Miscarriage, Cancer, Fertility Preservation, Chemo, Surrogacy

Sometimes life throws you a curve ball and then it throws you three. After her first pregnancy ends in a miscarriage, Chloé’s second pregnancy produces a healthy baby boy. All is well but then she struggles with miscarriage and infertility trying to expand her family. Just when Chloé’s about to jump into the world of fertility treatment, she discovers a lump in her breast and instead dives headfirst in the world of cancer, chemo, fertility preservation and ultimately the world of surrogacy.

Chloé’s Story:

My first pregnancy was a miscarriage. I was 8 or 10 weeks. Even though I’d never been pregnant, something didn't feel right. Then at our appointment for the heartbeat, they couldn’t hear one. As the doctor tried to smooth things over, he said, “Maybe the period calculation was wrong,” I was looking at them and that’s when they discovered there was a sack with no yoke.

My doctor gave me three options. I could have a D&C, take (essentially) abortion pills or let the miscarriage happen naturally. I can’t remember if I took the pills. But this was how tough I was then: I said, “I'm not going to take a cab home, I'll just take the bus.” My doctor warned me, “You know this could happen at any time.” Before I got home on the bus, that's when it happened. I started having cramps and when I get home, I started pushing around my womb to make it happen naturally. It was like a very heavy period with the most painful jabbing pain that I’ve ever had. Then it fell out in the toilet. It was very painful.

I wasn’t sad because I felt that miscarriage was nature's way of saving you from a very, very bad heartache later. I was quite practical about it. While we'd already told our parents about the pregnancy, I’d said, “But I feel like there's something not right.” So, I wasn't upset because I wasn’t thinking this pregnancy is going to go ahead and I knew that we would eventually have children. I didn't know why I knew that I just did.

It was a couple of months before we got pregnant again. I was 37 and I had William at 38. With him, we didn't find out the sex of the child. I really, really wanted to have a full natural birth at home in a tub. I was reading a book about natural birth, what the drugs do to a baby, what the drugs do to a mother. Then I heard about the birthing clinic at a hospital in the city. So, I started seeing Dr. Mitchell there. I was assigned to the midwives and we tried to find a doula.

We eventually found an amazing, amazing woman with the most enormous breasts to be our doula. LOL. So, I had her and Tetsuji who was an amazing doula as well. Toward the end of the pregnancy, when we were on our way to Dr. Mitchell’s office, we bumped into him on the Upper West Side near his office before our appointment and he joked, “Chloé, that baby's not going to come on time.”

I said, “Yeah it is. It's going to come on a day exactly when it's supposed to come!”

“Well I'm not delivering that baby today.”

“Yeah I know you're not delivering the baby,” I said, “the midwife is.”

Then he just backed up as if we didn’t have an appointment with us and said, “Go home, have sex, keep walking and eat lots of spicy food and I'll see you in the hospital to check on you.”

So I said, “Well, I'll see you in the office.”

He turned around and said, “Well, if you're coming in anyway … but, you're not going to have that baby today.” He then turned to Tets and said, “Do you want to go up and feel around or something?” He was so funny.

We got up to the office. I wasn't dilated enough for birth yet but Tets went up there, felt t he head and … my water broke. I was like, “My water just broke.”

Dr. Mitchell said, “NOW you're having that baby. You need to go home. Go out for lunch, take a walk around the block.” So, we went to a nearby restaurant.

I swear to God I nearly had that baby in that restaurant. We walked in, we were  sitting down, we wereordering and all of a sudden I just grabbed the tablecloth and wentI, ”OH!” The contractions had started so badly.

The waitress said, “You're not having that baby in this restaurant.” Ha.

Oh my God. Horrific pain. The labor started. Then I said, “I can't sit here.” I was gripping the tablecloth in pain so we went home,

Tets called the doula and she said, “Get her into the shower.“

It was the most horrific pain. I vomited all over the apartment. But, she wouldn't come. Some doulas will not come until you're certain centimeters wide which you measure by timing the contractions and how far apart you are. So, I had a hot shower. On the phone, I said something like, “I've never had this kind of back pain.”

The doula explained, “The baby is on your back.”

So, I was fine, but the baby was on the spine, which was painful beyond. As I said, my doula wouldn't come until I was a certain amount dilated or time between contractions and she counseled you can't go to the birthing center until you're seven, eight centimeters or in active labor, otherwise they turn you away and I was adamant on having a natural birth.

Finally, I was just standing in this hot shower when the doula arrived and I went, “Oh my God. You've got the best breasts”. I tucked my head into her massive bosom and she just held me bouncing me up and down.

Then the only time I ever saw our doorman get up to get us a taxi was when we came down to go to the birthing center. We get in a taxi with the birthing ball, with the doula, with neck pillows, with a LOT of stuff. The taxi driver said, “You're not having that baby in this taxi. You need to go get an ambulance.”

I told him, “Drive this taxi to the birthing center! I don't have time!”

The hospital was like two and half miles away so by the time I walked in there, I was literally holding up the walls as if they were the walls of Jericho and I said “Give me drugs.”

But Tets stopped me. He said, “You're not having any drugs.” I loved that he held firm to our plan. We had it all written out: I wanted the baby to go straight on my chest. No one else was to touch the baby. All, very natural, old, and normal. I had learned it's the way tribal women had children. It’s what rang true for me.

Almost probably every woman is somewhat like, "Okay, I want the drugs" because the pain is way beyond your imagination. It's beyond. Anyway, I was in labor for 21 hours and you're not technically allowed to do that much labor in a birthing center. You're only allowed to push for maybe an hour. Otherwise, they have to move you up to the normal hospital.

I don't know where the fuck you go in your head during labor. LOL. I was in the hot bath going in and out of consciousness. I would stop trying to have the contractions and said, "I'm just not ready for this. I'm not ready to be a mom. This needs to stop." Then I called on the millions of ancestral women and say, "Tribal women, you need to help me. You need to help me. Please get me through this." I could feel the women around me. I could feel them chanting. Then I said, "Oh dear God in heaven, help me." I just keep saying it out loud, "Oh dear God in heaven, help me. Please help me." The doula thought I was saying, "Oh dear God, I'm in heaven." I was like, "What fucking parts of THAT looked like I was in heaven?" LOL.

Then I got out of the tub because I knew he was coming, but I just kept sucking him back in. I think it was about three hours of pushing, they said, "You have got to get this baby out." They tried coaxing me, "Don’t you want to find out what kind of sex it is?" I didn't know what the sex was.

Then they’re whispering and the doula said, "She does not want any drugs or anything. You're not moving her."

They came in with a table full of scapulars. I sat up and looked at it. They looked right at me and said, "Chloé, you keep sucking the baby back in. If you don't push this baby out, we're going to cut you."

I said, "I'm a horseback rider. You are not going to cut me. I am not going to be cut. I'm not giving up horseback riding.”I actually said, "I'm not taking eight weeks off of horseback riding, you're not going to cut me." Absurd, I know. LOL

Then they said, "Well, I'll tell you what, if you don't push him out, this is getting dangerous. We're going to take you upstairs and we're going to cut you." I said, "Right" and that was it.

I never wanted to give birth in a bed because it didn’t make any sense why you'd go against gravity. In my travels, I learned that tribal women, they all squat, which made total sense to me. I really wanted to have the baby squatting, which we tried. We also tried the bouncing ball and … we ended up having him in the bed.

The whole thing happened as we’d written down about how no one was to touch the baby. The baby was just to come on my naked body, blood and everything. I didn't care. Tets cut the umbilical cord and that was it.

I remember Dr. Mitchell warning me that I'd be ravenous afterward. I asked him, "What do most women get?"

He’d said, "A burger, two fries and two shakes."

When Tets went out, I said, "I want a burger, two fries and two shakes." I demolished it all.

Plus, I had apricots and then Dr. Mitchell struts in to check on me joking, "Oh, you had that baby, didn't ya? You're fucking nuts. You're fucking nuts." He said whilst eating my apricots.

I joked back, "Excuse me. I just gave birth, would you get the fuck out of the room?" Dr. Mitchell was hilarious.

I remember it as quite difficult to deliver the placenta because you hear the other women. There was this other woman, a little after I'd given birth, came in and she was screaming and pushing for what seemed to me like forever and then she gives birth. I was crying listening to these other women in pain.

It's quite unfair what the world expects you to do when you have a child. You don't know anything about giving birth, anything about being a parent. We asked the birthing center if we could stay longer. We had already stayed 24 hours and you're not allowed to stay more than 24 hours. They offered to move us to the normal part of the hospital. "I said, "No, thank you." So, we went home at about two or three in the morning and I nearly left our son in the taxi because I was not used to having a baby. To be fair, it was two or three AM.

Originally, I never wanted kids at all and then I thought, “I want six kids!” There's NO in between with me! “Oh yeah, six kids. I want to live on a farm. I want to home school. I want to be like Little House on the Prairie. We’ll grow veggies. We'll caravan around.”

Then when William was about one and a half, I got pregnant, and I knew something was wrong. I thought, “Oh God, this is way too soon.”

I was forty though and I thought, “Well, obviously it's what was meant to be. They'll almost be Irish twins.”

Yet, I felt that something wasn't right. I was extremely exhausted. I was getting really thin, which was great, so I thought, “Well, it's because I've got nearly a two-year-old. Of course, I’m fucking exhausted!”

I continued horseback riding, working and raising a baby — my normal. There was a heartbeat. My hormones were excellent.

Yet I said to Tets, "Something's wrong."

He said, "How do you know?"

I said, "Something's not right. This baby is not right and it's not going to last."

Anyway, I started spotting so I went straight to Dr. Mitchell. He said, "Everything is fine. Your hormones are great." My mom said, "Don't let them put anything up your thing because it can cause a miscarriage" which was funny.

The hormones were fine, the heartbeat was really strong. But I said again, "Something's not right." Mitchell couldn't figure it out. No one could. Then a couple of days later, the miscarriage came. I had the miscarriage at home and then had to have a D&C to make sure everything was clear.

Afterward Dr. Mitchell said, "Look, wait a couple of months to try again but you're going to have to hurry it up because you're getting older." I did the whole thing of peeing on the ovulation stick and all of that for a while. Mitchell told me all about how to do it. He said, "Whatever you do... when you do the whole thing where you pee on the ovulation stick, don't tell your husband it's time to have sex because the male's sperm goes down.” He told me when you need to do it, how many days you hold off etc. But, nothing was working.

Then Dr. Mitchell said, "I'll tell you what, come in for an exam. I'm going to put you on Clomid and you'll probably hate my guts because you'll end up having twins."

I thought, "Something just isn't right." I don't know ... I never really spoke up about it.

Then the night before I'm to see Dr. Mitchell to get Clomid, I was lying in bed and I did a self-breast examination. I have no idea why. I'd never done one before and I found this very hard lump that wouldn't move. It was like the size of a cockroach. I said to Tets, "I think you need to come in here and I think you need to feel this."

He said, "What the hell is that?" He was really stunned.

"Let me call my dad." I called him and said, "Dad, look, I found a lump in my breast and it's not moving."

My dad said, "That's not good. You need to get to the doctor."

"Well, what's really strange is that tomorrow I have an OBGYN appointment with my doctor."

I went to Dr. Mitchell, waited for two hours as one normally does with him. He was examining me and he says, "Look, I'll see you in my office. I'm going to put you on Clomid because we need to get a move on with this if you want more children." and he handed me a prescription for Clomid.

Then I said, "Oh listen, listen, wait a minute. You've got to feel my breast." My kid was with me playing on the floor.

"Come on, I've got to get going."

I said, "No. You better feel this." He felt my breast.

"Well, I can't feel anything."

I took his hand and I said, "Well, I need you to press down really hard."

He did and then said, "Right, I want to see you in my office."

I went into his office and he said, "Give me the piece of paper for the Clomid." He tore it up and continued, "I want you to go get a mammogram immediately, like today." I could just see the look on his face that he already knew. I think we both knew, it was just... that man is always right about stuff and I'd never seen him react like that.

He said, "Use my name. This is who I want you to call."

But everywhere I called said, "You're looking at two to three months to get in." So, I called a friend of mine and I asked, "Where's the place that you went for a mammogram?"

She gave me the name and I called and say, "I’m a patient of Dr. Mitchell's, he seems extremely worried that I've found this lump. It's very hard, quite big, and I need to get in."

They said, "Okay, fine. We'll get you in for this."

I know my body very well. It's one of the things that I try to teach women: Trust your instincts, know your body, and go beyond what a doctor says. I got the mammogram, and they didn't see anything. The doctor said “It's clean."

I took his hand and I said, "Well, you've got to feel here."

"I still don't feel anything."

I said, "I'd like to go a step further. What's the next step? I'd like to do a sonogram. But first, I really want you to feel this." Then, I took his hand again and I said, "You've got to push really far in."

"Right. I'd like to do a sonogram on you." Even though I'd never had a mammogram before, something inside me said to go a step further and ask for a sonogram.

I went in for sonogram and remember the technician. I was lying there thinking, “I'm so fucked. I'm fucked.”

This technician was chatting, smacking her lips, chewing her gum, and everything. Then she stopped chewing her gum and said, "Right. I'll be back in a minute."

I thought, "Oh, I'm fucked."

Because her whole demeanor changed, there was nothing that she could hide. The doctor came in and he said, "Look, there is a lump there. Even if this is something..."

I said, "Is it something? Why don't you just be honest because I can handle anything."

"I'm not allowed to do that unless we do a biopsy. But, if this is something, it's something that they could get in one go."

I said, "Do you think this is something?"

"Again, I can't say. I want to schedule you for a biopsy." But this isn't a cancer story, so I'll get on with it.

Not even a week later, I went in for the biopsy. Tets was in the waiting room. I was lying on the table. The surgeons explained the procedure, they numbed me and I heard this drilling sound. My head was turned to one side and they were talking about the lump. They said, "Right, we've got a biopsy from the lump." Then, they said to the technician, "Do you see what I see?"

She said, "Yes."

I said, "Excuse me, I am right here. I'd like for you to talk openly and honest with me."

They said, "There is a second lump hiding behind the first lump and I'm going to try and get a biopsy."

At that point, my head was turned to the side and I started crying because I was thinking, “This is not good.” They were wonderful. I mean they held my hand.

They were pushing and moving my breast around drilling and trying to get a second biopsy. But they couldn't get a good biopsy from the second one. I remember walking out that day and getting Tets. He looked at me, we went outside and I looked up at the sky. It was as if I'd been reborn. Everything was all so new and crystal clear. The sky was so blue. The birds were singing. I was looking at people's faces and how beautiful they all were. I looked at Tets and said, "There's a second lump."

He said, "What?"

"There's a second lump and they tried to get a biopsy."

My friend Zach was with us. He drove us to the biopsy because his daughter had died of cancer. We went to lunch at the Whitney Museum when it was still uptown. We were all sitting there, looking at our food, trying to eat, but not really functioning, feeling like life had been drained out of us. Zach asked, "Well, does it have veins? Does it have bloodlines?"

I said, "Look, I don't know anything. They just said there's a second lump and they couldn't get a biopsy from it."

The worst waiting game was obviously when you're waiting. I remember they told me that it would take a week. Until then, you're not sleeping, you're not thinking, you're half alive in a big fog. They said, "We'll call you on Thursday at this specific time."

I planned where I would be when the phone call was to happen. I spoke to my best friend in Ireland who asked, "Will Tets be with you?"

I said, "No, I sent him to the office."

She said, "What are you doing? You need to get your husband home, whether it's good news or bad news. Why would you want to be alone?"

I was in the apartment. Tets was there and I got the phone call exactly at the time they said that they would call. They said, "It is cancer." Both lumps were cancerous.

It becomes like a movie. It was like following a movie script. It’s as if you’re cut off from your emotions, as if I'd been trained to know what to say. I was very factual. I said, "What stage is it?"

They said, “We don't know.”

“Okay. What is the next step?” They told me the next step.

"Right. Who are the doctors that you would go to if you were me?"

They said, “We really can't advise you at this point on that. Later on, when we really look at the biopsy, we’ll know more and can give you more facts."

 I said, "All I want to do is speak to Dr. Mitchell."

I put in phone calls to Dr. Mitchell and I waited. When I finally spoke to him, that's when I cracked because he started crying on the phone and said, "I was in surgery and I knew I had to call you, but I couldn't. I just couldn't pick up the phone and tell you that you had cancer." I asked what stage he thought it was.  

"I don't know, but the fact that you've got two lumps… Listen, kiddo, you need to listen to me."

I said, "What is the next stage? What are the next steps? What do I do?"

 "First of all, you have to find a surgeon."

"Well, who would you go to?" I asked.

"If this happened to my wife or my daughter, there are two surgeons I’d go to: One, whose manner you will love and who is excellent, the other, whose manner you probably won't like and who's also excellent. This is going to come down to personalities and who you trust the most."

I said, "Okay."

"Now, next step. Do you want more kids?"

"Yes." I said.

"Listen,, they're going to chemo you to the hills. You're a young mom and they don't want this to come back."

I said, “I don't believe in chemo. I'm not getting chemo."

"Either way, if you want more babies, you have to make some now before you get into chemo."

"Okay, who do I go to?" I asked,

"You go to this man called Dr. Lewis," who had devised a way to take your ovary, cut it into strips, freeze the tissue and implant it back into your forearm after chemo. But if you didn't want to do that he also found a way to keep the cancer level flat by not making the estrogen go up—because my cancer is estrogen positive —but still get a good chance of getting a lot of eggs.

First, we were hit with cancer and now we were hit with we've got to plan ahead to make more babies. That night I had a scheduled work call. I work in television. Tets said, "You're going to cancel it." I said, "No, I'm not. I'm not going to cancel it because I need to have a good reason. This is a huge deal for work.” Four days after being diagnosed, I was on television for 24 hours. Then, within one week, I’d called both surgeons, got appointments with them and each said, "How the hell did you get into our office so quickly?"

I said, "Dr. Olivier Mitchell."

The first surgeon had his assistant meet with us to start off the appointment. We sat down and she said, "Would you like a single mastectomy or a double mastectomy?" First fucking words out of her mouth.

I said to her in very Monty Python way, “Oh while you're at it, would you like to take his balls, as well? Because I don't need them, he don't need them either.” She just looked at me and then I said, "No, seriously, would you like to take his nuts? Sorry, but what kind of question is that to lead off with? You may do this every single day, but I've just been diagnosed with cancer. What are you talking about? No, I don't want to have any type of fucking mastectomy.” They're examining me and we go in and they're looking at it, looking at your charts and you're just sitting there in a daze going, is this really fucking happening? Is this me and my life?

Meanwhile, I'm cracking all these jokes when they’re out of the room. "Oh, Tets, let's take the rubber things!"

 Tets was like, "What are you doing?"

I said, "We’re going to have to laugh. Laughter is going to be our way through this." I wanted to go into every doctor's office in a great mood. I stayed at that appointment to learn all the facts that they figured out from the biopsy and what's the next step. But I did not care for that doctor’s assistant’s demeanor at all.

Then, I went to the second surgeon. While I was in his waiting room, a friend of mine who's got cancer—she's got triple negative and she's Asian, which is very, very rare—She walks into the waiting room, sees me and said, "Hey, what are you doing here?" I said, "I joined the club, darling. I've got cancer, too."

When I went in to talk with this doctor, he looked dry and wore a bow tie, but he was lovely. I ended up really, really liking him. We got on famously well. He said, "I want to do the BRCA test on you." Then told me all about the test.

So, I asked, “But if the test comes back positive, what do you do?”

"Well, most women would elect to get double mastectomy plus the ovaries removed."

I joked, "I wish I could deliver a kidney, balls, whatever. What else would you like?" He laughed.

 "Look, you are the golden girl. I've seen this cancer before. I think we can get it in one go."

 “Are they going to chemo me?” I asked.

 “Yes, they are.”

I said, "I don't want chemo, I don't believe in chemo."

Your whole life in less than an hour becomes all about getting to see every doctor, getting to see oncologists, scheduling the next biopsy, scheduling the next test, scheduling surgery …  just nothing else exists. Meanwhile, I'm going on television, pretending that everything was completely normal, trying to plan in my head, “How am I going to tell them that I need time off?” I didn’t want anyone to know I had cancer at that point. You worry you're going to lose your job. No one wants to see anybody who's going through cancer because people have such a stigma about what cancer looks like.

Anyway, the hardest thing was going to see Dr. Lewis and listening to him tell me the types of drugs that he'd have to give me in order to have more babies. Tets couldn't be with me for that appointment. I went to get all of my follicles checked. Apparently at 40, my follicles were really, really good. He said, "Honestly, I don't see any problems, but we're going to have to do this before you go into chemo."

After all the surgeries, I had a window of about eight weeks to do fertility treatment before starting on the therapies. Tets and I were sitting in Dr. Lewis’ clinic, looking at all these women, listening to all this stuff, taking it all in and wondering, “What is their story? Why are they here? What are the drugs doing? How many jabs do you have to get? Did they write it down properly?

You go to get all your blood done and this and that done. Tets was getting tested as well. But his was whatever compared to what women have to go through, sitting there with your legs open in stirrups as they look at your follicles. I bumped into a friend of mine in the clinic who had tried for seven years to try to get pregnant and it wasn't happening. This clinic was meant to be a very good clinic, but it was not at all.

What was interesting was that Tets couldn't give me the shots. He just wouldn't do it. I said, "Are you kidding me? Just give me the fucking shot!" He said, “I can't do it.” So, I gave myself all of the shots. One day, I was pulling the fat out on my stomach to jab myself when William came running up and grabbed the needle. Aaah! LOL.

I was doing the shots. My ovaries were bloated and I was still riding horses. Nobody told me not to ride horses or exercise. One day I had this massive, bloated feeling. My trainer says to me, "Chloé, I did IVF with all my kids. You could burst an ovary riding horses." I don't know how many weeks I'd been riding without knowing that important bit of information!

Meanwhile, they were monitoring my estrogen to make sure that nothing was going up. I don't know how many times they drew my blood for testing. But it was successful because they got 19 eggs. During retrieval, there were people behind the glass taking the harvested eggs and I was all over the place thinking, “What's happening with the eggs? Are they going to sell the eggs? I don't want anymore fucking children. I don't want to do this.” LOL. Anyway, there was very good news. My eggs were really good and so we waited for the next step, embryos.

We thought everything was great as we created embryos. But it wasn't good enough that we had made embryos. Now we had to hope they’d get to the blastocyst stage. More waiting. It was very difficult because we were waiting on several things. First, did they get enough in order to make really good embryos, so that then I could start chemo? Or we would have to do a second round?

Dr. Lewis called us and said, "The results for all those eggs were amazing and out all of those eggs, you created 9 embryos that look amazing. This is an amazing result. You are absolutely going to have a child if you want two children."

So, we asked, "Should we start chemo? Or should we do another round?"

 "No, you don't need to do another round. You are going to get a child out of this. You're probably going to get two children out of this round and you should really start chemotherapy."

I started chemotherapy which, you know how I feel about chemotherapy by now. I don't think it works and the man who I worked for had begged us, "Please don't do chemo because it will be back in five years and very aggressive." I was only stage one-B, you see.

My boss was right in my case. But, they put the fear of god in you. I had a husband who was saying, "I want you around." So, I did chemo and radiation but now they know differently. If you're a stage one or stage one-B, you shouldn't have chemo, you should just remove the cancer. For me, the fact that I had two lumps was the issue. He had to go in three times to get all the cancer. I think that it had spread by that point or they just couldn't see it all or maybe the more you go in, the more you take the risk of it spreading? I don’t know.

I did well with chemo. I mean, it was hell and then I would be better and get back to my life. I just pushed my way through it which, looking back, I would never do it that way again. I would have allowed myself to be weak. I was very sick. I could feel that my brain was going, so I would make myself be with my child to try to get my brain back. Nine months after chemo, William was two and a half maybe three, that was when I think we started talking about how we wanted to go about having more children now.

I didn't find my cancer as hard to deal with as being told, "You will never be able to carry another child." That, to me, was the hardest thing to get my head around. I could get my head around cancer. I couldn't get my head around if I wanted more kids that I'm never going to be the one to carry them.

Now, we had to decide: Are we going to do something with these embryos? Are we going to have more children? If so, how do we go about finding a gestational carrier? We were entering an entire new world after having entered another entire new world from cancer.

Around the same time, I was sitting at Joe's Coffee on the Upper West Side. This little girl was sitting next to me with her grandmother and we just started chatting. I said to her, "I love this coffee place."

She replied, "Oh, this is my son's coffee place." We’re chatting and I ask if her son is married. She said "No. He's gay and he used a gestational carrier." Now, in my entire life I've never thought about a gestational carrier and here I am in conversation with this woman and she tells me her son had a gestational carrier.

"I'd really love to talk to your son."

She said,  "Well, he's going to be here in a few minutes."

He walks up, his mom introduces us and I said, "Can I ask you a few questions?"

He said, ”Sure.”

"Your mom was just telling me that you had a gestational carrier."

He said, "Yes.”

"How did you find your gestational carrier?" How do you even go about trying to find an agency to find a woman?"

And he said, "I actually found it through a girl who was drinking coffee here and she had cancer.”

All of a sudden, there in this coffee shop, this entire new world opened up to me. One minute you have cancer. Then, you discover this other woman had the same cancer, she can't have kids, you learn what she went through to get kids, and what agency she used!

Tets and I were very clear that we wanted an agency who cared about these women —gestational carriers — as lovely human beings who are doing something incredible for other people. This was important because this new world that we never thought we'd have to enter, or even knew existed, was full of very strange stories. I found out very quickly which agency not to use. I called a woman who was one of the biggest lawyers for gestational carriers. She went through IVF herself and then decided to devote her whole law practice to this area. But then I started hearing horror stories about her. So, I went to an open forum talk about surrogacy in White Plains.

I went by myself and sat in the very back of the room listening to everybody's stories about how they never thought that they would have children and were so grateful for the gestational carrier. Sitting there, things floated through my mind, “Why does a gestational carrier even want to do this? Are they doing it just for the money, or are they doing it as an act of goodwill? What does she tell friends, neighbors, her own husband? How am I going to feel never being pregnant again and watching her become pregnant? All of this was so overwhelming, but I got a lot of information and found more agencies.

We narrowed it down to two of the major agencies to interview. They were both in Massachusetts because it was illegal to do it in New York. We had a house in Massachusetts. The first agency was extremely, low-key, very real. We clicked with them because when we met. The way that they spoke about the women was so beautiful. They only got women who wanted to do this to help other people. I asked them all these questions, “How do you know they really want to do this?” And they said, "It is amazing in the interviews, we ask them so many questions that the truth comes up. They can't lie. Somewhere the women applying for this position will admit, ‘actually I hate being pregnant’ or ‘Well, my husband's making me because I can make $35,000.’”

This agency just had such a long waiting list because they had a track record of really caring for these women. The owners had gone through their own difficulties as two gay men trying to have children. They were very empathetic because they had lived it. They never talked about money or anything until the very end where we had to say, “How much does this cost?” They wanted to know about us, who we were, who William was, how did he feel about having a brother or a sister, why did we want more children, what kind of woman absolutely would we choose and how involved would we want to be? I mean, it was a full examination. We left from there looking at each other, saying, "This is who we want."

They were lovely people. Then, we had to drive from there up into Boston for the 2nd agency. I said to Tets, “I have a gut feeling that this next agency is going to be a bunch of bullshit.” It was awful. We both sat there with our mouths agape at their rudeness. The way they spoke about the women. The way it was all about money. Within 20 seconds I knew I wanted to get the fuck out of there. Tets said, "Why did you stay?"

I said, "I kept throwing looks at you, daggers, like ‘We need to get the heck out of here!’"

 “Why didn't you say something?"

I said, "You know why I wanted to stay? I wanted to see how far they could possibly go about being this rude about probably one of the hardest, stressful, most emotional decisions you'll ever have to make in your life."I found them heartbreakingly grotesque. I ended up telling them so. They said, "Are you interested?"

I said, "Actually, no, I'm not interested. I should have left 20 seconds into this,"and then told them why.

They had the balls to say, "Oh, these women, they're out in the middle of Middle America. They aren't generous, they need the money. You know what it would be to them to get pregnant for a couple who's on TV? I mean, they would love that. It would make their whole life."

 I looked at them and I said, "That's repulsive. Why would you look at these women this way because they are somebody. What they're doing is the biggest sacrifice on their life on their body for someone else’s family. They don't know what friends will say, they don't know what family is going to say, they don't know how their husband's really going to feel deep down.” I reported this agency and they are one of the well-known agencies that a lot of people use. If they were the last agency on earth, I’d never use them.

Anyway, we went with the first agency and I was in Tets’s board room, signing an affidavit to start the surrogacy process in front of his secretary who was validating it. Tets asked, "Are you absolutely sure you want to do this, you want to go ahead?"

I remember the anger rising and said, "I can't take this anymore. No, I don't want any more fucking kids!" This is in front of Tets’s secretary. Chemo has a horrible repercussion on your mind, your anger, your temper, your brainpower, everything, months and months and years afterwards.

Then I said, " Let's just do it. Let's just fucking do it. Just sign the fucking documents. let's just get it over with." The thing is you don't know which way to turn. If you don't do it, you'll have no more children. If you do it, you are entering another emotional roller coaster when you can't even function through your day to day.

After deciding to go ahead, there was another waiting game because the agency had a long list of people waiting. But they told us that they were clear on what we wanted, and they’d do their best to try to find us a surrogate. It was about two and a half to three months when they started sending resumes to us. Tets and I would sit in bed and read up.

When looking at the resumes, I knew instinctively who was right and who was wrong. We would just know, “No.” One of the biggest things for me, for us, was “How do you feel about us being in the birthing room?” Our other questions were, “Do you see this in any way as your child? Why is it that you want to do this? Have you absolutely come to terms with the fact that you will be handing over our child at the end of the day?” We were close to picking the first two but we said, "If it's not 1000% right, it's not right." We wanted to find somebody who sees it almost as being a caretaker, someone who cares about keeping our baby alive and caring for it.

Once you start on this path then you want to keep it rolling. For those first resumes where it was a “No”, afterward we thought, “Okay these two are not right, when are the next ones coming?” The agency said that they were on to somebody for us and to give them time. It was about three days later, they sent us a third resume and Tets said, “You're not going to believe this, right. I think this is it. There are too many coincidences.” For starters, she was the same nationality as Tets was. She had traveled in the same countries that I had in almost exactly the same years that I had. Tets and I sat down and we said, “This one. She's just amazing.”

We knew the type of woman that we wanted was someone who’d had kids of her own. This woman was a mother of two, she lived in Massachusetts. She wanted to do it. Education was also very important to us, and it was to her. Her husband had a decent job, so this was not just money. Some women get forced into this by the husband. It seems an easy way to make $35,000. But it is not an easy way to make $35,000 because of what their bodies goes through and emotionally what they go through. There were so many beautiful connections on paper. We called the agency immediately and said, ”We want to talk to this one!” and they said, “We knew.”

You have to think of everything. How do they live their life? How do they eat? Are they going to take prenatal vitamins? How is their diet? Do they drink? Do they smoke? Do they have an abusive husband that you just don't know about? What's their house like? What is their living situation? Are they really who they say they are? You have to go through every thought process. Are they saying that they're not going to drink but they actually drink? We've met several people who found out that their surrogates were just eating fast food the whole damn time. You have to think about all of this stuff because their blood is going into this child. They are birthing a life.

Anyway, her husband was also well educated and from the same country as my husband. The reason they wanted to do this was because they had to use IVF to get pregnant both times. They wanted to do this for their best friend but it didn't work out because the best friend's eggs weren't good enough. They were crushed. She said, “Well, I promised our friend that because it didn't work out for her, I'd love to do this for a family, and only do it once in order to give a family a child. Had it not been for IVF, we would have never had our children.” That’s why we called them.

What was so good about this agency was that they said, “Listen, we hand it over to you now. When you say you like this person, you like this person. We give you the phone number and you guys can talk. We are not involved in any of that part of the process. Afterward, please come back to us.” I’d understood most agencies were on the phone calls. They would time the phone calls and would listen to the phone calls. Our agency said, “This is a private affair between the two of you, and you'll know if it's right.”

Our surrogate was an angel. She's continued to be an angel. She was extraordinary. We spent two hours on the phone. The first time I got to speak to her, I got to speak to her husband as well. At the end of the call, we said, “Can we meet you?” We drove up to Massachusetts and we met them. We walked around the village with them, as she was playing with her girls. She says, “Please ask me any questions you want.” I asked her very, very hard questions to make sure that she could absolutely not get emotionally involved at all, in any way. Then, we talked about how they were going to explain it to their girls, their family, and people they meet. It’s tough when you think about figuring out how they were going to explain to their daughters that their mom is carrying a child that is not going to come home.

We had to talk about the other thing too. What if something's wrong with the baby? … Hard decision. A lot of women say that they are okay with ending a pregnancy and then they're not. Surrogates have the right to say, “No, I will not terminate this pregnancy.” So, we were very clear upfront. We said that it would have to be a pretty, severe case where they found down syndrome or there was something really, really, wrong with the child. She says, “At the end of the day, this is not my child. I will not be raising this child. This would be your job for the rest of your life and I will do whatever you ask even if I don't fundamentally agree with it. I will do it anyway.” She was an angel.

So, we said, “This is it.” We just loved her. We just loved her. We loved the fact that they were a very much together, a wonderful couple and that they were from the same foreign country. We had so many similarities, morals, values, and ethics. We loved them as a family. They loved us. And that was it.

We all had to go into counseling together. I can’t remember if it was because of the agency or just because it's a smart thing to do. We went to one counseling session together. We had to do a little bit of “Do you tell your son or do you not tell your son?” My children do not know and they will never know. There's no need for them to know. We talked about stuff like that or how long did our surrogate see herself being involved. She was very clear she said, “The day that we leave the hospital, I'm going to let you all handle that. I do not need to be involved. I'd like a photograph and then I think that that's it.”

I just knew with her, she wasn't clear cut about it, but I just knew with her that we would keep in touch. I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted to keep in touch because she was such an angel and a beautiful person. Then in the natural pace of life, it would phase out. I would say for the first six months, I would send her photographs and I would be very careful. I told her if this is ever too much to let me know. She said it wasn’t. Then it just faded out over a short period of time.

I know people who are very, very good friends with their surrogates. The surrogate comes to visit, they go on holidays together. All of us had just decided that the natural thing to do was to not. Our older son does not know, even though we all went to doctors appointments together. William would play with her girls and we were all in the hospital together. He remembered the kids but we would just say, “Oh, she was having a baby at the same time. How funny was that?”

It was odd when transferring the embryos to a new clinic once we had found our surrogate. I remember, wondering how we were going to get them from place to place. The clinic told us there were FedEx services. But then we are thinking, “Wait a minute. We're going to put our children in a FedEx box? And what if FedEx loses the box? Then they could lose our children, right? We'll just pick them up.”

You go in, get all the papers, look at the straws of embryos on dry ice. You're thinking, “I don't know if those are our straws. They have our name on it and everything. But who knows.” We say that they were ours, or Tets did as I wasn’t there, and that's it. You sign. They hand them to you. Then you are strapping your babies in these frozen straws in your car into a seatbelt, treating them as if they're actual human beings. I mean, it's fucking comical in that light.

Tets called and said, “I've got the kids. They're in the car.” I think William was there in the car too and he asked “What is that?” We just said, “Oh, it's just something on dry ice.” I met them at the clinic, in Connecticut. They were walking in, we were looking at them, the doctors came out, they picked up the box, we were signing all these papers and it was all fine.

Unfortunately, those nine embryos didn't work out. What happened was the first time we did a round with our surrogate, the new fertility clinic in Connecticut said to us, “What your initial fertility doctors told you about those nine embryos being great was a lie and not truthful at all.” They had fucked up.

We found this out when the surrogate was at the clinic. They were looking at the straws as they're getting her ready and we found out that everything was a lie. The embryos were not frozen properly. I don't remember what happened exactly. We got the two doctors — from the old clinic and the new one — on the phone and the old clinic had a different rating system. The new doctor said, “I don't care about the rating system. I can see everything’s quality that's in there and I'm telling you what you were told is not the truth. These are all not good, and you have a 10% chance of getting a baby”.

So, we went from, “You have a hundred percent chance of getting a child to you have basically a 10% chance … if you're lucky.”

We said, “Why didn't you call us and tell us this?” 

 “Well, we unfroze the ones for the transfer and when we did there was nothing in there.” the new doctor explained.

We said, “What the fuck are you talking about? There were two embryos in there.”

“No there's nothing in there at all”

 Then the doctor decided to move to the next straw and there was one, but there was supposed to be two. I can't remember the exact details. It was a horror story. The eggs completely disintegrated. The doctor said, “This doesn't just ‘happen’ when you store embryos. Even an embryo that is bad quality doesn't just disintegrate.” The whole thing was a total sham.

All of us together went into the doctor’s office. We’re sitting there with our surrogate who was ready to go, waiting for an egg to be transferred but now there was no egg to transfer. So, we asked the doctor to leave so we could speak to our surrogate. We turned to her and said, “Look we don't know what to do. He said everyone could come back tomorrow and we'll do the transfer depending on what we get. What would you like to do? This is your body.”

She was the first person that said to us, “But this is your life. This is your child. What is it that you would like? I'm going to do whatever it takes to give you the baby. That's why I'm here, I'm going to do whatever it takes. The decision's up to you.” Naturally, we were all in tears and hugging.

We said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

We all went home. We were driving from the Clinic in Connecticut to New York when the Clinic called to tell us that they'd gone to the third straw to see if we had something to transfer and it had disintegrated. There's nothing there, and there's supposed to be an embryo there. They said, “What do you want to do?”

I said, “You go to the fourth straw.” We're now on the fourth fucking straw.

They went to the fourth straw. They called us and said, “There's an embryo there and it looks pretty good. What do you want to do?” We’ve got to decide in less than 10 hours. Are we going to put this embryo in her and hope for the best? They said it looks pretty good. But what's pretty good, man? The clinic told us “Well, it is ‘this and this’” and now we were learning all about quality of an embryo etc.

I said, “We're not fucking doctors, what do you think we should do?” Their approach was telling us the odds and that maybe we had a 30% chance.

Meanwhile, you are now in this. You are SO in this. Your emotions are sky high. You've got a whole other family involved. Now you find yourself desperately wanting to have a child whereas maybe before you were like, “I think I want more kids but I’m not sure if I want to go through this.” So, we told the clinic. “Okay, we'll do it.” Our surrogate showed up the next day, they put the embryo in. And I was thinking ... “This is not going to work.” It's not about wasting time or wasting money. It's about what our emotions were. What our surrogate’s emotions were what her body was going through. We waited however many weeks and then of course, it didn't work.

Now, we've got five more left and go to fifth straw. They were not any good either. We went to the sixth straw. What was supposed to be in there was not in there. Went to the seventh straw. Meanwhile, we were asking our surrogate, “Will you stick with us?” She said, “I told you I will do anything to give you a baby.”`Went to the seventh straw. Also destroyed. Then we went the eighth straw. There was supposed to be one embryo and the one embryo was there, but it's in such horrible condition that they said there's no point. We went to the ninth straw. There are two embryos in there, and they were in very, very good condition.

I remember I was sitting on our back porch, it was August, and Tets had been away and was driving back up here, when our surrogate called and she said, "We're pregnant," then added, “And my hormones are double!"

I said, "Oh my god, it's twins. It's going to be twins," because we put in two eggs and they looked absolutely amazing. I remember that August so well.

She said, "I think it's twins. I think it's twins."

We were both crying and then Tets showed up and I said, "She's pregnant!"

She was incredible. She would do every type of test. I barely had to go to any doctor's appointments, nothing because I trusted her so much. Luckily her pregnancy was easy. We were traveling in Asia. She was sending pictures and you couldn't even tell she was pregnant. But we knew she was very far along and decided we would tell Wiliam about it on the trip. We said to him, "You're going to have a brother and sister." Then he drew a picture where we were all five angels together holding hands and said, “I'm going to take care of them and teach them.” I remind him of this because most of the time he wants to kill them now!

The big thing at this point was that we wanted to find a hospital that would allow us all to be in the delivery room. You had to get a court order to do it saying that the surrogate is not the mother. You have to get all the legal documents to make sure that the hospital would not hand the surrogate your babies. You can never allow the surrogate to ever sign her name on a piece of paper because the hospital will naturally recognize her as the mother when the baby is born. One of our friends who had done this also who had had cancer told me all of this information. Thank God for her!

So, we were at the hospital the whole time for the birth. We’d gone with this very progressive Massachusetts hospital and when we were talking to them about all of this, they basically said to us, “Don't worry, we know what we're doing."

I said, "As soon as those babies’ documents are printed you are to hand them straight to us. Nobody else's name is supposed to be on them. No one is ever supposed to know and there's no pictures taken.”

The hospital said, "In case of emergency we're going to have to choose who gets to go into that delivery room."

We said, "Well, this is her husband, he has to be. But we want to all be in there." In the end, we were all in there together, all of us, and her parents were eve there too. They flew over.

Afterward, our surrogate was down the corridor like eight rooms down on the right corner. I wanted them very close by. Her kids were there and our son was there. We just didn't let anybody bump into each other. I wanted her to see the babies. I kind of snuck up in the middle of the night. I wanted her to hold them. We wanted her to see them and make sure that she was okay so I kept walking down there to see if she was all right. We hugged and had tea together. All of us were together but in each our separate roles. It was extraordinary. Really, it was a beautiful experience.

We had a lot of very wonderful friends and people rooting for us who didn't know the intricacies of the heartache that we'd gone through. Even still so many friends wanted to come from overseas just to hold the babies. I remember one of the nicest things someone did for me was that a friend called and insisted on throwing me a baby shower.

One of my work colleagues who had three children of her own and always wanted a girl and adopted a girl, she gave me some of the best advice. She said, "Those babies are yours. You do not pass those babies around and let people hold them. Those babies must know only your scent for the first few months of their lives." I always remembered that advice.

What's really weird is that as soon as they were born, even before they came home I started having a tingling in my breasts as if my milk were coming in. I didn't let anyone in the hospital touch the twins. I’d said, “No, no, no, no. They come to me.” Right after they were born, I got naked with them and I put them on my breast. I let William see me as if breastfeeding them. We took pictures of me with them on my breasts. For a month, I slept naked with them. I just wanted the same experience I’d had with William.

No one ever asked if I’d been pregnant. You know how it is sometimes. You see a woman who is pregnant, slightly pregnant, next thing you know they're nine months gone. You're like, "Oh, you have a baby now??" Sometimes I showed up for TV and said, "I only want the camera from here up." I started wearing pregnancy looking dresses and I didn't allow any photographs. I just went along the journey as if it was both of us going through this journey together.

It's not that we're ashamed of using a surrogate in any way, shape, or form. Our surrogate will always be our angel and I think about her every day. I just didn't want to have to explain it all to our children. I didn't want them to second guess anything. I didn’t want them questioning and searching and looking. I didn't want all of those questions. From the very beginning, we decided this all and made it very clear with our surrogate and the counselors.

My advice:

Don't be so steadfast in your thinking. You have to be open when it comes to the way that you think that you're going to have a child. It's not necessarily the way that you would have planned it. But maybe there's something better and greater on this journey that's going to be the best gift. You just never knew it would happen that way. Be open if you really want children and trust that it's going to come to you in a different way. You need to be open to gifts coming to you in a totally different way than ever you imagined.

Now my practical advice is: Don't do frozen transfers if you can help it. Do live. Oh and research, DO YOUR RESEARCH. Because we trusted a little too much, we went to one of the best clinics and it didn’t work out. Do your research.