Origin Story, Shaken

Usually, I reflect, position, and craft when I write, but today I’m just going to tell you about something that happened. Think of it as exorcism, rather than clarification.

From late 1986 to the spring of 1988, a point in time when Sam and I had two kids, Hannah and Jake, I was seized by a desperate desire for a third, which wasn’t happening. My ob/gyn sent me to an endocrinologist at Yale who specialized in infertility, Dr. Burton Caldwell, who had a great success rate. What followed were 18 months of injections and blood tests and ultrasounds and more injections, every month culminating in a hopeful period of waiting before my devastating actual period. Some months into this protocol, Dr. Caldwell recommended IUI, or intrauterine insemination, where the semen is collected via donor (in my case, Sam) and a plastic cup and taken immediately to an on-site lab and run through some process where only the zippiest sperm are injected directly into the uterus during ovulation.

Dr. Caldwell’s office felt like a secret club, where women like me shared a waiting room and commiserated. We talked about side effects of the fertility drugs we were on, like horrible bloating and mood swings, our sisterhood laser-focused on motherhood.

I was a mystery to Dr. Caldwell. I seemed to have healthy, viable eggs and Sam’s sperm count was fine, but still, no baby. He suggested IUI. I remember Sam joking about the sample and me on my back with my legs stirruped and spread while Dr. Caldwell instructed me to stay on my back with a pillow under my hips to give the little swimmers a gravitational advantage.

What neither Sam nor I remember after 36 years is whether we did IUI the month I got pregnant with triplets.  

This past Monday, on my way back from driving Rachael, #1 triplet in birth order, her husband Will, and grandson Henry to the airport, I was listening to a New York radio station. The lead story was about a Connecticut doctor who was being sued for deceptively using his own sperm to impregnate his infertility patients, a fact which came to light after results on 23 and Me. Apparently, so far, he fathered 22 children in the New Haven area, though probably more, because the only matches were in the 23 and Me data bank. The doctor’s name: Burton Caldwell.

After I screamed for a bit, I called Sam. Of course I called Sam. Together, we tried to reconstruct our time under Caldwell’s care.

The triplets are fraternal, so three eggs were fertilized by three different sperm cells. Sarah, # 2 in birth order, had already done 23 and Me, and is a Sam/Laura match, basically half Ashkenazi Jewish and half Northwestern European. That leaves Rachael and Eliza to get the 23 and Me test kit, because it’s not impossible that Caldwell enhanced Sam’s sperm sample with his own before my insemination.

I always considered myself a good judge of character, and I trusted and genuinely liked Dr. Caldwell so much that when the triplets were born, I brought them back to his office so he could meet them. He was delighted, and I was so happy, and now…

In the weeks before 23 and Me provides Rachael and Eliza with their results, I will sort my muddled feelings out. They are unsettled but confident this will turn out to be just a weird false alarm, but I can’t help feeling that even if nothing at all changes, something already has.