The rooms they give you to provide your sample in privacy are filled with various porn magazines. It was kind of a hoot. You’ve got this very prim and proper, sanitary doctor’s office, and then these rooms like you might find in a porn joint, only cleaner. How many other guys have pawed over these magazines, you might wonder. They told us they’d have the results in a few days.
What happened next… is giving me some serious distress at the moment. Almost panicky. It is a very weird thing discovering that you are no longer human.
I think my wife had an appointment the day the results came in, so they told her first, instead of me. She waited until I came home that day.
“They gave me the results of your test, today,” she said.
“And?”
She looked at me, and It was clear from the way there were tears rolling down her cheeks that something was not right.
I would have been find if they had told me there was a low sperm count, but I was completely unprepared for what happened.
She looked at me and the tears came faster. She wiped at them.
“What?” I asked? “Is it a low sperm count?”
She shook her head again, looking worse and worse.
“What?” I couldn’t imagine.
She mumbled something that I didn’t catch. She raised her voice a notch, “None.”
“What?”
“None.”
“That can’t be,” I said “Did they say why?”
“No.” She shook her head. “They said we should make an appointment to talk about this.
.
.
Everyone in the world, I thought, had to try to prevent a pregnancy. For most, getting knocked up is as easy as falling off a log dead drunk. Me? I’m just not human. I can’t do what every other human in the world can do, and they do it so easily that they have to try not to. But I, no matter how hard I try, will never be able to have my own children. I’m a mutant. Inhuman.
Thus began a five year battle to try to figure out what to do. My condition is called “congenital absence of vas.” Means I have an incomplete vas deferens. There is no way for the sperm to get into launch position.
There’s an operation, they told us, that might work. They could operate on me and extract some sperm and then operate on my wife and extract some eggs, and put them together in a petri dish. It was an expensive set of operations, and insurance wouldn’t cover much of it.
“What are the chance of sucess?” I asked.
“10%,” my doctor said. Not very good odds. “Do you want to try?”
We decided to try, but we were pretty stupid about it. Our doctor had only performed this operation a few times. Basically, he was learning on the job. It was a weird thing, this outpatient surgery.
It didn’t work, of course. It was difficult to think about it. Our hopes for a family were gone. We couldn’t afford to try again, and anyway, the odds didn’t seem very good. We decided to go for fertility therapy.
We learned a lot from our fellow group members but one by one, they left the group because they had children—one way or the other. Eventually, we were the only ones left.
The internet showed up at some point during these events. I joined a fertility news group where people shared information about all kinds of issues related to infertility such as where to get cheaper drugs—who had extra; where you could go in Canada or Mexico where the drugs were less than half the price, how to deal with the feelings, what new technologies were available and more.
I learned how to shop around for the right clinic—the one with the highest success rate. At some point, we found a place that had a 33% success rate. They used a number of new technologies.
I am skipping a lot of things we tried in between, as well. We got some donor sperm from a friend, because I thought that if we had to have someone else’s child, I wanted to know who the father was instead of having some random person from a sperm bank. That turned out to be a nightmare in logistics. It didn’t work, anyway. We thought about adoption, but I wasn’t interested. I don’t know what else we tried. And all this time, I’m feeling like some kind of alien whenever I think about it.
We did end up with biological children. Wonderful kids. Great fun to bring them up. They know they are really wanted because of how hard it was for us to conceive them. We didn’t stop until we succeeded. By the time we did, my wife was 38. We had a few extra embryos in the freezer after our first child was born.
My wife did not really want a second child, but she did it for me. And that is the start of another, even more difficult story about our marriage and abortion and infidelity and mental illness. I’m not going to relate that story here. It has not reached its end. I will say this, though: I thought I was an alien then—but I had no idea. No idea at all about how much worse things would get.
I’m just incredibly lucky that I have two amazing children, and that I’m still alive.
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