Six years after being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer, Sophie Beresiner was told, aged 37, that chemotherapy had made her infertile. Now, her new book The Mother Project charts her story, from cancer diagnosis to surrogacy.
Here, she shares the exact moment doctors told her she was infertile, and the overwhelming mix of emotions you go through as a woman who has just found out that she cannot carry her own baby…
How do you know if you’re infertile? Someone professionally straightforward tells you you’re infertile, that’s how you know. Perhaps in a medical facility of the standard nondescript variety, like this one I’m in right now. Nondescript, but already in the top two most hideous rooms I’ve ever sat in, nonetheless. Currently I can’t hear anything except the whooshing of my own blood – that happens sometimes when you’re delivered earth-tiltingly bad news that you weren’t really expecting. Unfortunately, this ain’t my first rodeo.
My husband Mr B is definitely saying something soothing, because he’s rubbing my back whilst doing so, but I’m deafened by hot white noise and instead focus on his adam’s apple bobbing as he gulps something down repeatedly – ah yes, the taste of abject disappointment and distress. That’s because this just happened:
‘I’m afraid your ultrasound showed no ovarian function, in fact your left ovary was not visible at all. And your AMH and FSH blood test results also demonstrate that you are infertile.’
Infertile. A somewhat vague diagnosis that kind of makes the room warp in on itself while Mr B rubs my back, and no one rubs his. My hearing returns just in time to catch him saying, ‘Well, you’ve been through worse, eh?’ Oh Christ, I should have stayed deaf. In this moment, when I’m imagining my future hurtling down a toilet, it’s safest to avoid comment. I glare at the poor man and then at the doctor. Dispassionate doctor with your face set to ‘patiently waiting for news to register’ whilst preparing leaflets on egg donation.
OK, yes, I have – literally speaking – been through worse: the breast cancer, chemo and radiation that apparently fried my fertility and put me in this position in the first place. But still, I don’t think it’s appropriate to park me anywhere on the bad news emotional acceptance scale whilst I’m smack bang in the middle of processing this bit.
Right now, as a woman finally ready to start celebrating my traitorous body again by making a baby with my lovely husband, nothing feels worse. I can’t make a baby. My body has let me down again, and so I fucking hate my body right now, along with everyone else in this room. It’s my right as a female human being. It’s what everyone does. It’s been my end goal, my dangling carrot to get me through the last five years of remission therapy, and now I’m here, I’m ready. And I can’t do it?! OK, this may not literally be the worst thing in the world, but it’s the worst thing in my world right now. This is just … well this is, just … this is not fucking FAIR.
Uh oh. I’m having an internal tantrum. I can feel the rage building at the same time I imagine the doctor going through his Kübler-Ross stages of grief checklist. ‘She’s skipped denial and gone straight to anger, so she’ll be on to bargaining shortly, I’ll wait.’
I’m not interested in bargaining. I want to go home and get into bed and cry for a hundred years. Instead I stand up abruptly and walk out of the room, while Mr B makes my apologies and follows me to the garden bench outside, where he disregards his own feelings to try and soothe mine.
I know that this man crouching at my feet is the only person who understands what to do with me right now, he knows me better than anyone. He already understands that he said the wrong thing on the spur of the moment, and he’s explaining that he panicked. He wanted nothing more than to shine some light onto a deeply dark situation, to put it into perspective in the only way he knew how. By telling me I’m not dying this time.
Yes. Yes that’s true. *Sucks in deep breath*.
There is a similar kind of finality though. The no going backwards-ness. Once again my whole life has hit a trajectory I was not expecting, one I do not want, one that changes things forever. I’m angry at him because I won’t ever see what my own child looks like, and he still might see his. And even as I’m thinking it, I know it’s not fair. Even as I’m thinking it, I know it’s our child I wanted to see, that beautiful and unique mix of me and him. And, if I can just clear some of this rage from behind my eyeballs, I can see that that’s what he’s lost too. Even right now, on this stupid garden bench, while I’m making a snotty spectacle of myself in front of the hospital-goers, and the doctor is still waiting for us inside.
*Sucks in deeeep breath*.
I close my eyes and stand up to give him the cuddle he also needs, and we go back in to talk over our options.
To read more about Sophie’s story, including her surrogacy journey which meant she and her husband finally welcomed their daughter last year, pick up a copy of The Mother Project: Making It To Parenthood The (Very) Long Way Round by Sophie Beresiner (HarperCollins, £14.99), out now.