Something peculiar has been happening at work. Since I told the pregnant crew member and large group of turkey-rissole-eating members of the public about the miscarriage, a girl here and a girl there has come up and confided in me about their miscarriages. Evidently the telegraph, telephone, tell-a-flight-attendant thing has been working and half the workplace know about me.
And it seems i’m not just elected chief representative of the miscarriage society but have also been given an honorary seat on the failure to conceive board. The latter meets spontaneously and surreptitiously on a one-to-one basis as revealed to me one day when i’m sitting in the flight attendant lounge and a fertility goddess sidles up to me wearing the olympic uniform. ‘oh no’ I think. In my mind now there is a clear demarcation between us and them and she is one of them.
I force myself to do the minimum compulsory requirement – I congratulate her and ask when it’s due and she tells me. There is an awkward silence during which I frantically scan the room for someone with a new shade of nail varnish that I can feign interest in. Before I find someone s blurts out that she never thought she’d be in this situation, she and her partner had been trying for years and finally, due to ivf she was pregnant. The worse thing for her was that her husband had had a one night stand before he met her and the woman subsequently gave birth to his child. Then during all their difficulties and expenses with falling pregnant he’d been paying child maintenance!
“that’s horrible, horrible, you poor thing,” I say, totally empathic.
encouraged by my response she goes on to describe how, before they tried ivf they’d even resorted to having sex with her standing on her head, an image i’d rather not have been offered.
As i’m wondering what more to say to all of this she gets up all of a sudden to go to her aircraft then presses a card into my hand with the name of her doctor, saying if I got to that point she couldn’t recommend him highly enough. What point she thought I was at I have no idea and nor could I recall having told her I was considering ivf because I wasn’t.
For a minute I think I may have acquired a large sign on my forehead saying ‘infertile. Please approach with anecdotes and advice’ and actually glance at the nearest mirror but no. As for the ivf thing, in a past, pre-conception life, I had been adamant that if when the time came to have a child I couldn’t there would be no way i’d line up for treatment that was obviously so painful and expensive. Instead i’d do things like fly on the concorde and do the orient express with the money.
Excerpt of ‘in vitro fertility’ goddess’ by jodi panayotov
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The book has been described as “Australia’s answer to Bridget Jones” by ABC Radio National Breakfast Presenter Fran Kelly. |
