Dear Nadya (Octomom), Please Get a Therapist or Two

Dear Nadya,
It's hard to believe that it has been over two years since the miraculous birth of your octuplets. So much has happened since then! Most notably, after gestating eight babies for thirty weeks you brought them all home from the hospital, happy and healthy. Understandably, since then you and your children have been a hot topic on the talk show circuits, and you've earned your own catchy nickname: Octomom. Your former doctor, Michael Kamrava, was expelled from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) in October of 2009 for "a pattern of behavior that was detrimental to [the field of Reproductive Medicine] and not up to [the ASRM's] standard." Dr. Kamrava also had his medical license revoked; as of today (July 1, 2011) is is no longer allowed to practice.

I'm sure your kids are now in the throes of the terrible twos. If you have eight children all in the terrible twos, does that mean you're dealing with the terrible sixteens? Or perhaps more accurately, the fourteens (which is the total number of children you have, right? You had six, then decided to transfer 12 embryos at once to have a bunch more)? In any event, I imagine you are completely exhausted and overwhelmed. I think you may be feeling a great deal of stress right now -- how are you holding up?

Not so well, I take it. CNN says that in an interview with In Touch magazine, you cope by locking yourself in the bathroom and crying. CNN quotes you as saying, "Sometimes I sit there for hours and even eat my lunch sitting on the toilet floor. Anything to get peace and quiet." I understand the need for a little "me" time - all moms need a few minutes to themselves. But really, girl, before you even contemplated another round of IVF (well, I don't suppose you actually "contemplated" much at all when it came to your reproductive career) you were already the mother of six kids. Peace and quiet have long been absent in your household -- even adding one more child to your brood (let alone eight) would have guaranteed an asbolute lack of peace and quiet for the next 18 years.

Honestly, you need help. And I'm not talking the kind of help that Dr. Phil or Oprah will offer you -- you need real help. You need to find a therapist who can do two things: first, help you work through all of the psychological issues that drove you to have fourteen children (including an incredibly high risk pregnancy), and second, to help you move forward and learn how to take care of yourself and your fourteen children. It sounds like your plane is going down, Nadya, and you need to put on your oxygen mask first before you can help all fourteen of your kids put on theirs.

Stop talking to magazines. Stop posing for inappropriate photos. Stop giving interviews to television crews. And for goodness's sake, do not sign any contracts to appear on any reality shows. You need to focus on yourself and those children, and if you are spending any time seeking outside attention, your children are losing out. Nadya, you owe it to your fourteen children to do everything you can to secure their childhoods and give them a chance to grow into healthy, independent adults. The more of a train wreck you continue to be, the more likely it is that you will be sealing your kids' fate as fourteen future train wrecks. And that's not fair to them.

From the outside, it appears that your ever-present childhood desire to have a "lot of babies" was combined with Dr. Kamrava's disregard for the professional guidelines and ethics of reproductive medicine to create a perfect storm. You were relatively young when you first started having babies; when interviewed by various news outlets after the birth of the octuplets, you said you always wanted to have a "huge" family to make up for the lack of connection you felt as a child (BBC). Given that you hadn't been working, three of your six children have special needs and were already receiving disability benefits, it seems likely that you couldn't understand the impact of one more child in your life, let alone eight more.

And yet somehow you picked the worst possible doctor to help you - probably the only reproductive endocrinologist in the U.S. who would've followed your wishes, going so far as to acknowledge to CBS News: "Without [Dr. Kamrava], I wouldn't have any children, so that's what's amazing about it!" Dr. Kamrava clearly did not take into account your health (excellent), age (young), fertility (CHECK), mental health (you could have used a consult or two), ASRM guidelines or any other factors, such as whether you possessed the financial and mental resources to be able to take care of more and more children. It's quite ironic that Dr. Kamrava is the doctor who helped you achieve so many successful pregnancies, because Nadya, his success rates were abysmal. In 2006 Dr. Kamrava did 61 IVF cycles, resulting in five pregnancies and two live births. That's an 8% pregnancy rate and a 3.3% overall success rate for Dr. Kamrava, while the national averages were 44.7% and 38.8% respectively (SART.org and CDC reported statistics). And your last twin pregnancy counted for at least one of the five pregnancies, and your twins' live birth counts as half of all of the successful live births for Dr. Kamrava's treatment in 2006.

The remaining details of your life and treatment before, during and after the birth of your octuplets really don't matter to anyone else but you and your therapist (or therapists - plural). If you love your children and have any respect for yourself, you need to kick the media habit. No more interviews, no more reality shows (Celebridate? Really? C'mon, you can't get enough time away from yourself to do anything other than lock yourself in the bathroom and sob - but you can dedicate time and energy on a television show where you'll be evaluated as "dating material" and surrounded by a camera crew?) and no autobiography. We already know way more about you than we ever wanted to - and your kids deserve more than just a remnant of privacy.

Dr. Kamrava's professional course self-corrected after all of the facts of your treatment came to light. His medical license was revoked and he won't be given the opportunity to make such a terrible medical mistake again. (Dr. K, if you're reading this - thanks for having the courtesy to remain mostly out of the spotlight. Please continue to do so, and get some help for yourself. And hey - why not spend some time making amends somehow? You've helped create a huge mess for this woman and her children, and the kids are the unwitting victims here.)

Nadya, the first installment of your karmic bills are coming due and you don't have enough karmic capital in the bank to be able to pay them. There's no quick fix, here. The longer you wait to get help for yourself (and more importantly, your children) the longer you put their precious, innocent lives at risk. You have fourteen little people looking up to you, depending on you and desperately needing your whole attention. If you can pull your personal shit together in the coming months and years, those fourteen little people may someday be able to lead relatively healthy lives.

After the recent news surfaced in which you purportedly stated your disdain for your children and your regrets about your reproductive choices, your most recent statement to TMZ that this was a fabricated interview is heartening: "I Love ALL my children, I do not regret them." Excellent news! But you did make foolish choices, put yourself and eight babies in great danger, lied about various aspects of your medical care and have not always behaved in ways that are consistent with good parenting. So when you say, "It's ridiculous that I have to continue to defend myself against these disgusting fabricated lies," I have to disagree. Your behavior is and has been suspect, and you knowingly thrust yourself and your children into the media spotlight (and continue to do so).

In all seriousness, because you love all of your children, you owe it to them to get some help. For the sake of those kids, please get it.

Sincerely,
Erika Tabke
IVFConnections.com

P.S. For the thousands of women in the IVFConnections.com community, access to reproductive healthcare and infertility treatment options are true gifts. While most of the one in eight people in the U.S. diagnosed with infertility can be treated either surgically or medically in order to overcome their infertility issues, some do need more invasive procedures such as in vitro fertilization. For those who need IVF, it is a procedure filled with hopes and dreams - and often personal finances are depleted in the pursuit of those dreams. Frankly, we're all quite bummed that you repeatedly used this precious gift so selfishly and irresponsibly. IVF and other Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) are still controversial in some circles, and you've given plenty of kooky fodder to those who wish to limit and/or regulate infertility treatment. By taking such frivolous liberties with your infertility treatments, both you and Dr. Kamrava have compromised the promise and hope of IVF for the rest of us. We're responsible, ethical, healthy, loving people who wish to bring more love into this world. We would really appreciate it if you would start flying under the radar for our sake, as well - so that we can preserve these treatments that we so rightly deserve to have as family building options.