Casablanca to Casa Nuestra: a Moroccan Adoption

By Clive Jackson

This book is concerned with what it's really like to overcome obstacles and adopt a child in a foreign country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481796637

Book preview

Chapter 1

A reversal

T here was a problem with us conceiving children naturally. I had had a vasectomy when I was twenty-seven years old, more than twenty-three years before, and there was no more than a slim chance of a reversal being successful. Moreover, I was one of the first to have a vasectomy, and little was known at the time that I was considering the operation about reversals and their chances of success. However, Maria is a doctor, and she had friends who were willing to give it a try, so off we went to a private clinic in Madrid for a consultation, and after some fondling of my scrotum—by the doctor I hasten to add—it was decided that there was a good chance of a successful reversal, and a date was fixed, a Saturday as I remember, for the operation.

I was scrubbed up (or rather down), asked to lie on a table, given a local anaesthetic in my scrotum and in my groin, and the operation began. There was a sort of opaque screen erected to stop me from seeing what was going on, which I remember thinking was not very fair—after all, it was my property that they were tinkering with. Out of sight, cuts were made to either side of my scrotum, and the search for the knots—made all of those years before–began. There was no big problem to report with this exploration, and the knots were cut away, and clean ends were prepared to rejoin the tubes.

One interesting thing happened. When they cut the left-hand knot, there was a spurt of liquid from the pipework, almost as if, after years of being imprisoned, the trapped sperm and associated liquid were eager to be about their appointed business. I took this as a good sign and an indication of my unquestioned (by myself anyway) masculinity and virility.

There was a nurse present who seemed to have more experience with this particular procedure than the doctor present, which is not that surprising when one realises that nurses attend operations with many different doctors. I make mention of her because she was responsible for the most indescribable pain in my body, which came next.

The cutting back of a tube to a clean end to make a join had left a shortfall of tubing on the left side. The doctor started to pull on what was exposed in order to get a bit more to play with, and that was when I realised that the local anaesthetic had not covered a wide enough area. I could feel my tubes being pulled from what appeared to be the inside of my lower stomach area. The pain was terrible, comparable to what it must have been like to have your entrails pulled out in a medieval torture session, I thought. I sort of whimpered to indicate that all was not well, but the nurse kept urging the doctor to pull.

I felt hot, then I felt cold, and then I felt as if I was about to have a bowel collapse. I remember thinking that that would be both unhygienic and unmanly. Before long, all of the things that you hear happen when people are scared or threatened started to happen. The cold sweat poured from my face, chest and back, and my body went rigid, which I remember thinking wasn’t fair, as I wanted to take a swing at the doctor. All the time the nurse was encouraging him to pull more and telling him that there was plenty left inside to play with.

At last the doctor seemed to be happy with what he had, which felt to me like a couple of metres of tubing, and he stitched the two ends together with something inside the tubes that resembled a piece of blue fishing line in order to keep the joint from sealing over. He put a few more stitches in my scrotum to tidy up the job, and then with this ‘fishing line’ protruding from the stitches on either side of my scrotum, he told me that all was OK and that the stitches would dissolve in time and that I could pull the ‘fishing line’ out myself in a few days’ time. That will be a delight, I thought. He told me that he would see me in three months’ time to do some tests.

I didn’t leave without telling him and the nurse of the pain I had suffered. The nurse, who had monitored my top half as well as my bottom half during the operation, sort of sniffed in disdain and told me that of course she had been aware of the acute pain I had been feeling but said that in such extremes of pain it is customary for the patient to pass out, so it was my fault I had suffered so much. ‘Not this soldier,’ I told her.

I felt a perverse sense of pride in having stayed awake through the whole thing and of having showed them some British mettle. In fact, I have always fought against anaesthetic, and I did the same in a Dutch clinic during my vasectomy.

I had a day or two off work to let the bruising and dull pain subside, and then I went back to teaching the following Monday.

I was teaching a class in a department of the Madrid administration when I felt ‘something go’ down below. I looked down and saw some blood seeping through my trousers. I decided to carry on with the rest of the lesson—although I must admit that it wasn’t one of my best—but to do so sitting down, from my chair. Once I had dismissed the class I went to the bathroom to find that the stitches had split on the left-hand side and that there was a half-inch opening in my scrotum.

I went back to the doctor to see what was wrong, and he said not to worry and that he would re-stitch. He did so, but after a few days I noticed that the wound had not joined, so off I went to see the doctor again. This time he re-opened the wound, cut back to open flesh on both sides, and re-joined yet again. This surgery worked but with the result that the left side of my scrotum does not look old and wrinkled as with other men, but it looks as if it has had a bit of nip and tuck done, which in fact it has.

I duly went back for the test after a while and was told that the operation had been successful and that I was again firing live ammunition, although only half the number of spermatozoa than was normal. With the number still into the millions, I thought that it would be enough to get the job done.

We tried for the next couple of years. We religiously counted the days to ovulation. We took Maria’s temperature readings to make sure that the time was right. We abstained for the recommended number of days to make sure that the sperm would be at its best and healthiest when released. We read all available literature on conception. We consulted with Maria’s medical colleagues to gain insider tips. However, we found ourselves no closer to a pregnancy and the then desperately wanted child. My mindless optimism and confidence had come to nothing.

Chapter 2

IVF

T alk turned to means of artificial insemination. There was more reading, and there were more discussions. We decided that if we were to be successful with in vitro fertilisation (IVF) would be the only way forward. We discussed the many different ways of doing this, but always at consultations came the doctors’ doubts about my pitiful three million sperm count. I couldn’t work out statistically how, if only one sperm was needed to do the job, having twice as many beginning the swim improved the chances of conception. I thought that the six million would cause a bit of a jam—as at the start of a marathon. But the doctors proved annoyingly right, and we started to tramp around various private clinics to find one that suited us.

The first private clinic we visited was a glass and steel affair, and our interview with the director there was less than successful and very unprofessional, although the clinic was rated the best in our nearest big city. The consultation was on a Friday afternoon, and the director was due to start her annual holidays as soon as she had finished with us. Her children were in the waiting room, impatiently waiting for the off, and she actually left us twice to console them and tell them to be patient. The consultation was rushed, and no time was given for us to ask any questions. We decided to go elsewhere.

We knew of another doctor, considered to be extremely good, who worked in the state hospital in the mornings and who did private work in the afternoons. His offices were not a patch on the first clinic, but he had a much better attitude, and he exuded professionalism and a calm confidence. We left the consultation with him feeling much more confident and eager to get started.

We understood that, for IVF, Maria was to take drugs to increase the number of eggs brought to her ovaries during ovulation and, when these eggs were ready, they would be surgically removed, and the best of my three million sperm would be injected into the best of her eggs. The cells would then be watched to see if they separated and multiplied and, if they did, the egg or eggs would be replaced in the ovary, and the pregnancy would thenceforth run its natural course.

I was given drugs to smarten up my slovenly three million sperm, took numerous homeopathic enhancements, and I stopped all alcohol intake in order to give them the best chance of success on the big day. Maria was given drugs—at a cost of nearly 1,000 euros a shot—to increase the number of eggs that would be ready for collection and insemination at the next ovulation, and we waited.

The day dawned, as they say, and it saw us at the clinic as the sun rose, paying the first of what would subsequently turn out to be thousands of euros. Maria was wheeled off to be prepared for her minor operation to remove her eggs, and I was unceremoniously pointed in the direction of a toilet with a small plastic specimen jar and instruction to give it to the nurse when I had done my duty.

It is not that easy to do one’s duty when in the decidedly unromantic surroundings of a hospital toilet, even a private one. However, I adopted the attitude that my mother had instilled in me and my siblings as children, which was that we were as good as anyone and better than most, and telling myself that I was not the first to have stood on this very spot with a red-capped specimen jar in one hand and the hopes of the future in the other, I desperately tried to do the necessary. I eventually did, although it didn’t feel like my best ever effort, and I handed the jar to the (thankfully male) nurse who rushed it off to the lab to select the Mark Spitz’s of what I had offered.

Maria had by now been sedated and was waiting for the removal of her eggs, of which there were three, we were told. This was duly done, and the lab inserted the best of my sample into the three healthy eggs, and we were told to telephone the next day to see how things had progressed.

It was not the easiest twenty-four hours of our lives, particularly for Maria, who is not as used to waiting around as I am, but we persevered, and at the appointed time the following day Maria phoned the clinic to be told that two of the three eggs were multiplying their cells in the magical way that they do at the start of a new life. So we were back in the clinic the following day for the now busily dividing eggs to be reinserted into Maria’s womb. We were told that although both eggs would be put back it was unlikely both would survive and we accepted this. All was successful, and we left the happiest people in the world, Maria feeling as if she was carrying the future of the world inside her and me feeling as protective as the Royal Guard, eyeing everyone and everything to make sure that nothing could harm this precious cargo.

Over the next few weeks we went to the clinic several times for scans to make sure that everything was as it should be. We saw the egg sac growing at the proscribed rate, and we marvelled at what was happening inside Maria. I started a diary, and we took some photographs of Maria’s naked profile as well so that the baby would have a written and a visual story of its beginning in life.

Then, at six weeks, after making sure that Maria had plenty of rest and no stresses or strains that could harm the baby growing inside, the scan showed no life inside her womb, and our world and dreams collapsed around us. It is impossible to say what caused the baby to give up its will to live, and we tried to console ourselves by saying that nature had decided that the baby hadn’t been strong enough for this world and that it was for the best, but words and rationalisation are no good in situations like this. We both