As I pulled into the driveway the pounding of my heart shook my bones. I knew Carolyn was in the bedroom resting, and I thanked God that the boys were off at the neighbor’s and our youngest was with my mom. I walked upstairs in the silent house, filled with trepidation.

  The bedroom curtains were drawn, and the room was nearly dark. Carolyn looked weak and tired in the dim light. I approached her side of the bed, startling her.

  “I have some really bad news,” I said. She sat straight up in bed. “You are pregnant, but the doctor transferred another couple’s embryos into you.”

  “What?”

  “They made a horrendous mistake. Another couple’s embryos are inside you. The doctor called to tell me.”

  “You are joking,” she said.

  I shook my head no.

  She repeated loudly, “You are joking!”

  I shook my head no again, and terror flitted over her face.

  “You are joking!”

  I moved to comfort her, but she flew out of bed. I stood back. She walked toward me with her finger pointed at my chest, as if she was going to make me take back what I just said. Then she stopped. I watched tears building in her eyes, while tears of my own ran slowly down my face. I was her husband, and I was not able to help her. No one could.

  CAROLYN

  Sean’s face was ashen and his shoulders slumped, his body drained of his usual confidence. Deep down, I realized he wasn’t kidding. As the seconds passed and I understood what he was saying, I lost control.

&nbs
p; Sean reached to comfort me, but I didn’t want to be touched. I ran toward our bathroom. He followed. I ran from the bathroom to the closet, back to the bathroom, to the bedroom door, and back to the bed, as if I needed to get away, but there was no escape. The problem was inside of my body. I realized I was gasping for air. I caught a glimpse of myself in our bedroom mirror. My skin was covered in red blotches, and my eyes were bloodshot and swollen. Get a grip, Carolyn, I thought to myself. Then I looked at Sean, who was standing in the corner of our bedroom, tears streaming down his face. I’d only seen him cry twice before: the day his dad died and the day Ryan was born, when I nearly died. Once again, he was crying tears of helplessness. He didn’t know what to do for me.

  I plopped down on the bed, grabbed my pillow, and hugged it to my chest. Staring at the wall, I tried to catch my breath. I couldn’t look at Sean. I couldn’t look anywhere.

  After a few minutes of silence, Sean moved closer. He hesitated and spoke softly.

  “You know, the doctor wants you to terminate.”

  “What? They want me to do what?”

  “He said it would be best for you to terminate.”

  Our fertility doctor didn’t believe in abortion. How could he go against his personal ethics?

  I looked up at Sean, and our eyes locked. We both knew what the other was thinking. This was a human life, and we would protect it. It didn’t matter that this child was in the wrong womb. That wasn’t his or her fault. I put myself in the place of this child’s mother. If I were her, I would be terrified that my child’s life was going to be taken away because he or she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. What if my unborn child was in the wrong woman? Would that woman be merciful and allow my child to live?