Anyone who has struggled with infertility will tell you that the road is long and full of thorns. Our road began some nine years ago and ended, in a manner of speaking, in the pages of the Canadian Jewish News.
Baby Hannah at four days old
Like many couples, we waited a few years into our marriage before trying to have children. Little did we know the challenges we would face. After several years of trying “the old fashioned way,” we pursued fertility treatments.
Over the course of 11 inseminations, we achieved three pregnancies, but one miscarried and two others were ectopics, in which the embryo implanted outside the uterus.
We moved on to in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure that we had been hesitant to embark on because of its considerable cost and relatively low success rate. In three cycles – two fresh and one “frozen” (using fertilized eggs from a previous cycle that had been frozen) – we succeeded only in producing what medical experts call a “blighted ovum,” or an empty sac with no embryo.
Then, in the Nov. 8, 2007, issue of the Canadian Jewish News, we came across an article headlined “In vitro fertilization breakthrough at Weizmann.” Reporter Leila Speisman’s article provided the details of a speech given at Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue as part of Life As A Journey, a program offered by Weizmann Women and Science. The speaker was Prof. Nava Dekel, head of the Weizmann Institute’s department of biological research.
Working with medical doctors at the Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot, Dekel had conducted a study in which a sample group of 12 women underwent uterine biopsy (a scraping of the lining of the uterus) prior to IVF.
Remarkably, 11 of the 12 women successfully carried their pregnancies to full term and delivered healthy babies – a success rate in excess of 90 per cent, and much better than in-vitro’s usual success rate of 20 to 50 per cent. Further studies resulted in success rates nearly 50 per cent higher than usual with IVF. As Dekel explained in the article, “It appears that local injury of the uterus doubles the chance of having a take-home baby.”
After reading the piece, you could immediately hear the gears begin to turn in our minds. We e-mailed Dekel, who very quickly put us in touch with the doctors she was working with in Rehovot, Amihai Barash and Irit Granot. The Israeli doctors were kind enough to respond with a detailed description of the procedure, which we immediately passed on to our local fertility doctor in Toronto.
As of this writing, the successful outcome of this discovery is now 11 days old and lying in a beautiful cradle by our bedside. Hannah Esther Angel Kaman was born on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008, at 10:27 a.m.
Approximately 48 hours later in shul, we read parshat Bereshit. Of course, Bereshit is all about beginnings (in fact, the beginning), but, at least metaphorically, it’s also about the process of birth. Just as Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden for becoming self aware, so, too, do we all start our lives by emerging out of the womb into the larger world.
The further along this road of life we go, we realize that oftentimes, the things we’re seeking most deeply may come about from the most unlikely of places, such as the pages of a newspaper.
We need only keep our eyes open so that we may see them.