Two Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest – The 1-in-6 Story
Bobby Bains
Copyright Bobby Bains 2011
Published at Smashwords
home@oneinsix.com
A
word of caution -
it's a book!
Our
story amongst hundreds could be told here. If you are of a weak
disposition or suffer from high horse mentality do not read any
further.
Based on a true story, literary license can go a long way
not that we used it extensively or at all.
Those that hang on to
every word and sentence written here will find themselves no time for
other duties save being judgmental on what goes for the disease which
is childlessness. If one prefers controversy and shocking tales then
we suggest the following books be added to your ‘to read’ list -
the Bible or the Torah or the 9/11 Commission report amongst others.
We hope you enjoy reading “Two Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Peace to all and to quote a famous saying, “may your gods go with you and may the Force be with you also.”
Please use the bookmarks feature on your Adobe Reader to jump to chapters.
Introduction
I think my head would have exploded had I not written this book. Too much had happened for me not to share this with others. The past few years were a nightmare that we had to continually pinch ourselves for the unbelievability of it all. You’ll discover for yourself the sheer stupidity of the situations we found ourselves in and by the book’s end hopefully come out smiling whilst opening up the eyes and ears of everyone to the world of surrogacy and to the world of the childless. One might say much of this book would make for unpleasant reading but with the unfolding of our events I have tried as I have done so on our website to inject a little humor which I hope I have succeeded in doing. If the spell checker could have a sense of humor it would surely nod in agreement.
We are no different from any other couple with only the one thing missing from our lives, one really big thing, well a tiny thing to be more exact. Each and everyone of us has stories that could be told and no two cases are similar but there is one common thread linking our story to many other couples and that is this burning desire to have a baby and that seemingly at any cost. I am Bobby Bains, my wife is Nikki, we are aged 44 and 43 years old respectively when this was written in 2008. Nikki works as a PA to a senior partner in a law firm. A mouthful, but I’m quite sure indispensable to her boss. Whereas I have shunned any working responsibility for the past several years to set up a website called www.oneinsix.com, well that’s my excuse anyway. The title of ‘1-in-6’ refers to the statistical chances a person having some sort of fertility problem. We first introduce ourselves, how we came to be, our health, our background and how our marriage incredibly some would say lasted through the thick and thin, mostly thin over the past several years.
We married relatively late in our lives hailing from an Indian background the pressure to get married earlier was evident so too was it to have a baby. But our parent’s sound advise which by the way they usually are fell on very deaf ears. We had met each other without the aid of our parents via, and this was before the age of the internet, on a newspaper introduction page; though the lost and found newspaper column would have been more suitable. The one area where we wished we had listened to our parents was in the grandchildren making department which tragically for our part was too late as far as mother was concerned. The clock stops for nobody and at the risk of being blunt and brutal, not having any children signals the end of this particular family tree. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing as looking back on our lives did we really make the most of it? Pretty sure our forefathers would be tut-tutting and our late dear mother’s head shaking down at us from the heavens shouting “I told you so”.
On the plus side we have Nikki. She is especially good with babies and would make the perfect mum. Yes, how many times have we heard this before but there’s no other describing Nikki except to say she is both beautiful and the most perfect daughter-in-law any parent could possibly wish for their son. How lucky then is Bobby? How she has coped without having a child of her own and managed to keep a lid on her emotions god only knows. But from a male perspective coming into a brick wall, a full stop, adios amigo etc. it is not an option so I must do something and do it quickly even if it means that our family and our friends raise eyebrows or have suspicions and have ‘not ours’ stamped all over the poor baby. Besides we have mother up in heaven, our descendants and more than enough well wishers on our side so the opinions of others does not or should not matter. One has to always keep things in perspective and always have a good sense of humor which we hope comes across well in this book.
To summarize our fertility problem in one word it would be ‘unexplained’ as our consultant said and it was this verdict that sent us on an expensive journey both here and abroad, the horrors and the joys of trying to find us a surrogate and an egg donor. I’m afraid you do get what you pay for in this world.
An amazing coincidence is that we are both celiacs, meaning that we are allergic to certain food products. Namely wheat, barley and rye. Foods we have to avoid range from pizza, sausages, breads, cakes, pasta you name it we can’t eat it so just don’t ask what we eat as it would be a lot easier to spell out what we could eat instead. As if this wasn’t bad enough we were both vegetarians! No meat, fish, eggs, gelatin or alcohol. Well to tell the truth we were vegetarians for a few years but that’s another story and another instance of trying everything to appease the gods as we hadn’t stopped eating meat for any green ethical or medical reason but because we were desperate for a baby and so decided to favor almighty in this way. A lot of sacrifices, still it was for a worthy cause. As we stand now, Nikki eats everything which is not saying much as she barely eats at all. And Bobby has stuck to the self-imposed meat-free diet until the delivery of the baby and it has been what eight years since Bobby tasted chicken. The bacon sandwiches he makes for Nikki is always tempting. It certainly is a strange way of having a baby. Goes to show how desperate or foolish one can really become when childless.
We were diagnosed with this celiac disease independently before and after our marriage. I have been on this diet for twenty-five years and my wife Nikki in 1997, just two years after we had got married. So if we’re to have children ‘together’ and that’s a big if, then they would more than likely inherit our condition. It’s the protein called gluten that we are unable to digest. It harms the intestinal lining and curiously it is mainly a western european non-catchable disease and we being asian it certainly raises eyebrows whenever we attend our annual celiac get togethers.
When Bobby first saw Nikki she was at work. She was then working seven-days-a-week and I can understand why she chose to as idleness made her conscious of her crippled past and of being shackled to a hospital bed for much of her teens to early adulthood. Nikki is a walking text book of ailments. Where do I begin here? Is there enough ink I ask for even the briefest synopsis? Though aghast at being exposed so openly on the web and in this book it’s for the best I’m sure.
As a result of having a very late diagnosis of her celiac condition the consequences were dramatic. My wife physically stopped growing at the age of 12 and is now standing tall at 4'7". By continually eating wheat which was harming her Nikki did not absorb any nutrients which a body needs to develop. Other than the dilemma of her height, further symptoms manifested themselves that her doctors fought to overcome unknowingly at that time the underlying problem was her damaged intestine. And so it remained until she met Bobby who himself was by then a celiac veteran for a good twenty years. Those early honeymoon years when Nikki ribbed Bobby about his diet, looking back one can laugh about it saying we were a good match for each other.
So through this lack of vitamins and minerals, rickets had developed in Nikki. She would eat but the food in her stomach would just sit there and not digest and she could go without food for days on end. The only way to ‘unload’ was through bulimia and this was the only method she knew how to relief herself. She just would not eat and could not eat and so suffered in silence until the day her father found her totally collapsed in the toilet.
Hobbling down her high street it was quite evident that something was wrong with her legs. The underlying problem was her intolerance to food containing wheat flour but first her legs had to be straightened. This was corrected by removing large portions of both her inner thigh bones, clamps, frames, plaster, crutches the lot. She lived in hospitals for periods of three months at a time and the hollowed out areas of both her thighs and scars running the whole length she just would not wear a bikini on our honeymoon! Even now she is unable to sit cross legged or hold them apart wide enough for any length of time let alone for a gynecologist.
When I married her she was very anemic. I asked her to see if she could be a celiac like myself. Finally a doctor had got his prognosis right. Her other ailments are eczema, allergies to strawberries, air-conditioning, hay fever, reactions to antibiotics. Her skin is sensitive to tomato, onions, pineapples, smoke etc. The white patches on her skin are called vitiligo. So why did I marry her I hear you ask? She’s not one to skip her duty and we are all thankful for that. Throughout our engagement her father was dying of terminal cancer. On return from our honeymoon there was little time for her father to get to know his new son-in-law.
It used to be that one half of us was the optimistic one and looked to the future whereas the other was always the pessimistic. Now I think the roles have reversed. Our priorities have changed. We can no longer afford the time nor money to really enjoy ourselves the way ‘ordinary’ couples do. Looking around, whenever we visit people’s homes we see not only families but people bettering themselves.
We don’t want to sound too defeatist but where is the impetus for us to better ourselves. Our standard of living has really dropped. Ten’s of thousands that could’ve been spent on home improvements and luxuries are being channeled into this black hole of seemingly endless medical bills with no guarantee of success. And as our life-force drains we put on a brave smile whenever we visit relatives. We play with their children and pretend everything is alright. As the years go by the gulf between us and everybody else develops further so we retreat into our shells. “ook daddy, those are the people who can’t have babies” There’s little point in trying to keep up with the Jones or in our case the Singhs. Our only hope lies in prayers and that one day we will get there in the end.
Ok, now that we are infamous, there are always going to be inaccuracies in the press. More colorful expletives are used to grab attention along with massaged figures and so on. You need to take them with a pinch of salt. Besides we won’t need to question people’s intelligence as they already know that nothing ever is that black or white. We’re hoping all this publicity is not going to be our undoing but instead be of some use in bringing attention to the plights of childless couples who hanker for children of their own despite good intentions from others to foster and adopt which is a different kettle of fish and one we know nothing about. Surrogacy is our story and the newspapers got much of their text from a quick phone call and from web pages. Would you believe us if we said we never saw the draft before it went to print? An excuse we cannot use compiling this book even to the more racier chapters as you read on. Though we mustn’t grumble, we’ll leave that to those more capable individuals whose emails we’re grateful for; not. We thank the vast majority who still send in their best wishes. Special mention to all who have kindly donated to our website, their charity helps keep us going when we had every reason to quit but have carried on crusading.
Whether we get a roasting from the media or the public or indeed from the government for bringing surrogacy to the fore we can at least console ourselves with the knowledge that any offers of help from potential donors and surrogates that we receive will be held and forwarded to fulfill the dreams of other childless couples the world has suddenly woken up to. Hopefully of the decent, married, law abiding and god fearing type.
These journalists have been kind towards us so far and we thank them. We have kept their calling cards should we ever get raked over hot coals by rulings made against us and childless couples the press might be interested to hear about it. But why the attention now? Don’t we usually hear about such stories afterwards when couples, same sex or not, bring home babies by whichever means only for the media to get a sniff of it when it’s all done and dusted? In our case, they were with us from the ground floor up.
We find ourselves still on the launch pad some years later in a much delayed and anticipated take off. But now we’re yesterday’s news and might be glad of that. Things move on and we hope other couples can learn from our experiences and somehow get their own Mr. Stork winging his way to their home without the ‘mother’ of all detours.
1. The First Few Steps
The lucky ones have an unplanned pregnancy. Then you would not need to calculate body temperatures with a thermometer placed somewhere in your nether regions nor plot charts like some possessed statistician. There would be no buying of ovulation predictor kits and those prohibitively expensive and disposable home pregnancy detectors that lie in wait for the unsuspecting parent. I believe we still have those accursed charts at home scattered about our by now very well worn bed.
Who were we trying to kid in those days. The only people who gained any benefit were the manufacturers of these to our minds detestable objects. No, only the lucky ones benefited. Not us. Our expectations of becoming pregnant with ease hit the buffers quite early on. At that point we were not getting any younger and by the end of this book you will find we were not getting any richer either. That's right, this book is not for the squeamish!
The norm would be 2.4 kids and a nice white picket fenced home somewhere in leafy Springsville. Wrong. Our dreams had got scuppered after month after month of failure to achieve pregnancy steering us onto this course away from what would be the usual enjoyments and trappings of a normal family life.
One particular day haunts me. It was the day when Nikki jokingly said to me that she was pregnant. Now this was early on in our marriage and I was taken aback. To my mind it was too soon and I was thinking what could be ‘done’ about it. I don’t think Nikki was best pleased with my attitude to say the least and to this day I still worry. Worry that our chickens have come back home to roost. In our case roosting on an empty nest devoid of any eggs whatsoever.
Turning to religion, being of Sikh origin if not quite of proper Sikh faith, we held rituals. A sort of religious thanksgiving whereby the temple is brought home to your living room. The recital of the holy Sikh book and hymns are read and sang out over a three day stretch with most people attending the final day. Sikhs pay their respects to god and thank them or him for their bit of good fortune. Whether it be a new home, business success, newborns, funerals, graduations or upcoming events like weddings. We felt out of place. Other people’s homes were done up with bouncing babies aplenty. We could not have felt more ashamed of our status and surroundings. Tacking on a piece of paper onto our backs with the words ‘failure’ sprang to our minds but then everybody at these functions knew who we were anyway, “oh it’s those couple that don’t have a baby” they would whisper to one another.
One Sunday I had to rush Nikki home just in time to place a bucket in front of her so she could empty herself of pent up emotions. This time it was the affects of the antibiotics tablets she had been taking for her glandular fever. Funny, we’ve never been to ‘Glandular’ I wonder where that is? Early to bed that night, we can watch Starsky & Hutch some other time. Most days we sleep on the floor by choice and it’s kind of refreshing to know that most of the world sleeps in this way.
“Have you tried IVF?” was the usual remark we get when we explain our difficulties in conceiving to people. Though meaning well, In-Vitro Fertilization and having to explain what it involves like the less well know element of hardship and heartache, it is something one can never fully understood or realize unless you go through it yourself. To explain the procedure somewhat briefly it is a process whereby the woman after taking medications and injections has her own eggs grown and collected then fertilized in the laboratory and the resulting embryos are transferred into the uterus or womb of the subject some two to five days later.
For the woman donating egg it can be even worse having to give, some would say sell your own eggs to strangers after enduring the month long needles and drugs. Something not to be taken lightly if you wish to be an egg donor. More so should you ever wish to become a surrogate mother for complete strangers. The race to rejoin the human race was beginning for us with a look around to find the cheapest if not the very best IVF clinic in London.
Nikki will tell you in no uncertain terms how easy it is for a woman to have her hormones unnaturally messed around with. The headaches, the stress, the mood swings which Bobby can testify to. By the way all these drugs and injections has to be administered by yourself. Yes that’s correct, you will be injecting yourself and be doing this for a month with no guarantee of ever achieving an egg harvest. You will be required to undergo scans to chart your progress a number of times as well and finally when or if it comes to the egg collection time you will be under general anesthetic and have to endure a little bit of discomfort after they have fetched out your eggs. Sounds drastic but it’s the only way but you do get offered a cup of tea hopefully free what with having to pay through the nose the thousands to get to this stage. Hope we haven’t scared anybody off from becoming a donor but it does bring back hurtful memories of the hopes we had of our IVF treatments and unfortunately our subsequent failures.
Our very first IVF clinic in England was King’s College Hospital chosen because it offered IVF for around $3,000 which was remarkably cheap at that time and happily it included the cost of the drugs as well when normally the total would be nearer $6,000 at any other clinic. When we enquired as to why they charged so little it was because the staff were all new to this as it was an experimental time for them. Marvelous we thought, if we could come away with a result. To Nikki’s mind the cheapness of the treatment was evident in the lack of beds, no changing room, the constant wait and having to conduct the whole affair sitting in what seemed like a dentist chair whilst fully awake after having her general anesthetic wear off almost immediately. “Can you get off the chair, dear?” said the shitty nurse. Nikki was not very amused.
The drive to the hospital saw us pass under the Thames river and into what looked like hostile territory. We hardly venture this way for fear of muggings and losing our tires, it was a pretty grotty area to say the least far removed from our imaginary Springsville and unfortunately the trip to this hospital was to occur several more times.
We tried to make light of it by using the stairwell instead of the elevator to the seventh floor. We ran up like two little children. We can still recall that very first day as if it was yesterday. That was the fun part climbing stairs and to this day we still climb rather than ride our way to the top of any tall building we enter. The out-of-order sign hanging on the elevator and climbing is a metaphor to our own predicament. We had a mount Everest of a climb on our hands and that very first day at King’s College Hospital was not even the base camp.
The first of the five IVFs, perhaps better known as ‘test-tube baby’ making, now seems so far back in our history that we find it painful digging it out from our memory. It’s all there trust me just that one gets a mental block at times and it’s our wishful thinking that somehow we could extend this memory lapse to say the size of Everest.
King’s College Hospital gave us our medicines and injections for Nikki to self administer. We still have the needles and the puncture marks to show. In those early days you had the ampoule of powder and an ampoule of liquid in which you had to mix the two to a certain strength or dosage. Sounds simple but not for Bobby who had to keep well clear when Nikki was about to inject. One time Bobby decided to help out by filling the syringe himself, what a mistake that was and from that time onwards he was out of bounds. Filling the syringe was the easy part, the hard part was plunging the needle in which by the way was mercifully hidden from view inside a pen-style syringe holder.
Picture this, Nikki sitting on the side of the bed with the syringe held up against her thigh, “haven’t you done it yet?” Bobby would ask half an hour later. Poor Nikki was trying to psych herself to press the trigger on the pen - and that was just a dry practice run!
After a few visits the time for Nikki’s egg removal came. They collected six eggs which was below average as normally it would have been a dozen or so but since this was her first go they tend to err on the side of caution as they must avoid hyper-stimulation which is the growth of a large number of eggs and the perils of it. The first attempt on a patient was always to be a learning curve and should it fail the view was that on a second IVF attempt they would know how much more or how much less the dosage should be. Having so few eggs to play with I suggested we do an ICSI (Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection)
This involves the injection of a single sperm of mine into each of Nikki’s eggs then hope for the best. Fertilized eggs are then called embryos and it is these that are transferred or implanted in the uterus or womb. This method of fertilizing eggs can be suitable for patients with low or poor sperm count or quality but in our case I chose this method as we had only a few of Nikki’s eggs and I wanted to be absolutely sure that some sperm of mine actually penetrated the eggs. The alternative was to let the two meet in a dish and let them fight it out gladiatorial style with the winning sperm burying itself into the egg rather than being physically arm twisted into action.
As it turned out we had three embryos and we transferred all three into Nikki and this was June 1999. Two weeks later we performed the home pregnancy test and little did we knew then that it would be a long, long time before we would get a result and that the urine sample to test would no longer be my wife’s. If we could skip the write up on our second IVF it would be nice but what good is a biography if it excludes certain chapters. Warts and all is needed and we have plenty of those.
We didn’t wait long, it was October 1999 when we went back to King’s College Hospital to commence our second IVF attempt. It started well, we had around eight follicles growing in Nikki’s ovaries. A follicle is a small sac in the ovary in which the egg develops. But something went horribly wrong. According to the embryologist and the staff at King’s College IVF Unit, Nikki must’ve not taken her final injection the night before which explains the zero egg count. Despite having follicles, when it came time to extract eggs from them there was none to be had. They put the blame on us for not taking our medicines properly. We think they were still new to the procedure and putting it mildly they had simply screwed up. They gave us the shocking news whilst Nikki was still half sedated and lying on the bed in what looked to be a storage locker. “Move along, we need the bed” the dragon said to us cruelly overlooking the fact that my wife was crying and our world was tumbling down around us. Bobby asked if we could stay a while as we obviously were not in a fit state. Bobby rang his work place to say things went terribly wrong and he doesn’t know when or if he’ll ever come back to work. We were ushered out unceremoniously as if we were on state handout. Do they not realize that we paid good money for what was private treatment? Yes we know it was cheap and the lesson if there ever was one could perhaps be that you get what you pay for in this world.
Life was passing us by at an alarming rate and we were not getting any younger nor richer. The third IVF had to take place somewhere different. A hospital not only nearer to home but in a more upmarket catchment area meaning better staff and facilities and we found one in Buckhurst Hill which is just outside east London. The place was called Holly House and it was a small private hospital. It was January 2000 and we dragged ourselves up the gravel grounds, yes I did say upmarket, of the hospital to begin this third IVF. This time the doctor suggested a different approach, a method called GIFT. Gamete Intra-Fallopian Transfer. This is a mix of eggs and sperm transferred directly to the fallopian tube through a keyhole opening. The idea was to allow the eggs and sperm to go down the tube and let them get on with one another naturally. This was used in conjunction with IVF. So all in all we had eleven eggs retrieved, two had been mixed with sperm and dropped into one of Nikki’s fallopian tube leaving nine eggs left over from which five had got fertilized in a dish this time without needing ICSI which was quite good and therefore cost us less. But the bad news was only one of these five was allowed to be implanted in the womb as per guidelines set out by the enemy of the childless the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA).
It seems very harsh to allow perfectly good embryos to perish but that was the law at that time in the UK that you cannot implant any more than three embryos. So we had to bid farewell to the remaining eggs and embryos; thinking back could we have frozen them for use later? We knew a lot less then than we do now and perhaps looking back in hindsight we could’ve questioned them on this. Since then the laws have become much more unfavorable for the childless as the fertility watchdogs have reduced that figure to two for all women under the age of 40 and an implant of three embryos if you are over 40. With red tape of this nature going abroad for treatment was fast entering our consciousness especially given that this third attempt again had failed to get Nikki pregnant.
On our fourth attempt it was becoming quite clear that our age was a major hindrance factor. As one gets older the quality of any eggs or semen would start to fall and what’s more the body starts to manufacture fewer and fewer of the life giving eggs. A vital ingredient without a doubt and one to be extremely worried about should we keep failing. We were always prescribed increasingly higher and higher levels of drugs which had meant the medical part of our IVF bills would balloon with each new round of IVF treatment.
One of us wasn’t working and earning. Bobby dropped out of the rat race in 2000 for reasons unclear. Either he had depression or was plain lazy. All subsequent treatments now had to be paid by Nikki who by then was preparing to give up ever having a child but for the insistence of Bobby went along with IVF number four in January 2001, a whole year later.
Our experience at Holly House was good enough to want to begin there again. My wife’s egg count was by now starting to fall. There were only five eggs, three had got fertilized by the ICSI method but only two embryos was good enough to be put back in Nikki’s uterus. When this failed to get us pregnant the doctor’s report in red ink looked like a rash all over it and spoke of continual unsuccessfulness, failure to implant, poorer and poorer ovulation responses etc. God what were we to do now? “I tell you what” spoke Nikki, “how about getting yourself back to work and you pay for the next one?” Unknown to me she had already typed up my resume and sent it off to my former employer and I was back at work before I knew it. It was the only way I could bargain for Nikki to have another go at IVF, that I should go back to work and pay for the next treatment.
We had saved up enough by June 2002 for what was to be our last and final IVF attempt in England. So it’s back to Holly House to start IVF treatment number five which might have been a backward step but a familiar one at least. This time we were gunning for a method called Blastocyst. This is when the embryo has matured to day five thus ensuring only the biggest and best quality embryo is implanted when normally the embryos are two days old on a standard IVF implant. So it was one last hurrah with them before we must consign ourselves to the dustbin.
By now the doctor was looking to get us off his books as we were clearly besmirching their proud patient success record. As expected the eggs grown and retrieved were few in number. There were four eggs harvested. A pitiful amount considering the dosage of the drugs she took and the need for a much larger count was required to make Blastocyst feasible. Just two good embryos lived to day two from which one survived for which we are grateful. The other one turned brown and died and it was decided not to wait till day five and go ahead and implant or transfer on day two instead. They were all given a grade four which meant an excellent quality eight-cell division embryos with no debris. We always had approximately this many and they were always of text book quality the embryologist and doctors had said. Was this meant to assure us? We even managed to observe some of them through the microscope. I said good-bye to the embryos, we were about to lose them yet again. What is it with our luck? Did you know that there were four other ladies in that ward that same day when Nikki had this done. When she rang the doctor some time later to ask what was the outcome of all the other patients it staggered Nikki so much to hear that they all had got pregnant. It was only us that failed and that was the final nail in our coffin as far as continuing IVF with Nikki’s eggs. A blow from which my wife if she’s honest with herself will never recover from.
Bobby’s punishment was having to read over and over all that he has written and to recite all those failed prayers one more time so as to make sure it’s all fit for publishing. We don’t wish to offend worshipers do we? As we found out to our cost there’s enough charlatans, fortunetellers and soothsayers baying for your attention and money.
We’re not trying to preach to anyone as one religion is just as good or bad as another. We both had visited and had been visited by holy men in our bid for a child. We also had our house exorcised of evil spirits though I was not present at that time it turned out that one of our ancestor was the culprit behind it all. From Nikki’s mouth came words from this other person and she started to sprout out some nasty vitriol rather like in the movie ‘The Exorcist’ which scared the living daylights out of everybody in the room. I wish I was there to see all this. In the end and with much machete waving, the woman who brought out the demon inside Nikki was extracted into a box, bagged up and thrown in to a river. That’ll be $2,000 thank you very much said the lady with the machete. Happily we avoided the river pollution fines and the swing of her weapon. Apparently, the ancestor who had made us childless was my father’s sister who had died along time ago. She took it upon herself that I was her son and how dare I marry Nikki without her permission. So she... yes, this all sounds a load of cock and bull but intriguing nevertheless and Nikki is now less hostile than she used to be so maybe there was something in this after all.
One holy person told us to repeat the lines of the basic belief of the Sikhs and we were given rosary beads to do this with. We had to wash ourselves early every morning and cover our heads. The daily recitals took over an hour to cycle fully the rosary necklace five times and furthermore we was to do this for forty days. We won’t burden you with too much religious rhetoric in this chapter other than this very first prayer as follows:
Ik Onkar There is only one God
Sat Naam Truth is his name
Karta Purkh He is the creator
Nir Bhau He is without fear
Nir Vair He is without hate
Akaal Moorat He is immortal
Ajooni He is beyond birth and death
Saibhang He is self illuminated. The Enlightener
Gur Parsaad He is realized by the kindness of the True Guru
After this had failed us another babaji, a holy man, told us of the tradition of clove-offering started by master Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji, founder of Sikhism in the fifteen century although at that time it wasn’t called Sikhism until some time later but that’s another story. This method was suggested to us by Baba Anoop Singh Bedi who hails from the fifteenth generation of Guru Nanak. Upon meeting him we were given some cloves in a small packet and a bottle of amrit which is holy water. Whilst praying, the idea was to swallow the piece of clove whole with cows milk and sugar to taste and to fast that day allowing only one salt free meal to be eaten. Another clove was to be kept safe until blessed with a baby boy. I believe Nikki still has this clove wrapped around one of her garments (the whiff). We was told to pray for another forty days and when blessed with the child to visit the Sri Chola Temple somewhere in Punjab for blessings of the Guru.
Whilst we wait for the bit of good news to arrive this other babaji came along. There seemed no doubting him as he looked the part as he was blind. He mentioned a spell or a curse had been put on us and for us to repeat for yet another forty days, and we won’t foster on you the full recital, the prayer beginning with ‘Dukh bhanjan tera naam ji.’
Next came this Joginder Singh Pharla of Village Bharoli, Julandhar, Punjab, India. Another imposing babaji who we had to visit a number of times. On the first visit the house where he guested was full of people and all of whom had different problems needing resolving. He was to have an audience with all listening to their ills. He said to Nikki that she would get a headache, her eyes will hurt and not to take any medicine and come back next week for his ‘verdict’ which comes in the form of him being in a trance along with the usual possessed voice all whilst being held in place by a circle of people should he fall down. Sounded corny, maybe a bit scary even. He spoke astoundingly. Members of the ‘audience’ were told that one of them was to be divorced four times before reaching happiness and others had such and such curses. Those that did not believe in him were singled out to their shame. A week later he told us to pray for yes, forty days and take parsad which is holy blessed food. Nikki will get a pain in the right side of her stomach followed by faint spells he said and told us not to take anything for it but instead use some incense sticks and continue with the parsad. He eventually pointed out that we will have three kids! His prayers that Nikki had to repeat when her symptoms started is called and it does sound rather rude, ‘Ras ras ram rasaal salaha’.
So did we end up with three babies? Ok this didn’t work either as Nikki never had the dizzy spells. We continued on with his ritual. Mum was given a piece of cloth and some petals and after the obligatory forty days to put the petals in a bag and throw them in a river. This was to apparently get rid of the evil spirit in our house. We weren’t to look back on the pollution we caused on the water he said. Fine by us.
A relative this time said if we say these certain lines then things will surely happen. By the way we were told to keep it to ourselves and not tell anybody. Sure we can keep it a secret. Didn’t expect sudden miracles either. ‘Maru mahala panjvan dakhna’ the secret began with. By the way this very aunt of ours was far from kind to Nikki when she blamed her for mother’s death. Some people honestly.
Our parents forever trying to help us came back from India one day with yet another ritual for us to perform. Fresh from motherland this so we gave it a go. Very time consuming it was as the rosary beads went up to one-hundred-and-eight and again forty days. Why forty always and why us? The prayer began thus ‘Ja ke basi khan sultan’.
We thought this one was working as it coincided with the appearance of our surrogate-to-be. It turned out to be the devil’s work as this surrogate was a con. Clearly the Force was not to be with us as our cursed existence had remained.
Carrying on, the next one wasn’t dressed in white bed sheets as he was an astrologer. For the cynics out there he demanded no fee only what we could afford as it was to go to the poor back in India. One billion of them then. When we mentioned I was a vegetarian to please god he didn’t agree but I was desperate and mad enough to keep this tack of mine going. Nikki was also a vegetarian but for only three days a week and when we mentioned we already can not eat much as it is what with our wheat-free diet he said eat what you like. I was beginning to like the sound of this guy. Anyway so this astrologer got his pen and calculator out and we gave him our birth times and dates. He scribbled away on his pad no doubt assessing his wealth. Immediately he noticed Bobby’s chart was heavily loaded on one side. This block had to be remedied. Nikki’s chart was ok. Except for a period of stress and health which we had to watch out for. We were asked to do the following. Get a small piece of used black cloth. Put some Kali Mah (black dhal pulses) salt, some soil and a rusty used nail in to a bundle and tie them together. Cover Bobby’s head then encircle this bundle seven times above his head. The department of environment might be interested in us as we again had to throw the lot in to a river not looking back chanting ‘Om boom boodhay namah’ however many times we wished. Bobby was asked to wear a green emerald ring on the small finger and to donate food to the poor in India equal to half of the body weight. I continued to wear this emerald ring for a good few years before passing it over to my wife after all she had paid for it!
To help cleanse the house, once a week a Chinese ritual of lemon grass oil in a bowl of hot water was to be sprinkled everywhere in the house on all four walls. Give or take six months, the astrologist sought to give out a ‘fixed’ date for our happy period. Apparently it would fall between November 2003 and April 2005. Three years later we find ourselves still waiting for this predicted bit of good news and to rub salt into the wound we don’t know where that blasted green emerald ring went to!
But what about herbal remedies? Please don’t get us started on this as we tried several of them from the downright disgusting to the dangerous. We have no doubt that ayurvedic and other ancient forms of medicines can help cure some illnesses after all ayurvedic originated from India so that cannot be a bad thing can it. Eating what’s akin to cow dung or drinking urine can put anybody off from complimentary medicine still one cannot argue that it is not cheap, natural or fresh. One old wife’s tale saw Nikki putting some petals in a bucket of boiling water then was told to sit on it.
When we hit the headlines we received no end of emails from people telling us of this remedy and that remedy or to ask us to visit this shrine and that shrine. What’s wrong with putting our faith in our own religion? Why should we follow someone else’s? A Catholic work mate of Bobby’s, when he used to work that is, showed him a prayer of St. Anthony’s which we had to read lighting a candle every Tuesdays and it was said that whatever we had asked for would be given within nine months. Another faith consigned to the bottom drawer then. Well actually, a Catholic surrogate did turn up and she lived in India and as you read on in the book you might find her not quite the savior we wished for. We performed so many more of these prayers and rituals that it got to the point where we gave up counting. We just could not write them all down. It would take up an entire book.
The final follow up consultation at Holly House came amidst one of our new prayer routines. Our lives was shaky at best and it didn’t help when the doctor now told us to basically get lost and go look for donor eggs. Great, all we could think off was jumping in front of a bus, in fact one of us has already been knocked down more than once before. So now we had to hunt around, advertise and basically beg everyone we know of for an asian or olive skinned donor who lives in the UK. Our initial expectations of a simple family life was now truly buried.
I guess each couple has to go through their course of repeat failures using every other means available before their doctor ultimately recommends the use of a donor egg that is assuming you haven’t had any hysterectomy or if you think your body will not carry to term for reasons numerous like you cannot bear having another miscarriage or the wife’s instincts or the tea leaves. And no amount of logic or reasoning will deter a woman from seeking out a surrogate or an egg donor. But in our case Nikki had been put through so much medically that she was mentally and physically exhausted and that is when surrogacy normally comes into play when you are at the end of your tether or should that be the hangman’s noose. Sometimes you have got to learn to listen to your body, to your instincts and to your wife. Should that mean we totally give up on ever having our own baby and stick that bit of paper on our backs? Hell no, we still have at least fourteen more chapters in this book to explore together!
2. The Surrogacy Market
It was the end of the road as far as throwing money at the problem that my wife would get pregnant. We of course never gave up hope that we could still conceive naturally and so kept that part ‘up’.
The solution of using just an egg donor was not the complete answer for us. Nikki had been a guinea pig for way too long that it was now ‘due’ for a different person to take over to become pregnant if not become the mother of our child. We had options, egg donor, surrogacy, adoption, surrogacy, egg donor. Obviously surrogacy together with egg donation was on top of our thinking. The third option was too messy, too complicated and too time consuming. Besides we knew next to nothing about adopting other than having various social service departments knocking on your door poking their collective noses on parents of adoptive children for years on end and hound us at our very fireplace. No, we are selfish enough to want our own children and to those who would deny us that well they can canvas and rattle their tins on normal couples. Leave the likes of us alone and chase broken families instead as we are trying to fix and mend our way to become a family unit. Unlike the oblivious majority us childless couples are not blind to the pleas of the poor, needy and the homeless. Give us a break for we are well aware of what’s out there as a westerner coming to use the third world’s medical services, we are ready to dig deep into our pockets to help especially on the orphanages of India. If more couples were just as ‘selfish’ perhaps this world would be a better place to live in.
After exhausting our money on repeat IVF failures we had to go about finding an egg donor by ourselves or let an institute charge us $500 annual registration, this was back in 2002 and then they send you off to a clinic of their choice for the treatment. They also asked you to advertise for an egg donor yourself to quicken this process. What they really meant was they have no egg donors on their books but was still asking us to pay a yearly registration. This clinic then charges a whopping $12,000 which does not include the donor’s fees or donor’s travel like hospital care or her loss of earnings. You can take it that these donors come from abroad like the USA where donors sell their eggs which may result in finding an egg donor quicker but only for the wealthy because this might entail you going abroad to an expensive clinic in the US to finish off the treatment. This ruled out the vast majority then.
Instead, our hospital the Holly House also known as The Essex Fertility Center charged just over $8,000 for the process and have you placed on their waiting list for free. Although we would be better off finding a donor ourselves by begging in the streets and advertising on corner sweet shops. If it’s not the government it’s the greed in some clinics that’s killing us. It’s just business for them, there is no sympathy. Though our doctor did say that they would be willing to wave some of the drug cost for us so I give them their dues and recommend them whole heartedly. But only for a ‘white’ couple who are prepared to wait years for an egg donor to come along as we were told by him that normally it’s a wait of two years.
One cannot make an omelet without an egg and reattempting IVF using my wife’s eggs would mean another year’s worth of saving most probably ending in the waste bin not to mention the ticking time-bomb that is our life span and aging body. Though we must add here that aside from this curse of infertility, god has given the two of us good health, good fitness and to this day a wrinkle free existence! In the long run we might be able to fit in nicely with parents half our ages and this youthfulness seen in our appearance and in our behavior is something people literally kill for so we should be highly grateful for that and somehow try to flaunt it. Sometimes we hear from envious parents that having kids has aged them and that they no longer have the free time that they once used to have. Was that supposed to make us feel any better? Perhaps they say it just to comfort us. I mean what else could one say to pariahs like us?
Should you be fortunate or perhaps unfortunate to go the egg donor route then the treatment costs gets ramped up a further $2-6,000 on top of the IVF charges. If you’re really lucky you may already have located your donor. This could be a family member or a friend though using an anonymous egg donor would have additional benefits like for instance not having the fear that some day the donor would come knocking on your door. But not for long as in UK the morons in charge have just announced the end of anonymity for any donor wishing to donate semen or eggs. Hen’s teeth just got kicked in the teeth then.
The waiting list for egg donors was years. An enterprising company had set up a fast track route or perhaps a fast buck way to deal with the finding of egg donors for you. Their idea was to find you a donor from somebody in Europe who was willing to share their own eggs with you if you subsidized this poor couple’s IVF treatment. You would’ve been asked to contribute towards the donor’s treatment fees, how much we don’t know and all this for a 50% divide of her crop. The more eggs she produces the more gets shared between you and her. Back then this service cost nearly $6,000 which included travel, hotel, local tourist information and assisting in communications between the two clinics and the donor. Then on top goes the donor’s medical fees you contribute not forgetting your own IVF treatment back home.
All this for a share in the egg count? Makes you think why settle for a few when you could have a dozen or two dozen eggs by advertising. You could get ‘cracking’ by placing an advert in a women’s magazine or local or national newspaper pleading for a donor. We heard this can get you results very quickly. You could even try posting leaflets and such and still save on money. If one’s eggs was to come from Europe then why not go there for the complete works, IVF, donor etc. And instead of paying $8-12,000 here in the UK, $6,000 abroad could’ve given you the entire eggs of a lovely Spanish teen student together with Spain’s IVF cost with no sharing and subsidizing or waiting involved. Spare a thought for the Americans as many migrate up north to Canada or south to Mexico for cheaper IVF treatment. Should we be any different here in Europe?
A sure sign of desperation was when we had to place some pictures of us on our website. One had to reveal oneself to the world otherwise how else were we to get the word across that we are looking for a donor at that time and a surrogate later. In order to alleviate our fears that people who visit the website think that we were a right odd couple and fat ugly ones at that, which if you’re honest is always the assumption or that we are a bunch of asylum seekers that should be thrown and fed to the lions at the London Zoo.
We had put together a leaflet on pink paper asking for a donor to come forward, printed hundreds of copies of this and placed bundles on the desks of two hospitals and four schools.
“We are an asian couple” the leaflet began. “We long to experience this joy of parenthood...”
It was so crass but the aim was to sell ourselves and sell our dignity along with it. We even placed bright florescent cards on some shop windows offering ourselves which sat proudly next to placements of rooms for rent or noting their number, a busty young blonde.
We had a little success, our clinic told us of a person who offered to donate her eggs but had to stall or decline because of an infection. Another who was a work colleague stepped forward to say she was willing to donate her eggs to us. The forms were filled in and of course we knew it would be denied for myriad of reasons.
For starters, the donor knew us, she was young at 21. She had no children, she is inexperienced and not stable enough and so on. As long as we had our website there was hope of a rescue that others may also step up to the plate. Finding a woman who would give us her eggs was not enough. Either this woman was to both donate and be our surrogate or find a second woman who would be the surrogate mother and us being non-white our chances of succeeding in this was next to non-existent.
Our outlook was bleak to say the least and what’s more people knew it. People like the two surrogacy organizations that we paid good money to join and had looked towards for help and guidance. What good is a swimming pool without water? We wasn’t told that we had to bring water with our bathing towels when we joined these groups. And so we queued up on standpipes holding empty buckets along with the hundreds of other surrogate-seeking couples. This then was the life for anybody seeking a surrogate in the UK that didn’t have a friend or relative who could ‘stand-in’ for them in their hour of need and thirst.
Either we wait or we do something about it. So to further fulfill our dreams of becoming good law abiding parents we therefore resorted to breaking the laws of England and so started advertising for a surrogate. Yes it was illegal but what else was there to do?
One bright idea of ours was to write out on a sheet of paper this calling for a surrogate indicating that we was willing to reward $20,000 to the woman who would do this for us and to display this sheet of paper on the rear windscreen of our ‘family’ car. That got people’s attentions and to this day we still grab the attentions of other car drivers and passersbys. There was also another sign on our car, a clever one. A yellow ‘baby on board’ caution sign. What’s so clever about that you say? Well I stuck a small ‘No’ above it so that it would read ‘No baby on board’. Bizarrely at the time we had a baby car seat affixed. It was there for our two baby nieces. Had there been an expensive flashy motor besides our jalopy it would be no contest as to where the glances went much to the other car owner’s dismay.
