Children had been part of my consideration in the past but I had always prefaced the discussion with the statement, if we want to have children, we must let nature dictate whether we can or not. My ex wife and I had friends in LA who were doing untold damage to their own relationships and their own psychic energy by fighting the course of nature without success. Stories of untold biological shifts, surgeries, etc, were creating angst-ridden couples who were completely happy and content before. The desire to have children had become the only focus in life and it was as destructive as substance abuse.
So to make the decision to have surgery went against my own drive for nature's course. It's funny though because I really didn't think about it for more than two seconds. The specialist confirmed my hypothesis, so he must be right of course and I heard the words - all will be good in three months. What's three months and a little pain to create a new being? It had to be worth it. I later found out that the surgery was completely unnecessary as the readings fluctuated like the breeze on a summer's day. I didn't get a second opinion because I found someone who confirmed my own opinion. Isn't that how it works with healthcare these days? You do your own prognosis and then tell the doctor what's wrong? I just went by the modern day rulebook but I was suckered and a lot poorer for it.
I will not spend too much time on the money side of this two year story but I will ask you now to consider just how much bringing a child in to the world is worth to you if you were struggling to have children. If I told you that for $100,000, I could guarantee you will get pregnant and have a baby nine months from now, would you think twice? I doubt it. Sally and I are definitely more fortunate than others and while cost was a constant scare, we didn't let it get in the way of our pursuit. If we could afford the next step, we would continue on.
This phase of our journey started by seeking out a specialist who had helped a friend of ours. We immediately loved her. She was full of optimism and open to answering every question we had. She presented us with lots of hope and talked about increasing our probability percentage by making the impregnation a more organized, mechanical process - my words not hers. We started with the hormone - bet you didn't see that coming - trick. An injection at just the right time to put the female body in its optimum chemical position to embrace the enthusiastic sperm. The hormones, otherwise lazy and disinterested get tricked in to believing that the body is not finished with its natural course in life. No retirement just yet.
Unfortunately this process brought no new success and monthly disappointment. Our specialist then introduced us to IUI. It's a pretty straightforward process that required more visits to the porn room. We were told to have as much sex as we could but really this was no longer necessary in the process of creating a baby. IUI would take care of that part of the process. The specialist in her enthusiastic voice said “this is bound to be a success for you guys, which is great because you'll avoid the next stage, which is IVF” - a much worse proposition, we discovered through internet research, which demands way more chemical interaction with the body.
I should say at this point that the guy really has no role in this stage of the process. Your visits to the porn room become less frequent as your supply can last for a number of months. Remember it's only one attempt a month. You just sit there offering words of encouragement and a shoulder to cry on when the pregnancy test comes back negative. You might even shed a tear yourself but at the same time you try to withhold too much grievance as this adds a burden to your partner (the word grievance transferred from mind to keyboard without much awareness and I was going to change it but actually this is the perfect word to capture the feeling you have - you grieve a life yet unborn). Guys just have to accept feeling pretty useless really. The one thing that helps is to insist on giving the one injection that goes with IUI. This commitment gets all the more important when you move to the next level - the dreaded IVF.
With three unsuccessful IUIs under our belt, our specialist decided that further analysis was needed of Sally. It was at this point that a fibroid was identified. According to the fertility doctor who found this fibroid, it was on one side of the womb and really nothing to worry about. If we were younger, they would normally recommend surgery but it's very invasive and it takes a while to recover from it. A while was running out for us as Sally had already had her 40th birthday. We discussed the "nothing to worry about" aspect with the doctor and she confirmed that it was highly unlikely to pose a problem especially if we go to IVF.
It doesn't matter what people say about IVF, you will never understand the initial fear factor that goes with this option. Of course there's a financial fear but the fear that puts money in the shadows is the number of injections, the size of the injections, the required positioning of the insertions, and the fact that there were many everyday and for a number of weeks before the retrieval of eggs. Luckily Sally let me give her all her injections and occasionally when I was out of town, friends and family helped out. Giving injections was a way to stay emotionally engaged in the process. Without that, as mentioned above, the guy is a mere spectator.
I will not go in to tremendous detail on the IVF process but there are a few watch outs for anyone who goes down this path. The first is the effect all the chemicals have on the female emotion, body shape and biological function. It's incredibly abusive but Sally was amazing through this whole process. I doubt anybody could match her strength. The second watch out is one we had heard from many people. IVF can destroy relationships. I would like to say that this is definitely true based on experiences we had heard about but it is also true that IVF can bring people closer together and that's what happened to us. The third watch out is the initial tally of eggs extracted. You get this immediate excitement that 12 eggs have been extracted but then you're informed that only half of those were in good shape and then after the fertilization process you can be down to 2 maybe 3 eggs for transfer. This is a nerve-racking time. Will any eggs fertilize?
We went through IVF twice with IUI in-between. You might as well do the IUIs as the female body is still full of chemicals, why waste the opportunity? Everyone was dumbfounded with the lack of success. The fertility doctor's staff became our friends and would all offer their good wishes and commiserations with each visit. The pattern was becoming disturbingly routine. Of course questions would spin around in our heads as to whether we had chosen the right fertility doctor. Should we change? Why isn't this working? Your demands of the doctor get a little curter as you look to solutions. The truth is that all of this process is completely out of your control. You are in the hands of the experts and as two people who like to be in control, this was difficult to deal with but deal with it we did.
