he phone rang and it was my wife’s gynecologist. Cynthia and I had been trying unsuccessfully to have a baby for a number of months and her OB had done some tests to check her FSH levels. We understood that the level of follicle-stimulating hormone could indicate whether or not our efforts had paid off. I listened to the phone ring and considered letting the doctor leave a message - Cynthia wasn’t home and maybe we should hear about the results together. But by the time Cynthia got home, the doctor would be gone and we’d spend another day playing phone tag and biting our nails. How bad could my wife’s FSH levels be anyway? We were both 39 years old - a few docks away from our 20s, but we certainly hadn’t missed the baby-making boat altogether. We probably just needed to relax and keep trying and it would be reassuring to hear that from her doctor. I grabbed the phone.
“Unless you plan on using a donor egg, you can forget about having a baby,” the doctor said. The phone felt heavy in my hand. What do you say to that? “Thanks for the update”? My wife was equally devastated - and shocked that her OB would pass along such information so flippantly over the phone. We decided to get a second opinion.
One of the things you find when you start to explore assisted reproductive technology (ART) is there is no shortage of people who will tell you what you want to hear. We looked into various options, got a referral for a clinic, and met with a number of people who assured us we had an excellent chance of conceiving.
The first thing we tried was acupuncture. For the next three months, Cynthia went once a week to see a very pleasant Chinese doctor who poked her with needles and gave her an herbal tea concoction in order to raise those FSH levels. The acupuncture wasn’t so bad, but the tea tasted like something you might use for fertilizer (which may have been the point). Her FSH levels did begin to rise and we kept to our regularly scheduled program of sex while adhering to every recommendation that made any sense: the woman should remain on her back... put her legs in the air... stay in sync with her ovulating pattern... think happy thoughts... relax!
After six months of Chinese needles and fertility tea, we still weren’t pregnant. Maybe it was time to take the next step. With some trepidation, we made an appointment at the clinic. This is a very tricky time for any couple considering fertility treatment. It’s a little like walking into a casino in Vegas. So many ways to win or lose - and it’s a good idea to know your limit before you start.
My wife had never wanted to have a baby past the age of 35, let alone do fertility treatments. She had already had a healthy child with her first husband and was reluctant to subject her body to the kind of rigor that hormone therapy often entails. Yet this was something we wanted to share together and it would be fair to say that she was willing to put her personal fears and concerns aside in order to give me a chance to be a father. It was an extremely generous thing to do.
The clinic we went to turned out to be a remarkably pleasant environment located on the third floor of a modern professional building. Finished in all natural materials with calming music piped in from perfectly hidden speakers, it looked more like a Japanese spa than a medical facility. In the reception area, we saw other couples - both straight and gay - with that nervous look in their eyes reserved for people waiting to find out if they made the team, if Santa exists, if dreams can come true...
Our first meeting with our doctor went very well. She was a knowledgeable woman in her 50s who had been working with couples like us for many years. There were tears, and laughs, and then we focused on the mission at hand: getting pregnant. Hormone treatments would be the first step. The first choice was pills or injections. Cynthia hates needles, so she went with Clomid pills. The clinic would take weekly blood samples to monitor her FSH and other hormone levels and, if all went well, there would be a monthly delivery of a viable egg ready to meet up with my swimmers. But first we had to rule out any problem with the swimmers themselves.
I had never given a sperm sample before. Giving urine samples was weird enough - I was always afraid I wouldn’t have to go when the time came to produce, and then came the humiliation of walking around holding a cup of your own pee. But a sperm sample really tipped the awkward scale for me. The nurse handed me a cup that looked like something you would find hanging from the side of a water cooler. She had to be kidding - was I supposed to fill this? “Try to get as much as you can inside the cup,” she said. I nodded, wondering where she thought the rest of it was going to go.
The “collection” room was tiny. There was a small couch taking up one wall facing a cabinet with a TV, DVD player and two drawers underneath. I opened the top drawer and found magazines and DVDs intended to inspire and focus even the most distracted participant. With some effort, I forced any thoughts of hidden video cameras wired into YouTube out of my head and got the job done.
A different doctor consulted with us after my swimmers had been analyzed. Although affable and avuncular, he reminded us a little of Dr. Bob Kelso, the caustic chief of medicine on the television show Scrubs. “Your husband is a lethal weapon,” he told my wife as we sat down in his office. He was trying to tell us that my potency wasn’t the problem, but it wasn’t the ego-boosting rush he had intended it to be.
Cynthia responded to the Clomid pretty much as predicted. She experienced some weight gain, but her FSH levels improved dramatically. Unfortunately, we still weren’t getting pregnant and it was time to consider the next step.
My wife and I don’t agree about everything. I tend to like things neat and organized, while she has a much higher tolerance for chaos. My taste veers toward modern and contemporary, hers leans toward the traditional. When it came to our fertility efforts, however, we could not have been more in sync. We would go as far as intrauterine insemination (IUI) and if that did not work, we would look into adoption - in fact, adopting a baby was something we wanted to consider regardless of the outcome.
IUI is not the most conventional way to have a baby and it’s about as romantic as having your teeth cleaned. We had gone over the procedure with our doctor and understood that it entailed injecting a purified sample of my sperm into my wife’s uterus with an instrument that resembled a small turkey baster. At least our qualified doctor was a woman, which somehow made the idea of the three of us sharing this experience more palatable. Cynthia was due to ovulate in the next week, so I had to drop by the collection room the day before to give another lethal sample of my manhood.
It was more than a little weird going in that room the second time. All my life I had thought that masturbation was how you don’t have a baby - and here I was getting ready to embrace fatherhood with my hands on my equipment. It was hard to focus to say the least. I opened The Drawer hoping to get the party started, but as it turns out I reached for the wrong one and found myself staring down at a collection of homosexual pornography. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. With some effort, I flushed those images from my mind and delivered the goods.
When Cynthia and I arrived at the clinic the next day, we were nervous and giddy. It seemed like an eternity before our names were called, but finally the time had come. We were ready. Then the receptionist told us that our regular doctor wasn’t there and we were scheduled to have the procedure done with the Scrubs doctor. Was that okay or did we want to reschedule? We had psyched ourselves up for this and rescheduling would have meant waiting another month. We figured we had come this far, we were going to the dance.
The procedure was mercifully fast. I remember the doctor making a few golf jokes while he worked. Ten minutes later, we thanked him and offered him a cigarette. On the way down in the elevator, we joked about having to name the baby after him, but by the time we reached the ground floor we had both forgotten his name.
After four weeks of blood tests, ultrasounds, and nerve-racking visits to the clinic, we were told that we had a bun in the oven. Finally, we were pregnant! It was hard to believe that it had worked. After poring over statistics and hearing about how long it takes many couples to conceive, we felt so fortunate that our efforts had been fruitful so quickly. Although it was too early to share our good news, we quietly celebrated by planning the nursery and picking out baby names. We even bought a few onesies. In this case, dreams did come true. We were on our way...
he phone rang and it was my wife’s gynecologist. Cynthia and I had been trying unsuccessfully to have a baby for a number of months and her OB had done some tests to check her FSH levels. We understood that the level of follicle-stimulating hormone could indicate whether or not our efforts had paid off. I listened to the phone ring and considered letting the doctor leave a message - Cynthia wasn’t home and maybe we should hear about the results together. But by the time Cynthia got home, the doctor would be gone and we’d spend another day playing phone tag and biting our nails. How bad could my wife’s FSH levels be anyway? We were both 39 years old - a few docks away from our 20s, but we certainly hadn’t missed the baby-making boat altogether. We probably just needed to relax and keep trying and it would be reassuring to hear that from her doctor. I grabbed the phone. 
