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2006-09-11

In the weeks following September 11, 2001, there seemed to be a media proliferation of new-found maturity and wisdom. Folks were writing about their own 9/11 experience, their resulting emotions, and their fine-tuned priorities. In the time that it took four planes to collide with buildings and ground, people began suddenly reflecting on big questions about what was really important in their lives and the lives of their families.

In my niche, the big question was "Dare we bring kids into this dangerous new world?"

I had satisfied my own drive to reproduce after five years of scheduled sex, scaling back a stressful social work career, ceasing all physical exercise save for walking my dogs, and learning how to inject myself with drugs in the thigh and abdomen twice daily during each pregnancy. Four pregnancies failed before my "miracle" child finally managed to survive my seemingly perilous womb. In my new career as a writer and online community manager for a world of infertile people, I was one of the lucky ones. I no longer had to wonder at what age I would cease the pursuit of parenthood. I'd dodged what had begun to look like an inevitable cascade of emotional struggles to adjust to an unwanted self-image: me without a child, forever.

While the whole world's attention was riveted on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, I watched my two-year-old lying in a drug-induced coma in a renowned pediatric intensive care unit in Houston. Televisions over every bed replayed the horrific scenes. The looming questions for me on that day all revolved around my own child's survival, and the answer was definitive and absolute. Even if sedated to the point of breathing via respirator, he was alive and it was good.

Maybe the question about whether to have babies wasn't on the minds of most people. For a few million Americans, though, the opportunity to examine one's core motives for having babies is nothing new. In fact, it becomes part of their daily life, the whole question of why anyone cares to have a baby in the first place. After the harsh realization that getting pregnant won't come easily in your own household, the costly and exhausting treatment struggle can make the most hell-bent parent-want-a-be question the value of the end point. Catastrophic events like 9/11 might understandably disrupt a person's pursuit. At least, that's what I thought.

Certainly I couldn't help but wonder that day about the well-being of the thousands of people who frequented where I worked, a thriving website for people dealing with infertility. I knew for sure that one, Grace Lamoureux, worked at the Pentagon.

A Technical Sergeant for the United States Air Force, Grace Lamoureux was one of my most level-headed volunteers. She and her husband, Bill, had by then done a couple of years of duty in the infertility trenches. Grace was extraordinary in her ability to provide straight-up facts with a soothing tone to the Internet community's members, mostly women, many of whom expressed anxiety-tinged desperation and even at times suicidal despondency. With her high tolerance for physical pain, she could share a different version of the diagnosis and treatment experience with needle-phobic readers. Grace was able to assure scared visitors that not only was the whole medication and procedure route to pregnancy tolerable, it was very worthwhile. She'd chosen tubal ligation to close out her reproductive life years earlier, believing that the boy and girl born from her previous marriage were enough. Then she met Bill.

In these days of microsurgical techniques, divorce, and subsequent marriages, once perfectly fertile people sometimes find themselves with a medical classification of secondary infertility. For them, as for the majority of people, the notion of having children usually begins somewhere in the realm of a hazy, romantic ideal or a hormone-driven biological slip. When they change their minds down the road, their dreams of slipping easily into parenthood again are dashed: that was Grace's story.

By 2001, after one tubal ligation reversal surgery, several months worth of intrauterine inseminations, and one unsuccessful go at in vitro fertilization, there was still no baby for the couple who had been long-time best friends before falling in love. Like so many double-military couples (Bill was also an Air Force Technical Sergeant), their first 10 months were spent in separate bases, in different states. When their careers allowed them to combine households in Maryland, Bill, who had no children of his own, wanted to be a dad. Already in her late 30's and, therefore, considered "advanced maternal age," Grace was prepared to go the distance to give to Bill what he called "the best gift in the world." She recalled a strong feeling of "incompleteness" without a child fathered by Bill.

On September 11, 2001, the couple's personal calendar was looking forward to the month of October when they would try IVF again at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

On that day five years ago, I was struggling to cope with my own results of infertility treatment. For years, I was sure that the most painful experiences I would ever have were my several miscarriages and looming involuntary childlessness. As virtually any mother or father eventually learns, there is no separating pain from parenting.

My own calendar was full of medical appointments for very different reasons. On August 1 of that year, a broken wooden garage door had come slamming down with a train's speed at the same moment that my diapered son toddled beneath it. Remarkably, the only body part injured was his right foot, but it was a devastating trauma. I witnessed the accident, and from my vantage point, I believed that my son was being crushed to death. Overnight, I learned about compression syndrome, how it rapidly devours all tissues surrounding even minor breaks for no known reasons, and how the only way to stop it is emergency surgery.

By September 10, I'd learned about the prophylactic use of massive antibiotic doses, administered through a catheter installed through the chest wall, directly over the heart, around the clock for seemingly endless weeks. I'd learned how to hand my screaming baby to masked strangers who whisked him down cold, bright hallways, out of my sight yet still within hearing distance . I'd been told that my son's foot would likely never again have a normal appearance and that his ability to walk and run was uncertain without untold numbers of physical therapy sessions. The day before the planes were used to kill thousands of people in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania, my husband and I spent a tortured 20 hours in the corridors and patios of the giant children's hospital in Houston where I'd once worked. By 2 AM on September 11, my son out of surgery four hours later than the medical team had anticipated, we were told to go home and rest while his little body was kept under heavy sedation. There was nothing we could do, the drugs made him unaware of our presence or absence, and this was our last opportunity to sleep uninterrupted for untold coming weeks. I left my child's side for the first time since his birth in 1999.

Later that morning, Grace Lamoureux took her daughter to a dental appointment and headed in to her job as a videographer for the Joint Combat Camera Center in the Pentagon. She'd chosen the high-stress, deadline-driven job primarily in order to remain in Maryland with Bill, who was working in D.C., too. She also thought it would be "cool" to work in the thick of things, editing footage sent in by various military bases and producing viewable material for television networks. Her new office was windowless and temporarily disheveled as the building was being renovated. Having spent the morning on the Metro sans radio or phone service, neither Grace nor her colleagues knew the reason that there were more security guards outside than usual at 9 AM. The weather was incredibly nice. They must be taking advantage, she thought.

Before she could drop her backpack and head downstairs to count and label furniture that was due to be moved, Bill called. He was watching the morning's events unfold with the rest of the country on live TV. Ironically, the Pentagon videography team was still without cable in their new office, so they relied on Bill's worrisome report by phone to hear the news that now a second plane had torn into the World Trade Center. About 15 minutes later, Grace wondered aloud to co-workers how horrible it would be for a plane to aim for the Pentagon, especially given their new office location on the outer ring's top floor, 300 yards from a heliport where dignitaries were believed to arrive. Twenty or so minutes after that, a loud but muffled sound from below shook the building with a force that up-ended computer monitors. A standing office mate lost his balance as the floor rocked. They hoped it was a downstairs wall being collapsed for renovation purposes.

The calls for evacuation began. As Grace and her team descended by stair and escalator, still not fully understanding the situation, they encountered and assisted hysterical but uninjured civilian workers. As their journey progressed, it became apparent that an explosion of some kind had occurred a few floors beneath the videography office, in the area where Grace should have been labeling furniture. They gathered in the parking lot and immediately began working on a plan to get to another venue for work purposes, knowing that footage would likely be streaming in for editing. With communication and transportation disrupted, it was two hours before Bill again reached Grace by phone.

In Houston, watching the TV in my bedroom as I dressed for a day at the hospital, I felt an undeniable wave of panic as my mind raced. At that moment, not knowing whether this was just the first of a possible series of attacks on our country's locales of great importance, my heart rose to my throat as my son lay unconscious in the medical center of a city built by petroleum-based money. My overwrought body couldn't move fast enough to calm my terrified mind. Nothing seemed normal -- the traffic, the looks on strangers' faces, the amount of security we met at the hospital, the droning TV screens everywhere. Still, once at my son's bedside, I had no big questions. Scared out of our wits or not, my child was here, and he was alive.

Eventually, the need to escape the breathing machine's rhythmic hissing sent me to the hospital's courtesy computers. I logged on, headed for my community, and started scanning threads for news of members' welfare, especially Grace. I was frankly dismayed that there were so many posts that seemed oblivious to the morning's horrors. It wasn't that they were in a fog and unaware, it was that their own needs were so much more pressing and urgent. Women in various stages of worry about why they couldn't conceive, or which treatment might work, or when they needed to start the additional fertility medications... and I couldn't find Grace.

Questioning the voracity with which someone flings herself into fertility treatment is unthinkable in groups such as our community. Rarely, if ever, were the big questions of whether and why brought to bear in these forums. On the rare occasions that such a renegade post appeared, the foolhardy poster was swiftly deemed an outsider and effectively banished by group derision. The mind-set was something along the lines of "Who would dare question our motives for wanting children?", followed by frequent complaints about the "unfairness" of infertility.

After four years creating and building the infertility website, I had decided to focus mostly on writing articles, culling together a team of 12 volunteers to manage the large community precisely because I had fallen out of love with the "infertility victim" routine. I let my sympathetic team work their magic to keep the community emotionally and intellectually fed, while I managed the mundane yet tolerable administration aspects.

It was painful to see, on the evening of September 11, 2001, the same sort of clamoring for backpats and attention that went on any other day in my infertility community. I wondered if I was over-reacting, emotions springing from my own circumstances which weren't even based on the day's events that were most significant to the world.

I judged it better to avoid all conversations, post a message of consolation for anyone who was impacted, and put out a call for knowledge of Grace.

Finally, word trickled through that Grace was okay. Eventually, I corresponded with her and learned of her impending second IVF. I posted a poll on the site asking readers to rate how much, if at all, their desire to bring forth children into this new world had changed. Grace consented to writing up her own thoughts on the question, and I published it with the poll results 13 days later.

It was not a scientific survey, but it was a good gauge of my site's membership. The question: "Has the recent terrorist attack changed your feelings toward having children?" Thirty-one percent responded positively to the statement "There is nothing that could ever change my mind." There was a smattering of responses to less confident stances but, in all, 55 percent had mostly positive feelings about having children. Only two percent said that the events had "definitely" changed their minds in a negative direction.

Grace's point of view essay is still frequently viewed, though on a different website. It is as candid as Grace, as reasonable and sober as her helpful posts to the community, as pragmatic as her approach to everyday life seems. She factored in all costs involved, from financial to social to emotional. She examined their emotions toward a future far more uncertain for active military than for anyone else. She and Bill did their best to avoid related conversations with their families, fearing they might hear only negatives from those who could not or would not understand. They compartmentalized their experiences, separating job from home, focused on the fact that they still got to come home to each other and their other children. Written just days after surviving the Pentagon attack, Grace explained that, in the end, they would still go through with their IVF. Today, she says she barely recalls writing it.

Bill and Grace's twin sons are now four years old. Since 2005, the family has lived near Fairbanks, Alaska where Grace is stationed at Eielson Air Force Base.

Just as Grace referred in her 2001 essay to the possibility of the country requiring more of both her and Bill, she was deployed to Iraq for four and a half months this year. There, she met a woman who already knew her name from having tearfully read the essay online, after searching for support and information about her own combined situations of being active military and wanting to have children.

The big questions are still very much out there, maybe even more so now, as advanced reproductive technology has boomed in just the past five years, offering myriad genetic choice to parents who can afford to be choosy. Now, it's not just a matter of why one wants a child and to what extremes would one go, but picky parents can choose a gender and screen for even the simple likelihood of many genetic conditions.

My son is fine now, a healthy, active, normal seven year old. More often than I'd like, I have found myself thinking of those fearful nights and days in that hospital, sick with worry and, frankly, wondering if I had done the right thing bringing this child into the world. At that time, I had to wonder about Grace and why she felt compelled to go forward with fertility treatment in order to bring another child into this dangerous world.

When I spoke to Grace earlier this week, she made it clear that there was nothing she would do differently, even given the anxiety and heartache involved in being an active military mom of young children. As we talked about the many visitors to the online community who seemed so driven to distraction by the infertility experience that they lost track of the goal to parent, Grace summed up with the hindsight of a survivor, both of 9/11 and now Iraq, her own answer to the question.

We were thinking how cool it would be to put the best of both of us into a baby, she recalls. We're going to raise them to be great people. With the way the world is going, maybe this little soul can grow up and make some changes.

In addition to my burdensome wealth of medical knowledge gained through infertility and, then, the other shoe falling of the garage door accident, I have learned and accepted that I will never be the same after witnessing what I believed for only a few seconds to be my son's dying. Similarly, no one who witnessed the horrors of 9/11 can ever return to their previous version of whatever was normal. Finally, I realize that expecting the immediate and cataclysmic trauma of that day to have much bearing at all on the drive to have children, especially for people who must fight to continue believing that they can, makes as much sense as asking me whether I'd do it all over again if I had known the accident lie in our future. They are questions without answers.

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