The magic and wonder of procreation
When you’re very actively trying to conceive, you quickly learn all about the various fertility aids that are available to assist you. One of the most common of these is the Ovulation Predictor Kit, or OPK — a stick you pee on that tells you when you’re about to ovulate. People with regular cycles have a pretty good idea of when they should start to use these each month, and they usually get a positive within a few days. If you’re like me, and you have infinitely long, completely inscrutable cycles, you just have to keep peeing and peeing and peeing and hope one day to get a surprise.
Because I use so many of these, I buy ultra cheap ones off the internet. These are just little strips, not the fancy and convenient “mid-stream” cartridges, so they have to be dipped into a cup of urine. I keep a plastic cup in the bathroom just for this purpose, and I hope none of you has recently spent the night at our house and tried to get a glass of water in the night.
It is with this background that I describe one of the more dispiriting yet hilarious moments in this odyssey so far:
In our smallish bathroom, directly across from the toilet we have one of these “seven-drawer solutions” — basically just a plastic stand with several vertical drawers. The top drawer is mine, and it is stuffed with an astounding amount of stuff, including the aforementioned plastic cup. Last week I opened the drawer, got out the cup, and did my business into it as usual.
When I finished, I went to place the cup on the vanity opposite me, but I had some sort of spatial relations failure and kind of hit the bottom of the cup onto the lip of the open drawer with a decent amount of momentum, thereby tipping the entire (remarkably full!) cup of steaming pee into the drawer and all over its contents.
Matt and I had just been about to go out to do errands, and I was forced to tell him that he’d have to go without me, because I had to stay home and mop up about a half pint of urine from our personal toiletries. He is still finding reasons to make fun of me about that multiple times a day.
Filed under Getting Pregnant | Tags: infertility | Comment (0)Typography
We’re hoping it’s unnecessary, but we’ve made an appointment with a fertility specialist. The first round of Clomid didn’t seem to do the trick, so the Certified Nurse Midwife we’ve been seeing is putting Rachel on a higher dose, but suggested that we might as well set up a meeting with a reproductive endocrinologist, just in case. The appointment isn’t for several weeks, but yesterday a big packet of information arrived at the house.
First impressions? Mixed. It included a very thorough pre-screening questionnaire, including one question that I have to assume is there to weed out the morons. (“During intercourse, does your partner ejaculate in the vagina?”) The introductory letter was very professional and reassuring, and made it clear that I was invited and encouraged to be present at all of the appointments; I like that. Despite all that, I’m not sure I can get over my initial negative reaction: the letter was written in Comic Sans. Comic. Fucking. Sans.
I’m not sure I can trust someone with such poor taste in typography to have his mitts all over my wife’s lady-parts.
Filed under Getting Pregnant | Tags: comic sans, infertility | Comment (1)Masculinity
There’s only so much I can contribute to the whole “getting pregnant” thing. I know what my role is, and I’m more than happy to perform it, as often as is necessary. Since we haven’t successfully conceived yet, Rachel’s going in for a whole series of tests; it’s only fair that I get tested, too.
The testing process for men is certainly less painful and invasive than it is for women: I don’t have to get blood drawn or anything. I’ll submit that it’s still more uncomfortable. Rachel brought home a sterile specimen cup with instructions to “obtain a sample” no more than an hour before bringing it into the lab, and to “keep the sample close to body temperature” until it could be brought in.
We’ll just keep the process of obtaining the sample behind the veil of ignorance, since this is, after all, a family blog. (Literally! Hee!) I’ll just say that I found it a somewhat awkward procedure, given the size of the opening of the bottle, the logistics of transporting it, and the interminable paperwork once I arrived at the lab with a container of my precious bodily fluids in my pocket.
I got a call back from Rachel’s doctor a few days later, telling me that the results were “good.” We wanted some more details, so when Rachel went in for a follow-up appointment she asked for specifics. As it happened, I was at school when she got back from the appointment, and so the following exchange was captured by Google chat for posterity:
Rachel: So, she also asked if I wanted more details on the sperm analysis. I made a fast decision, and I said yes. Is that okay? I was really torn.
Me: Of course.
Rachel: Well, not of course. I respect your privacy. But anyway, she said they like to see a sperm count of at least 60 million. Would you like to guess what yours was?
Me: Um. 60 million?
Rachel: 115 million.
Me: FUCK YEAH
Rachel: They look for at least 60 percent motility, and you were at 70 percent. Basically she sort of chuckled and said, “Yeah, he has some really good sperm.”
Me: Hell, yes. I’m totally motile, baby.
Rachel: So once my ovaries finally give up an egg, at least we know we’re advantaged in that way.
Me: That egg won’t know what hit it.
Rachel: You’re being hilariously, uncharacteristically macho.
Me: Well, this is pretty much the core of masculinity here.
Rachel: Indeed.
Me: ME IMPREGNANTE! GRR!