Science that spawned 'Octomom' can't always deliver
Once hailed as miraculous, infertility treatments now seem routine.
The first “test tube baby” has grown up to be a 33-year-old woman with a preschooler of her own. Lesbians have babies all the time. Society seems bored by Octomom and her eight-baby spectacle. A 61-year-old woman gave birth to her own grandson. A 72-year-old grandmother delivered twins. A bearded transgender man has given birth twice. Science has given babies to millions of folks.
But not to Chris and Patience Bertana of Antioch, who have spent a decade and tens of thousands of dollars riding an emotional infertility roller coaster.
The couple met as kids in the marching band at Round Lake High School and started dating when Chris was a junior and Patience a freshman.
“We went to four homecomings together,” says Chris, now 38.
“And four proms,” adds Patience, 36. “And we have the big, ridiculous hair photographs to prove it.”
They married in 1996 and knew they wanted to have kids someday.
“Six months before we got married, he quit a very lucrative job to go work with kids,” says Patience, recalling Chris' jobs with suburban YMCAs. A special-education teacher at a Mundelein middle school, Patience says she loves working with children. Chris coaches the Blue Devils Swim Club and the varsity boys swim team at Warren Township High School in Gurnee.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Chris and Patience were having difficulties conceiving a child, as do more than one in 10 couples. They started infertility treatments and figured they'd have some funny stories to tell their kids someday.
“I was literally in the doctor's office giving my sample on Sept. 11, 2001,” Chris remembers. “I could hear through the speakers in the other room when the towers collapsed.”
Infertility and the treatments for it became more and more of their lives. Comparing themselves to gamblers, they'd view each small success as a sign to invest more money and time,
“We have a whole new respect for what a true miracle a pregnancy is,” Patience says. “There's more to it than just a bottle of red wine.”
As friends and relatives started families, Chris and Patience embarked on a grueling, decadelong process that built hopes and delivered heartache and pain.
They'd wake at 3:30 in the morning so they could leave their Antioch home, drive to an infertility clinic in Niles and be back in Mundelein in time for Patience's job at school.
“There'd be a line as if we were waiting for concert tickets,” says Patience, who remembers sitting on the floor in a “cattle call” of 30 women receiving treatments on a first-come, first-served basis. They went from clinic to clinic, from Niles to Naperville, before ending up in Colorado. In other aspects of their lives, hard work and following the rules led to success. Not so in their infertility treatments.
“Time and time again, I'd be the only one left who wasn't pregnant,” Patience says.
Chris remembers giving his wife shots of a drug that “was glowing like Kryptonite.” Patience would deliver smaller shots herself. Their lives were built around the schedule of infertility treatments. Chris couldn't bear to see a dad pushing a kid on a swing. Patience would send gifts but couldn't bring herself to attend baby showers. Infertility hung over wedding anniversaries, Mother's Days, Father's Days and family holidays. At a Halloween party, the couple sneaked into a bedroom to shoot up fertility drugs. They pulled over on the Edens after a concert to inject the drugs. They ran out to the parking lot during a friend's wedding for the necessary shots. All for naught.
“We were so angry at the world,” says Patience, who did manage to get pregnant sometimes, only to endure the extra heartbreak when those pregnancies proved not viable and ended in miscarriages, the most recent in May.
They realize now that their quest wasn't really to produce a baby.
“We want to be parents,” Chris says.
The couple (and their yellow lab “Romeo”) passed the rigorous screening to be approved by an adoption agency, and they now put the same passion into adopting a baby. Patience sells handmade paper greeting cards at www.virtue75.etsy.com to fund their adoption efforts. The couple's website — chrisandpatience.com — tells their story. They hired a lawyer and set up email at chrisandpatience@me.com to deal with adoption leads.
By telling their story, they hope not only to become parents, but also to make life a little easier for other couples struggling with infertility, they say.
“Maybe it's the teacher in me, but I want to educate people about being sensitive, to educate people that we aren't all crazy baby-stealers or Angelina Jolie or Octomom,” Patience says. “We are just normal people who want to raise kids. We're very excited about adoption.”