Inconceivable Read online

  I looked at Sean knowing this was one of those decisions we didn’t need to discuss.

  “We’d never do that,” I said.

  Sean nodded his head in agreement. And that was it. We would endure this pregnancy. I looked up at him, but his eyes had drifted to the portrait of our family on the beach that hangs over our bed. I closed my eyes. I wanted to shut it all out. When I opened them again, Sean was sobbing.

  CHAPTER 2

  In the Name of Family

  SEAN

  AS I LOOKED AT Carolyn, I saw tears running down her face and also felt tears on mine. I could not believe we were in this place. How did our life’s journey lead us here? So much of what had driven us since we met was our family. We had sacrificed and spent so much, all for the ideal of having a large family.

  The first time I saw Carolyn, at a party that my Miami University of Ohio fraternity hosted in 1989, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She looked just like the woman I had imagined I would marry. She was dressed conservatively, but I noticed a spark, a light she brought to her corner of the room. I asked some friends to arrange an introduction. Up close, I found her in a playful mood.

  “Have you ever seen a hair dance?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. She plucked a strand of her long blond hair, and I followed her to a beer-drenched table.

  “Watch closely as I place this piece of hair into that puddle of beer,” she said.

  I dropped my head for a better view, and she urged me closer. When I was within a few inches of it, she stretched out her hand and splashed beer all over my hair and face. Bold! I loved that she had the guts to try a trick. I really like this girl, I thought.

  We decided to go to a party at a fraternity nearby, but that party had ended. I offered to walk her home, and she accepted. We didn’t take a straight line back. It was nearly midnight, and the weather was a balmy seventy degrees, unusual for Ohio in October. We strolled up High Street, past the lovely old colonial-style brick buildings that dot the campus, laughing and talking so easily, in our own world. It just felt right. She let me steal a kiss at her door as we said good night.

  The following few weeks were a little hit and miss, but by Thanksgiving we were dating exclusively. Two days after Christmas I drove five hours from my parents’ home in Toledo to Champaign, Illinois, to see Carolyn and meet her family. All the Higginses were waiting to meet me: Carolyn’s dad Byron, her mom Linda, and her brothers, Mike and Andy. Byron was the chief counsel for the University of Illinois and knew how to take someone’s measure, particularly where his beloved daughter was concerned.

  Linda served an elaborate, multi-course dinner. Afterwards, I was looking forward to excusing myself from the table for a night out with Carolyn. As we stood up to go, Linda urged us to please sit down for dessert, and she set a piece of her famous cherry pie before me. I hate cherry pie. It makes me gag, but the pride with which Linda presented it alerted me to the fact that I’d better eat it if I wanted to make a favorable impression on the Higgins family. I choked down the slice of pie, slipping several bites to their dog Bailey, who waited eagerly underneath the table, and expressed my compliments to the chef. I passed the test. The reward was sharing an “I love you” with Carolyn for the first time as I was leaving.

  The summer arrived, and I had a job back home in Toledo pounding nails at a construction site. Carolyn was on my mind most of the time. Nearly every weekend I traveled to see her in Champaign, or vice versa. The commute to visit her was epic. One Saturday in July, I finished work at 3:00 in the afternoon, immediately jumped in my car, still dusty and sweaty, and arrived at her house around 7:30. On Sunday I had to be back in Toledo by noon for a family gathering, so I left Carolyn at 7:00 A.M. I spent ten hours in the car to spend twelve hours with Carolyn.

  As our one-year dating anniversary approached, I wanted to give Carolyn something special. On our anniversary—October 29—we drove to Cincinnati, where I bought her a beautiful Irish Claddagh ring. I put it on her finger as a placeholder for the ring I planned to give her in the future. I had no doubt we were moving toward a life together, a life with family at its center. During one happy evening early on, we imagined sitting at opposite ends of our kitchen table with our raucous children in between. We even named them.

  In the late spring of 1992, just after I graduated, I got down on one knee in the Formal Gardens at Miami University and proposed. Carolyn said yes, and the wedding plans began within minutes. On May 29, 1993, one hundred days after my father, John F. Savage, passed away, we wed in St. John’s Catholic Chapel in Champaign, Illinois. Carolyn joined me in Toledo, where I worked for State Farm Insurance as a corporate employee and Carolyn taught eighth-grade language arts at a Catholic school. Within a few years, I joined Savage & Associates, the financial services firm that my father founded, later run by my uncle Bob Savage. By then, we had two sons and Carolyn was working on her master’s in education and would soon be the principal of an elementary school. What could stop us from achieving our dreams?

  In a word, infertility.

  CAROLYN

  Though Sean fell for me immediately, I took a little while longer. Sure, I let him kiss me when he walked me home, but a few nights later we passed each other on the street and I didn’t recognize him. I think there was some beer involved in that episode too. I guess I needed some more time. The first time he came to visit my apartment, my roommate and I were looking out the front window as Sean approached, wearing a shiny blue tracksuit to our first date! She chuckled. “Well,” she said, “maybe you can teach him how to dress, ’cause he’s even cute wearing that.”

  Despite our beginning, when I fell for Sean, I fell completely. He is quick and witty, and like me, he never shrinks from a challenge. In each other, we truly had met our match. Besides our ambitions, we shared a faith, the same goals, and, at the center of it all, a desire for a big family. We both thought raising children was the best show on earth. I could spend my entire day snuggling babies, burying my kisses in their necks, and listening to them giggle. We agreed to have at least four children, but I wouldn’t have been opposed to five or six, if we could support them. Sean is the eighth child of John and Kate Savage’s brood of nine, and his description of growing up in a big family appealed to me.

  I met the Savage clan for the first time when Sean and I had been going out for about six months and he took me home for his sister Patti’s wedding. As we drove toward the church that afternoon, Sean warned me that I’d be introduced to more than a hundred of his blood relatives at the ceremony. How would I keep all those names straight? Sean didn’t make things any easier on me with his stories about his brothers.

  “You should be glad this is a wedding and not all of us sitting around the dinner table. My brothers all rate the new girlfriends when someone brings one home.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Like sometimes one of them will bring home a date for dinner, and we all just shout out numbers while we are eating.”

  “That’s awful!”

  “Not really. She never knows what we’re doing. We just ask for ‘three rolls’ or ‘seven green beans.’ Don’t worry. You’d get some high numbers.”

  Some high numbers? After the ceremony, my mind was tied up in knots as we pulled into the driveway of the Savage home, which sat amid five acres on a hillside in a suburb of Toledo. The Savages were hosting four hundred guests at a beautiful reception in a hall nearby. Honestly, I hardly noticed the food. Most of my energy went into memorizing the names of all the siblings and their spouses. There was John and Cindy; Kevin and JoAnn; Jeff and his girlfriend Carol; Scott and Julie and their one-year-old, Kristen; Brian and Beth; the bride Patti and her new husband Pat; Kelly; and Sean’s younger brother, Aaron.

  “Then there are my cousins,” Sean said. “My dad has eight siblings.” I must have looked dumbfounded. “Don’t worry. I don’t even know all of their names. My aunts make everyone wear name tags at family gatherings.”

  This was the large
family I wanted for my children. Of course, I had a happy childhood and love my family with all my heart. I have wonderful memories of sailing on Lake Huron in the summers. And our family dinners, every evening at six o’clock sharp, were precious to me. Yet the grand scale of this family captured my imagination. I definitely saw a place for myself among the Savages.

  Part of what drew me to them was their faith.

  My family was religious but not active in a parish, which was tough for a little girl who liked ceremony and regimen. The Savage family life was intertwined with the life of the church, something I also craved: a community that watched out for each other, linked through the ceremonies of life—the births, the deaths, and the holidays. In Sean’s family, all of it was held in place by the power and charisma of Sean’s dad.

  Revered in his industry, John Savage also was a motivational speaker with engagements all over the world. He easily could have paid for college for all of his children, but he devised his own motivational scheme to build character in them. The kids would pay for half of their college education. On the day they graduated, their father would give them back all the money they had put in.

  During our engagement, Sean’s dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. He died three months before our wedding, and it seemed as though the whole town went into mourning. John Savage’s death was front-page news for three days. There must have been a hundred cars in the procession behind the hearse, which paused briefly in front of John F. Savage Hall, the University of Toledo’s beautiful basketball arena that had been named in his honor, a testament to his kind spirit, generosity, and skills as a fund-raiser. The seven Savage sons, including Sean, served as pallbearers.

  In big Irish families, life is always moving on, despite the sorrows. The year John Savage died, we were married and a Savage baby boom was under way. We already had nieces Kristen and Meredith, and five more babies were due the year of our wedding. I hoped I’d soon be joining their number, but we weren’t certain, as I was already suffering some fertility problems. Doctors had diagnosed my endometriosis when I was a teenager, and I underwent an operation to remove scar tissue caused by that condition while I was in college. Before Sean and I married, my doctor told us that, if we wanted children, we would have to start right away. We took him seriously, and I was proud to be five months pregnant on our first anniversary.

  Drew’s conception came the old-fashioned way, and his birth went perfectly. We had beaten the predicted—almost promised—problems of infertility. If I had known what was to come, I would have memorized every moment of the day Drew was born. We tried right away for a second child, but it would never again be that easy.

  Our infertility treatments began with the most benign techniques: charting basal body temperatures to predict ovulation and trying like hell to conceive at times not at all inspired by romance. I’m pretty sure that our second son was conceived on a Sunday night during an episode of Murder She Wrote after an ovulation stimulation shot. Not the most romantic of conceptions, but it worked.

  My second pregnancy progressed smoothly until ten weeks before my due date. Late one night I felt woozy and was experiencing increasing abdominal pain. Sean rushed me to the hospital. My blood pressure had soared to 160/100, and they admitted me, suspecting preeclampsia, a dangerous condition of pregnancy when the mom’s blood pressure spikes and the placenta starts to break down. Early the next morning my obstetrician diagnosed HELLP syndrome, a rare and extremely deadly form of preeclampsia. The only way to save my life and our baby’s life was an emergency C-section. I delivered our second son at 10:30 that evening. He was under-weight and admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). I spent the next ten days in the hospital recovering. A month later, Ryan arrived home to meet his big brother—our well-earned happy ending—at a whopping three pounds, fifteen ounces.

  After Ryan was born, all the physicians we consulted agreed that HELLP syndrome was unlikely to happen again, and we were clear to try for another child. During the next ten years I underwent an enormous number of treatments. Every now and then we would ask if in vitro fertilization was something we should explore, but our doctors always said that we didn’t need that kind of technology. My ovaries responded well, and Sean’s sperm were Olympic swimmers.

  So what was the problem? Could it be stress? We thought so from time to time. For several years, as we raised our two active sons, I pursued a graduate degree with the goal of advancing from classroom teaching to a position as a principal. Sean was spending long hours building his financial services business. We found ourselves questioning whether we should keep trying for another child.

  In 2005 I was working as a principal, and we were seven years into our quest for a third child. With our busy schedules, miscommunication was a constant problem. Something had to give.

  One night I had a school board meeting that Sean had known about for weeks. I was just entering the meeting when my cell phone rang. I answered it.

  “Hi, Carolyn. It’s Geoff Aughenbaugh. I’m at cross-country practice, and it seems Sean left early and forgot something.”

  Sean coached Drew’s cross-country team, and he always left early on Monday evenings to get to Ryan’s soccer practice, where he was also the head coach. “Yeah, Geoff, listen. Can you just put whatever he left in your car and bring it to practice with you tomorrow?”

  “Uh, not really. He left Drew!” In years past, Drew had accompanied Sean and Ryan to soccer practice, but that year he was old enough to stay home alone. I thought Sean would arrange a ride home for Drew, but with our frantic schedules, both of us had forgotten to make sure that one of us would do that.

  I was livid with Sean, and as it turned out, he was just as frustrated with me. That night, before bed, we started blaming each other, and I ended up locking myself in the bathroom in tears.

  As I stood there looking at my tired, anxious face in the mirror, I recalled that there’d been a few too many incidents like this recently—too many for my comfort anyway. The week before, when I was driving the boys to school, I was so worried about a morning meeting that I forgot to drop them off. I drove a few miles past their school when Drew said, “Mom, where are you going?” By the time I turned around, delivered them to school, and fought the traffic to my job, I was late. And the week before that another mom had asked me how I balanced the boys’ school lunches nutritionally. I confessed that I didn’t pack their lunches. She looked at me as if I was the world’s worst mother. Her reaction was extreme, and it was none of her business, but she’d made me feel guilty. The truth was that I would have loved to have the time to make their lunches, to know during the day that they were eating something I’d chosen for them, something that would not only sustain them but allow me to touch them in some way at their midday meal. A small thing, but it mattered to me.

  When I walked out of the bathroom, Sean was waiting. He said what I’d been thinking for weeks: “You know, you don’t have to work. We can manage.”

  I wanted to slow down. I longed to enjoy our family. But it was hard to fathom walking away from being a principal. I’d worked so hard to get that job.

  Once again, Sean said just what I needed to hear: “You could always try quitting, and if you miss it too much, you can go back.”

  Right then and there, I decided to give it a try. At the end of the school year, I resigned from my position to start my new job as a stay-at-home mom, pledging to myself that I’d pick up my career at some later date. It also wasn’t far from my thoughts that without the added stress of two careers, we just might be blessed with another child.

  That fall, we headed back to our doctor to try for a third child in earnest. After three more unsuccessful ovulation stimulation cycles, we were verging on hopelessness. By the time we made an appointment to discuss whether there was anything else we could do, we were exhausted. When I thought about being pregnant, I felt like a failure. Prior to the unsuccessful stimulation cycles, I’d had two miscarriages in which the babies d
ied before they even had a heartbeat. We needed something more.

  “The techniques we’re trying aren’t working,” I told our fertility doctor. “I make tons of eggs. You said Sean’s sperm is fine. Why aren’t we pregnant?”

  “I don’t have an explanation for this. The only remaining option we have left is in vitro fertilization. But clinically, you shouldn’t need it.”

  “Well, obviously we need something more than what we’re doing,” I said.

  “I’m not sure I really understand IVF,” Sean said.

  “You’re familiar with the first part of it, as it starts out the way we’ve started before. Carolyn would take medications to stimulate her ovaries to produce eggs. When her eggs are mature enough, I will surgically remove them and use your sperm to fertilize them in the lab. Then we wait. We watch the embryos every day to see how well they are growing. Between three and five days later, we transfer one, two, or three of the embryos back into Carolyn’s uterus.”

  “How do we decide how many to transfer?” Sean asked.

  “I determine the quality of the embryos, and we talk it over. If the embryos are growing well, I would never transfer more than two. If the embryos are of lesser quality, we might transfer three. What we don’t want is you carrying three or four babies.”

  “After the transfer, we wait two weeks before the pregnancy test,” I said.

  “That’s right. We hope by that time at least one of the embryos has implanted in your uterus and begun to grow.”

  “Isn’t this very expensive? Our insurance doesn’t cover the procedure,” Sean asked.

  “After medications, office visits, and surgical procedures, it will run you around $8,000 per try.”

  The blood nearly ran out of Sean’s face. That was a lot of money, especially considering we had already spent a small fortune over the course of the previous decade on medications for our ovulation stimulation cycles.