Jane Clifford
San Diego Union-Tribune Archive Document
FAMILY TIES EDITOR
25-Dec-1996 Wednesday
Jeanine Bobardt | Denise North
Denise North and Jeanine Bobardt are typical twins. Playmates as children,best friends as they grew older, they can finish each other's sentences and, sometimes, even know what the other is thinking. What they couldn't do was share the joys of motherhood.
Denise wanted children more than anything, and tried for almost a decade to conceive. Jeanine tried to ease Denise's pain by involving her in the lives of her own son and daughter as much as she could.
"I remember when I had Sarah home the first night. Denise stayed up with her all night," Jeanine recalls. "The next morning, she said to me, 'Can I have her?' It just broke my heart."
On this Christmas Day, neither sister could be more joyful. Jeanine has given her sister a daughter, and two sons as well. Joshua, Adam and Elise are triplets. They are Denise's triplets, carried in Jeanine's womb. "This was my way of answering yes to Denise's question," Jeanine says.
Theirs is a story of the miracle of birth. And the love between two sisters.
On Sunday night, the weekend before Thanksgiving, Denise -- who works in the paralegal program at the University of San Diego -- and her husband, Kevin, production manager at a film-processing plant, had just come home to El Cajon when the phone rang.
They'd returned from Sun Valley, near Burbank, where Jeanine and husband Dave live with their two children. It was Dave on the phone. Jeanine was being prepped for an emergency Caesarean section. "Your babies are on the way!" he told Denise.
She and Kevin threw their things back in the car and sped north. The triplets were two hours old when their parents first saw them. Born several weeks early, as most multiples are, they were in neonatal intensive care at Glendale Adventist Medical Center. But they were healthy. They were going to be just fine. Everyone could relax.
It was over. All the emotional pain and suffering for Denise. All the physical pain and suffering for Jeanine. Finally over.
o o o
Denise and Jeanine Manderfeld were born five minutes apart on July
25,1962. Denise was first. Growing up in Tierrasanta, they shared
toys, shared clothes, shared a room. They are the middle children --
there are an older and a younger brother -- of Adelina and Tom
Manderfeld. So close were the girls, their mother remembers, that by
second grade they had to be separated. Denise was moved to another
classroom. For the first time, they were forced to make other
friends.
"But we always had a best friend," Jeanine says. "We always had each other." Further separation was inevitable. They moved through University of San Diego High School, began spending more time with boyfriends than each other.
Jeanine went to college. Denise went to work. By the mid '80s, Jeanine had married David and they were living in Los Angeles. Denise, still in San Diego, met Kevin. Soon, they married and decided to start their family right away.
"It was about six months after they got married that she thought she was pregnant," Jeanine remembers. "It boosted me and my husband to finally start our family."
Jeanine was pregnant within a month. Denise, however, was not. Her symptoms, her doctor told her, were associated with uterine fibroid cysts. Though common in women -- and usually benign -- Denise's cysts were serious. Too numerous, she would learn, and too difficult to control. Jeanine's son Evan was born in 1990. Denise kept trying. The fibroids were taking their toll; "I had a lot of pain and bleeding," she says.
Her gynecologist did a test to get a clearer picture of what was going on. His face told her the results weren't good. "He put his arm around me and said, 'You'll never be able to have children.'
o o o
Still, she tried. Denise started medication to shrink the fibroids
and had surgery to remove 26 cysts. The resulting scar tissue would
make it even more difficult for her to carry the child she so
desperately wanted.
"If you're a woman, you're meant to have children," she says quietly. "If you can't, it feels strange. It completes a marriage, I believe. And it was very hard for us. It was an emptiness."
She and Kevin went to the infertility specialists at Kaiser Permanente. She was young enough, they told her, to try. But the doctors found new obstacles. Denise was not ovulating. Hormones were prescribed. They made the fibroids grow back -- with a vengeance. She was seriously ill and in excruciating pain, worn out from the emotional trauma of the ordeal, financially drained from the infertility treatments and loss of time at work. It was time to come to terms with her dream.
In 1992, Denise had a hysterectomy. "You have to decide how much you're going to take. I had been too sick. It had come to me that I would never be able to have children, at least not this way."
What began as a trial for the newlyweds had become a test of their marriage.
"One of the doctors who treated me at Kaiser told me that a lot of marriages end up in divorce over this," Denise remembers. The struggle to create a child was draining every part of their life. "We wanted to produce something from the love between us. ... I told him I couldn't do it any longer."
o o o
When Denise's doctor first told her she couldn't have children,
Jeanine remembers telling her husband, "I'm going to say something to
you and please don't freak out. ... What if Denise is never able to
have kids? What would you think if I wanted to be a
surrogate
for her?" Dave didn't freak out. He thought it would be an incredible
act of love. She made a couple of passing remarks to Denise. But no
serious discussion took place between the sisters or their spouses
until after Denise's hysterectomy.
"What got me started on it again was a visit to my obstetrician after Sarah was born" in 1994, said Jeanine. Dr. Carol Burton had delivered Jeanine's two babies and, through her, knew of Denise's problems. "She said to me, 'You know what, you should be a surrogate for her. You'd be an excellent candidate.' Then I got extremely serious about it. "I was given this gift of a healthy body and I just felt I had to share it," Jeanine said. "It wasn't her fault she ended up being sick ... it could have been me."
o o o
Denise and Jeanine had many long talks about surrogacy. When they had
come to terms with it, they talked to their husbands. Dave was still
OK with it. Kevin was concerned. "Kevin thought it was too
expensive," Jeanine said of her brother-in-law. "He also felt that
they couldn't ask me to do it."
Their parents and in-laws also were concerned about what their children were about to undertake, but did not advise them against it. And, when the sisters consulted their pastors and close friends, they received nothing but encouragement.
In October 1995, the two couples met with Dr. Kathleen Kornafel, a Los Angeles endocrinologist specializing in fertility problems. "She asked us if we wanted to go the cheap route -- Kevin's sperm and my eggs -- and I said, 'No thank you!' " recalls Jeanine. "It was one thing for me to do this, and quite another thing to do it that way."
That way is the route taken by most surrogate mothers, and would have cost about $300, Jeanine says. But she feared the cost to her marriage, her relationship with her sister and her own mental health would be far more expensive if the babies were part hers and part Kevin's. "We were going to do this the long, hard expensive way," she said.
They also would have a contract, where Kevin and Denise agreed to cover life insurance for Jeanine -- "in case I died" -- along with addressing issues such as lost income and, of course, the cost of all the high-tech medicine.
The two couples would have stress enough as they embarked on the rest of this journey. Denise's ovaries would have to be put into overdrive, getting her eggs to their healthiest state. Jeanine's ovaries would have to be shut down, avoiding even the slimmest possibility that she would produce any eggs that could commingle with her sister's once inside her body. And there were other hormones Jeanine would need to get her uterus ready to accept and nurture Kevin and Denise's embryo.
This process, they were told, would require innumerable injections. Denise panicked. Jeanine's needle phobia is legend in the family." I wanted to know how many shots, for how many days," Jeanine recalled. "I had fainted at every shot in my life."
She took the first, that day, in the stomach. And, though it didn't hurt, she could feel herself on the verge of passing out. She bolted from the room.
"Denise came out looking for me. She said, 'If you can't do it, we'll stop here.' I thought to myself, it's like climbing a mountain, doing something you thought you couldn't do. ... I can't let something like this stop my sister from having her own child. So I told myself: 'You've had a child. A shot is nothing like that. It's just a needle.' "
Jeanine endured more than 80 shots. Most of them administered by Dave. Denise took her share, too, given by Kevin. And both women downed hormones daily.
"We were taking one thing to drop this level and another thing to raise that level. ... We didn't know why, we just did it," said Jeanine. "We were scared to death that we'd mess this up. I missed one tiny little estrogen pill and I never even told Denise until after the babies were born."
o o o
In the spring, Dr. Kornafel removed 13 eggs from Denise, to be joined
with Kevin's sperm. The next 96 hours were critical. The eggs had to
grow, dividing and multiplying to a precise stage. In the end, three
survived the process. "The chances for a multiple birth were so slim
that they decided to implant all three," said Jeanine.
Kevin wanted only two. Denise remembers him saying, "If anyone is going to get pregnant with triplets, it will be Jeanine."
"The doctor said, 'Don't count on anything happening,' " said Jeanine. She stayed flat on her back for 48 hours to avoid dislodging the fragile embryos. The tension mounted as they waited the two weeks until a blood test could confirm the pregnancy. But Jeanine knew. The familiar signs were all there within five days. Denise prayed she was right. Jeanine was surprised at how calmly Denise took the good news. "I expected so much more emotion."
"When I found out she was pregnant, I think I was in shock," Denise said. "It was working. Just like it was meant to work." With the odds stacked so much against even one embryo surviving, the doctor cautioned Jeanine and Denise not to get their hopes up.
At the first ultrasound, a month into the pregnancy, no one was more surprised than Kornafel to find three hearts beating in Jeanine's uterus. "Dr. Kornafel made up a story about a bill Denise hadn't paid, and said she was going to fax it down to her," Jeanine recalled.
What Denise saw were murky images of her three little babies, whose hearts were nothing more than small black dots. Then a one-word message from the doctor. "Oops!"
"At that first ultrasound, the doctor went over and over it with me," Jeanine said, "trying to tell me that the smallest one might not make it. A month later, at the second ultrasound, the first baby she found was waving its little hand. 'Isn't that in the same place as the one that wasn't going to make it,' I asked her. That little hand was waving as if to say, 'Hey, I made it.' "
o o o
As Jeanine's worries about the pregnancy lessened, other concerns
grew. She and Dave feared people's reaction to what they were doing.
Dave worried that his wife would suffer ostracism at the school where
she teaches fifth grade. And how would they explain all this to their
children, to her students. Her colleagues were amazed and supportive.
It was a little more delicate talking to her class.
"I avoided the whole talk about sex," she said, laughing. "I just told them I assumed they knew how babies are made and I talked about the test-tube situation." Son Evan, 5 1/2 , was fine with it. But Jeanine was unprepared for her daughter's reaction. At 2 1/2 , Sarah was like any sibling feeling she had to make way for new babies. She began acting out in preschool, and was not happy that her mother's condition meant no more wrestling on the floor, no lap time. There simply was no lap.
"My daughter did not really understand," said Jeanine, who explained to her that "mommies have a special sac to carry babies and Aunt Neesie doesn't have one so I am carrying her babies for her."
Once Sarah understood that, she also realized these babies were not coming to live at her house. She couldn't have been happier. By the beginning of October, Jeanine said a tearful goodbye to her students until after the holidays. By the beginning of November, Denise had gone public, too, and left her job. Permanently.
She spent weekdays in Los Angeles, caring for Evan and Sarah and Jeanine. Their mother took over on the weekends. Back and forth they went -- until Thanksgiving week.
o o o
When Jeanine arrived at Glendale Adventist on Nov. 26, she was
halfway through the labor process without a single pain. The births
were quick. Joshua David, Elise Jeanine, and Adam Michael came into
the world within five minutes of one another. Jeanine recovered from
the Caesarean section, while the babies gained weight and strength.
Kevin and Denise were at the hospital daily. They all waited for the
moment of truth. It came one day at the hospital when Elise began to
cry.
"My first reaction was to hand her to Denise," said Jeanine. "I was thrilled that I had that reaction. I was so relieved." She wasn't the only one. "Denise was tiptoeing around me. She kept asking me how I felt." Jeanine says she feels totally bonded to the babies -- as their aunt. "During the whole pregnancy, I never thought of them as my own. I bought lots of things for them and gave them to Denise right away. I never got a room ready, as I did for my own two."
And she never took the babies home. "I knew that if I didn't take these babies home with me and care for them ... I would not fall in love with them."
But, when Josh and Adam and Elise were strong enough
to be released, to go home to San Diego, Jeanine was surprised at her
rush of emotion. "I needed to go to the hospital and say goodbye to
them. Or maybe goodbye to this whole long process. ... I just needed
some closure." Jeanine pauses, remembering the moment. "I had to be
there to see them leave. ... I was losing having my sister here, too.
We don't get to see each other that much. ... We hugged each other,
and Kevin and Denise said a lot of things I needed to hear." Her
voice is a whisper, broken only by sobs. "Kevin said he'll make sure
the babies will know what I did for them. ... "He said there's a
special place in heaven for me. I never did it for that. I was only
thinking of making my sister happy."
Copyright
Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
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