remains clear. Sam’s sperm is fine (about ninety million of them, which is enough, surely?) and a sufficient number of them heading in the right direction to pass muster. Also my pingy thingy seems to have come up normal. Mr Agnew assured me that my tubes aren’t scarred, also there are no adhesions, fibroids, adenomyosis, or polyps in the womb, and that the area where the tubes join the uterus is similarly polyp-free. These polyps, it seems, are things to be avoided. I don’t really know what a polyp is. I suppose I think of them as sort of small cysts. Actually, I try very hard not to think about them at all. Quite frankly, just hearing about the eight million things that can go wrong inside a woman’s reproductive system is enough to make me ill. All Sam has to worry about is whether his sperm can swim.
Anyway, Mr Agnew was very nice and agreed with me that since we have uncovered nothing operable or treatable and yet we remain stubbornly infertile, the time may now be right to commence a course of IVF. Mr Agnew said that not only would this give us a chance of becoming pregnant (obviously) but it might also prove useful in a diagnostic sense, i.e. we might discover what, if anything, beyond the most incredible bad luck, is the problem.
“Fine,” I said. “When can we start?”
Seven months, said Mr Agnew.
“Bollocks to that,” I replied (in so many words), and Mr Agnew explained that if we go private we can start next month, so that is what we’ll do and I don’t care what Sam says. If I’m going to have to do this I’ll do it as soon as I possibly can and start the long horrible process of getting it over with. Quite apart from anything else, as far as I can see, the NHS is under such a strain that if we can afford to pay we ought to do so and not take the place of someone who can’t. Sam says that that attitude simply reinforces the two-tier system. Well, what if it does? I have a home while other people are homeless, isn’t that a two-tier system? Should I go and sit in a doorway to avoid reinforcing it? I eat ready-prepared meals from Marks amp; Spencer while people in the Third World struggle to grow a few grains of wheat. How many tiers are there in that system, I wonder.
Anyway, it’s not posh at all. We all get lumped in together and all the profits that Spannerfield makes out of the private patients go straight back into the unit to fund the research programme. Personally I thought that us making a contribution to funding research sounded like a pretty good thing but Sam says that NHS hospitals using private patients to fund their activities is the thin end of the privatization wedge. He says that the people who manage the NHS budget will say to the hospitals, “Well, if you’re partially self-funding already, we’ll cut back on your allocation of public money and force you further into the marketplace.” Hence the financial necessity of having a private system will become entrenched within the funding bureaucracy.
At that point I couldn’t be bothered to argue any further and told him to give all his food and clothes to Oxfam if he felt that strongly about it, which he doesn’t.
Sam has just asked me whether Hysterosalpingogram begins with “HY” or “HI”. He seems to have suddenly got very enthusiastic about doing his book and getting all the details right. I know I should be glad, and I am in a way. After all, it was me that made him start it in the first place. It’s just that I wish he’d share some of those thoughts and feelings with me. The way we talk to each other and react to each other has become just a little bit mechanical and predictable. Is that what happens in a marriage? Is it inevitable? I’d love to talk to Sam about that sort of thing but I know he’d just try and change the subject.
Oh well, at least now he’s writing down his feelings, which I’m sure is the first step towards him being able to share them.
I’m trying not to think too much about wanting a baby at the moment. I find it drains me. I wake up feeling all fine and then I remember that according to my life plan I ought to have a couple of five-year-olds rushing in to jump into bed with me. That’s when a great wave of depression sort of descends, which I then have to fight my way out of by reminding myself how incredibly lucky I am in so many ways. Sometimes it works.
Dear Self
Long meeting with George and Trevor at Television Centre today. Nigel was there for the first hour but then he had to rush off to Heathrow (two-day seminar in Toronto: “Children’s TV: Did Bugs Bunny Win? Cartoons and our children’s mental health”). Inconceivable is moving at a hell of a speed now. They’re already talking about casting and a director, which is quite unprecedented. They do have some problems with the script, though. Nothing major, but it’s something I’m going to have to think about very hard. It came up after we’d all been laughing at the “communal masturbation in West London” scene. We’d been improvising some gags about Colin sneaking a funnel in because those pots are far too small and of course ejaculation is scarcely an exact science. Then George brought up what was worrying them.
“It’s too blokey, mate. Colin’s stuff is really good, hilarious, in fact…”
“And touching in a strange sort of way,” Trevor added.
“But Rachel is a worry,” George went on. “Frankly she’s a bit two-dimensional.”
I couldn’t deny that I’d been worrying about her myself and was pleased to have the chance to discuss it. We all agreed that she has some good lines, but George and Trevor (and the ninety other BBC bods who seem to have read the thing) felt that she was clearly being drawn from a male point of view.
“There’s no real heart there,” said Trevor, “and let’s face it, essentially this has to be a woman’s story. You can’t base a movie about infertility simply on a load of knob and wank gags.”
“Excellent though they may be,” George added.
“You have to get inside the character of the female lead. Maybe you should take on a woman co-writer.”
I can’t even bear to write down the terrible thought that leapt immediately into my mind when Trevor said that.
This will need careful consideration.
Dear Penny
The die is cast. I’m booked in to start after my next period, presuming, that is (and I must at all times remain positive), a miracle hasn’t happened naturally.
Oh God, I do so want a child. Sometimes I think about praying. Not like going-to-church praying, but just at home in the quiet. In fact, if I’m honest I do occasionally offer up a silent one, just in my head when no one’s about. But then I think that that’s wrong and presumptuous of me because I don’t believe in God in any conventional sense so I have no right to pray to him (her? it?), do I? On the other hand, if he doesn’t exist I’ve lost nothing and if he does exist then I imagine he’d prefer even a sceptical prayer to no prayer at all so I can’t really lose, can I?
I’m certainly not an atheist anyway because there must be something bigger than us. There are so many questions that scientists can’t answer. Who are we? Who made us? Is there a reason? The easy answer to all that of course is God. The universe is a mystery and we shall call the author of that mystery God. That’s how I see it, anyway. I suppose I’m an agnostic, which I know is the easy way out. And also very self-indulgent because basically it means not believing in something except when it suits you.
Actually I think it’s amazing how arrogant we’ve become about God. He used to be a figure of fear and majesty, the ultimate authority before whom humanity was supposed to prostrate itself in humble repentance for our sins. Now you hear people talk about God as if he was some kind of rather eager stress counsellor or therapist. I was watching a bit of daytime American chat show the other day and someone said, “I hadn’t talked to God in a long time but when I needed him he was there for me.” The presenter nodded wisely and added, “You have to make time to let God into your life.” This unbelievable banality actually got a round of applause! I couldn’t believe the arrogance of it! Like this person and God were equals, pals! It’s amazing, this ready appropriation of the supreme being as some sort of spineless yes man who is on ready call to tell you that you’re beautiful and that everything is fine whenever you feel a bit low. I can just imagine God sitting in his heaven amongst his mighty host thinking to himself, “Oh no, some self-indulgent, self-obsessed sad sack of de-caf and doughnuts hasn’t called… If only these people would make room in their lives to let me in.”
I really don’t know what I feel about religion but I do know that if I’m going to have a God I want a great and terrible God, a God of splendour, mystery and majesty, not one that spends his time chatting to whingers about how stressed they are.
Perhaps I’m just being mean. If people find comfort that way why should it worry me? I wish I
