It was a routine bone density scan, part of a check-up. Over the head of the receptionist at the Montreal radiology lab was a poster of a pregnant woman holding a daisy over her belly. "Please tell us if you think you might be pregnant."
I'm sure the posters of the poster meant no offense. It was sound advice, after all. Skip the radiation if there is a fetus in your abdomen.
I was fairly sure there was none in mine. I had just returned from the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City, where Mike and I had signed on for in vitro fertilization treatment. I was going back to New York a few weeks later, to begin the process.
We'd been in in-vitro treatment at Montreal's Royal Victoria hospital for over a year before quitting the system in Quebec. Since last August, when the Quebec government became the first in Canada to cover the costs of in vitro fertilization, the navigation of an already complicated process seemed to become impossible, if only for the waiting lists. For some procedures, there were now waiting lists of 2,000. There was a doctor who told us that within the span of weeks, his patient load had increased three-fold, and that the ward hadn't been given the resources to prepare for the deluge, and that there was not a single extra staff member to deal with the new number of patients.
Last December, I took a bunch of hormones and arrived at the Royal Vic to undergo a long-awaited egg extraction. After extraction, my eggs would be combined with Mike's sperm for fertilization in a petri dish, and then the happy union would be reinserted a few days later. I sat in a gown, in one of a row of dirty peeling pink vinyl chairs, waiting to be wired up with an IV by a nurse. There were three women on either side of me. My chair was right in front of the doorway. People were coming in and out, stamping the snow off their winter boots. There was a thin curtain, half transparent polyester, half net. Every time I closed it, a passing nurse would open it while walking by. "We need to see you," one said. "So we remember you are here."
I have a prodigious and wildly varied medical file. I am thus experienced in the diverse humiliations of hospitals. I know it's good to bring an iPod with music that comforts. I know that in circumstances where one is wearing paper shower caps on both head and feet, novels are impossible. Glossy magazines, on the other hand, can feel like downright abuse. One might think: The whole world is drinking champagne in St. Barts wearing Pucci jumpsuits and I am here being stuck by a junior nurse who has no clue how to insert an IV catheter into an actual vein.
I brought poetry. Auden.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window …
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window …
The nurse could not get the IV in.
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen …
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen …
When I was finally hooked up, Mike was sitting on the arm of the moulting pink recliner. In the operating room beyond, a woman was screaming her head off. I told Mike the IV was hurting; I couldn't even stand to look at it. He took a Kleenex and draped it over the bony, bruising place where the needle was going in. I told Mike I had a bad feeling about the procedure.
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