“Seeking Healthy White Male for Baby-Making Threesome—No Smokers, No Slackers, No Fatties!”

I’ve dealt with a lot of strange, unnatural shit in four years of baby chasing, like fist-sized ovaries, daily embryo-status reports, and keepsake embryo photos from transfer-day. IVF is bizarre; an unholy alienation of nature from conception.

But nothing compares to the strangeness of sitting in front of a computer with your husband, trying to pick a sperm donor.

It must be kind of like putting out an ad for the guest star in a threesome: “Seeking anonymous healthy white male to fulfill lifetime fantasy of loving couple to conceive child. Must be handsome, fit, tall, healthy, smart, but not so sexy as to threaten manliness of husband. Will be compensated accordingly.”

We started out with a pretty short list. J and I decided to go with a local cryobank, one of two favorites identified by both my RE and my Favorite Nurse. We figured that if we’re looking for someone “like us,” then why not pick an East Coast guy? Then other criteria narrowed things further. We decided to pay extra for guys that are either in grad school or have a post-graduate degree.

And we only wanted white guys. We’re not looking for an exact J-match, but we want our kid to have enough physical “cover” that he/she won’t have to explain him/herself to friends, neighbors, etc. We’re not going to lie to the kid, and most of our friends already know, but we figured our kid should at least have a shot at privacy.

And then I got pickier—only guys 5’10” or taller need apply. After all, short is okay if you’re a girl, but why saddle a boy with that if you don’t have to? Sure, I know lots of short guys, but I bet most of them would love to be taller.

And while it wasn’t a dealbreaker, I really wanted to find a guy with blue eyes. Why? Because the physical feature I always hoped my kids would inherit from J was his blue, blue, blue eyes. I’m brown-eyed, but my mom is blue-eyed so there were even odds our kids would inherit this triat. Call me sentimental, but if I can have that 50-50 shot, even though they aren’t J’s blue eyes, I’ll take it.

And how do we decide on body type, anyway? J is pretty heavyset (nay, overweight), and I like the idea of having a kid who isn’t super-skinny. My little bro is thin as a rail and he hates it. But if it’s a girl, wouldn’t it be better to have her be naturally thin? After all, I constantly envy the women I know who don’t have to fight off weight gain all the time.

See how weird this is? Mind you, if a pregnant girl on the street asked me if I wanted to adopt her baby I would JUMP at the chance. I wouldn’t question her about the father’s height or her grandmother’s diabetes or her post-graduate education. But we have to choose someone, so we might as well choose the best. Right?

Shopping online for a donor is a lot like shopping for shoes at Zappos. First you sort by style, then by color, then you narrow things down by selecting only low-heeled shoes. Oh, and they have to be available in wide sizes. All of a sudden you’re down to three pages and you pick from those.

Eye color aside, our must-have criteria left us with about 35 guys to choose from. So on Sunday we started slogging through them, sorting about half of them into our “favorites” (see, just like Zappos!) and adding a few to a short list of superfaves. The free information is pretty sparse—there’s rudimentary medical info, a brief essay, and a couple of paragraphs of “staff impressions.” The essay consists of answers to six or seven questions about childhood memories, family member the guy is closest to, funniest story, where they want to travel, what they want to pass on to a child, and so on.

About halfway through J started to complain: “They’re all starting to blur together,” he said. “If I have to look at one more do-gooder who values integrity, admires his father, and wants to travel to Africa I’m going to shoot myself.”

Some of the essays really stood out. There’s the guy that put his overheating laptop in the freezer, then forgot about it until the following morning (and successfully revived it by putting it in the oven). The guy who’s strongest childhood memory involved selling the family farm, and who wrote a half-page on almost every question. The guy who won a car by living in it with four other people for a week. The guy who loves cats. The guy who grew up in communist Poland. And then there’s the guy who tried too hard to impress us with his knowledge of history/philosophy that we finally wrote him off as too pretentious.

At some point we stopped being able to talk about them, so the guys on our short list got nicknames: “car guy,” “laptop guy,” “hottie doctor guy.”

And then we started spending money. We bought a “complete profile” on three guys—for $70 a pop. J spent several hours yesterday going through the medicals, as well as seeing what’s in the “personal profile” information, and looking at the baby photos.

What’s there, you ask? A LOT of information. I haven’t even looked at the medical, but the personal profile includes favorites: favorite move, favorite band, favorite animal, favorite car. It includes hobbies and academics: SATs, ACTs, LSATs, GREs, as well as GPAs and honors for all of school. It includes a detailed identi-kit type description of every facial feature: size and shape of eyes, eyebrows, nose, cheekbones, lips, teeth, chin. And not-quite-so-detailed descriptions of physical features of parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles.

Faced with this wealth of information last night I got completely freaked out. I had been so content with our short list, but now I wasn’t sure any were good enough. Three days ago I didn’t really care about looks; we were focused on brains and personality. But one look at the ugly-ass baby picture from my favorite guy and suddenly I wasn’t so into him. I looked back at the staff impressions of him. Did they say anything about his looks? Nope. Great bod, it said, and nice personality.

“Maybe your good looks will prevail,” J said, “but then again, maybe not.”

So last night I found myself going through the favorites again, pulling up guys where the staff had said they were good-looking. I bought five more personal profiles (we decided to go cheaper at $20 each and spend more when we narrowed it down), and found a few guys I was glad to add to our short list.

We also found ourselves leaning toward the guys with “average” features. We just want his face to be a blank slate—nothing too dominant that will overwhelm the features I have to offer. (How are my HS genetics lessons holding up?) And I pulled up a website that listed dominant and recessive gene traits for J to look at as he went through more medicals today.

I’m such a cliché. My favorite guy right now is a doctor, tall, built, blue-eyed, with killer academic credentials. “Good on paper,” as Carrie Bradshaw would say.

Other stuff we found mattered to us more than we would have thought:

1. Personal tastes. The guy who put down “Transformers” as his all-time favorite movies fell right off my list.

2. Religion. Not that we care if they are religious, but I really was happy to find a guy who was agnostic.

3. Children. I found myself much more into the guys who already have kids. I don’t know why, but it seems like they’re more likely to be doing the donor thing for the right reason, or at least with full recognition of the consequences. And I like a guy like that.

The bottom line is this. On the one hand, all of these guys are fine. They’re healthy, smart enough to make it out of undergrad, with kick-ass sperm.

But on the other hand, it seems so random to be making such a huge decision—choosing the biological father of our child—in such an arbitrary way. We’re just shopping in the closest store for what’s available this week. Just like buying new boots at Zappos. It’s surreal.

The thing is, we just couldn’t figure out any other way to do it. How much agonizing can you do? At some point you just have to point and say, “I’ll take that guy.”

Every night I ask J if he’s all right. Every night I ask him to tell me how he’s feeling. (He says he’s fine, blah, blah, blah). I tell him how strange, almost creepy, this is for me. I even told him once that I thought it would be even creepier if we were doing IUI (after all, at least all that will be going inside me are my own embryos, not some stranger’s sperm).

I haven’t told him that sometimes I feel like I’m betraying him. He doesn’t need to think of it that way.

The Rat-Bastard HMO Giveth; the Rat-Bastard HMO Taketh Away

You know how there’s never a bank error in your favor? Not so for the HMOs! On Friday, J informed me that he had spent $240 out of my account, and that it was going to make me very happy. Couldn’t really imagine what he had bought me (with my money, not that matters, but you know what I mean). He kept asking me to guess. I hate that game.

And then he told me.

$240 just bought my ENTIRE DRUG PURCHASE for this cycle. A drug purchase that was supposed to cost almost $2,400.

Let’s savor this moment, shall we?

My asshole, shitbag, rat-bastard HMO—the same HMO that refused to cover J’s health-threatening hormone deficiency just because we’re trying to get pregnant and I’ve used up my IVF coverage, the same HMO that denied me coverage for a water sono to follow up on my fibroid surgery just because I’ve used up my IVF coverage, the same HMO that guarantees a three-day turnaround on preauths but always requests “additional information” several times until I am forced to pay out of pocket or cancel a cycle—just accidentally covered my hideously expensive drug purchase.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

We all know that one of the reasons the HMOs suck so hard is that they have no incentive to be competent. Incompetence makes them money, because you eventually get so insane with it that you agree to pay out of pocket just to avoid one more hour-long phone call where you’re told exactly the opposite of the phone call before.

But I guess incompetence occasionally cuts the wrong way. Heh heh heh.

I feel so smug. I feel so vindicated. I feel so frustrated that I didn’t order twice as much.

I’ve been waiting to post this until the drugs are in our hot little hands.

This Just Sucks

I’ve had a strange week, and every time I think I’m ready to write about it something new happens and I don’t know where to start.  The bottom line is that I’m definitely NOT in control of my life right now.  As much as I thought I could handle whatever was thrown at me this time, I was wrong. 

 

Friday was horrible.  Since Monday I had been handling the hormone rush of the pill and the oncoming unknown of a new IVF cycle with considerable grace—I was focused on my work, cheerful, and feeling at peace. 

 

So when Friday came along I thought I had it in the bag.  I had packed up my work the night before so I could work from home, and was all set to breeze through my sounding and water sono (SHG) that afternoon.  Shit, man, I’d done this all before.  Uncomfortable?  Yes, but not anything to get worked up over.

 

The sounding was a piece of cake.  Barely felt the catheter.  One more procedure down and I was free to go.  I emptied my bladder and hopped back up on the table, cheerful and chatty.

 

Twenty minutes later I was sweating, literally.  Turned out that we were doing this a little late in the cycle for someone who ovulates early like me.  Turned out that my cervix was bent into a curvy shape, and that damn catheter just wouldn’t go through.  Turned out that my a-little-bit-uncomfortable procedure was about to get a lot worse.

 

Ever hear of a tinaculin?  No idea how you spell it, no idea what it looks like (in my nightmares it’s a 3-foot wide clamp with big teeth).  A tinaculin is a clamp that goes ON your cervix—it allows the doctor to yank your cervix (an organ not designed to be yanked) all around.  Which fucking HURTS.  Remember the worst pap you ever had?  The kind that made your cervix cramp up and made you want to roll up into a fetal position?  Now multiply that sensation by five, and make it last for ten minutes.  I’m just saying, it fucking sucked.

 

And it didn’t work.  At the end of the day, we just had to give up.  My cervix wasn’t letting the catheter in (never mind that it had just gladly allowed the sounding catheter through) and that was that.  My RE said we could schedule an HSG on Monday.  Which I knew I would have to pay for, because it’s in the radiology office and my shithole HMO won’t cover anything any more.  (They have me flagged now.  I swear to god, I could go in with a broken ankle and my HMO would deny my coverage as “IVF-related.”)  To the tune of another $800.

 

At my suggestion, my RE said the before we take that step we could retry the already-paid-for SHG on Monday, this time with a full bladder.  If that didn’t work we’d do the HSG on Tuesday.

 

My nurse and RE left the room, and I started to cry.  I think it was a reaction to what I had just been through, and how unexpected it was.  It definitely was the most invasive procedure I’ve ever been conscious for.  And seeing all the blood when I cleaned myself up didn’t help.  I didn’t begrudge myself—I thought a few tears were warranted.

 

But I didn’t stop.  I got out to my car and I was still crying.  Five minutes later I was on the beltway and I was still crying.  And then I hit this massive traffic jam and I knew there must have been an accident in front of me.  So I figured I’d get off in Bethesda and take the back way home, which I’d done one before with my husband’s guidance.  But when I got to Bethesda (still sobbing, BTW) I got all turned around.  We spend a lot of time there, but J is always driving and I didn’t know which way to go.  Everything was familiar, but I was just driving around it in circles.  And I couldn’t stop crying.  I emptied out my multiple-pill bottle and realized that I’d never reloaded another xanax, so there was nothing I could take to calm me down.

 

I finally pulled over and called J.  Thank god he got service in the theatre he was in that day.  I tried to ask him for directions but I couldn’t stop crying long enough to talk.  I told him what had happened, and he gave me directions the best he could.  I got home more than an hour after I left the doctor’s office.  I was still crying.  I took a xanax when I got home, and eventually fell asleep.

 

Here’s the weird thing.  I had a bad experience, but it wasn’t like it was bad news or anything.  And I think if the water sono had worked, I would have been quick to bounce back.  I think what upset me more than anything was the complete loss of control over my life.  With no warning, I suddenly had to make arrangements to work from home again on Monday, knowing that I might have to do that on Tuesday or Wednesday too.  It’s just so frustrating.  Here I have a job where people rely on me and it’s important to my own feelings of self-worth to be professional and reliable, but I’m constantly having to ask for special favors and making excuses.  I hate it.

 

On Monday I went back prepared—I had taken a couple of alleve before I left, as well as a half a xanax.  We did the water sono with a full bladder, and it went fine.  It definitely hurt more than it would have if we hadn’t mangled my cervix on Friday, but it was manageable.  All clear, not a fibroid in sight.  I was so emotionally drained when I got home that I took the rest of the day off.  J and I went to see Star Trek again.

 

Crap.  I have to go, so I’m going to post this raw.  (I usually edit a bit.)  Sorry.

A Funny Moment

A Funny Moment 

Last night, J and I were watching the finale of the second-to-the-last season Star Trek Deep Space Nine (the crème de la crème of all Star Treks).    

So Dax (a Trill) and Worf (a Klingon) are trying to have a baby, but interspecies fertility is tricky, and they’re having no luck.  Worf is about to go off to battle, and Dax tells him that the doctor has found a way to make it possible.

“We’re going to have to get to work on it as soon as you get back,” she teases.

 In the stilted manner that amounts to Klingon flirting, Warf replies, “I do not consider that . . .  work.”

 J busts out laughing.  “You will,” he yells at the TV, raising his glass in a toast, “oh, you will.”

 Is romance dead when your husband cracks wise about your fucked up sex life, and all it does is make you laugh harder?  I love that man.

 

IVF Cycle #5, Freakout #1

I’m exactly 24 hours into IVF Cycle #5, and already have jumped headfirst into Freakout #1. Not a promising sign for things to come.

My RE wants me to do a long suppression cycle using Lupron. I sent her an e-mail asking if it really was necessary—I’ve gotten by just fine with a short (2-3 week) suppression cycle on the pill before, haven’t I? (Though I guess it depends on your definition of success, given that I’m still not preggers.) She wrote back and told me that we definitely could discuss this, but that she’d given it a lot of thought and decided to try the Lupron because in my last cycle I had one ovary develop faster than the other, so ended up with only 8 eggs.

I hate this idea for so many reasons:

1. What if this screws up my cycle completely? It seems like introducing a new drug when I’ve produced enough eggs without it is a bad idea. What if my body reacts badly? I don’t know how many more cycles I’ve got in me. Even with shared risk, they cost a fucking fortune. And I don’t know if I can take it physically or emotionally any more.

2. What if this screws me up completely? Lupron scares the crap out of me. Frankly, I have enough trouble with the pill for a few weeks. It makes me depressed and weepy and tired all the time. I’ve heard Lupron can make you bat-shit crazy. I have a pretty high-stress job that lately has been getting harder every week . I know what’s involved in the drug regimen I’ve already taken. This is entirely new. I don’t want new. I want the comfort (can I call any IVF cycle comfortable?) routine I know.

3. What if this ends up costing a lot more? I know I’m going to have to pay for the Lupron, but I don’t know how expensive it is. But what if I also end up needing more stims to counteract the suppression of Lupron? Stims are brutally expensive.

4. And finally: Oh my fucking god, do I really have to increase the total length of my cycle by another MONTH? I’ve been steeling myself for this cycle with the mantra that it’s only about 40-45 days, start to finish. But now I’m looking at being on drugs all summer, just for one cycle.

I really don’t want to do this cycle. I wish I could just knock myself out for the next three months. Wake me up when it’s all over—just tell me the results and I’ll go from there. Because this is all just too fucking much.

Goodbye, Spermies.

Today we said a sad farewell to J’s sperm.  We knew that was how today would go.  We woke up at 6 this morning to a truly epic thunderstorm, the kind of storm where, after your house stops shaking, you ask, “is that the loudest thunder you’ve ever heard?”  The kind of storm that leads you to reminisce about a night more than 10 years ago—when the big fear was not finding a job and infertility was something that happened to other people—where we sat under the large awning of a deserted dorm in Fredricksburg, watching lightning dance across the sky so often we couldn’t tell one thunderclap from another.  The kind of thunderstorm that reminds you that you used to cuddle in bed and talk for hours.  So we cuddled, and talked a little, and listened to the thunder roll around our little house.  And we didn’t talk about the appointment we were about to go to.  No need.  We’re all talked out.

 

J’s sperm count is still below 1 mil.  Almost uncountable.  His hormone levels are fine now, but the sperm just aren’t developing.  Dr. World-Renowned can’t explain it, but he’s done all he can. 

 

So on we go to donor sperm.  I slipped out of the doc’s office a few minutes before J was done to get things lined up with my nurses.  When I told them what the plan was, she asked how I felt about it. 

 

“I’m really sad,” I told her, feeling the tears well up behind my eyes.  “But it’s going to feel so good to do something different this time.  Maybe now, if I get a positive beta, I won’t find myself just counting days until the inevitable loss.”

 

She nodded.  “You’ve been carrying this burden for a long time,” she said. 

 

And that’s how I feel.  Today I’m sad.  And I’m sure I’ll be sad again.  But goddammit, I’m ready to MOVE ON. 

 

Last Saturday we babysat our best friends’ 16-month-old boy.  And guess what?  I still want one.  (It didn’t hurt that he was an angel for us the entire evening; he fell asleep in my arms while we watched John Lester take a no-hitter into the 7^th—what could be better?) 

 

But the most wonderful thing was watching J with that little boy.  Playing with him in the park; feeding him his yogurt that night; holding him on his lap while we watched the game.  So yeah, I’m giving up J’s genes.  But I’m not giving up watching him be a daddy.  And it’s about fucking time that we made that happen.

 

A Strange, Uncomfortable Place

The past few weeks have been strange and uncomfortable. It’s not like I’m in the Pit of Despair—it’s more like I’m standing at the rim of the Pit, thinking how much it’s going to suck when I start the fall.

I’m moody; I’m tense; I’m emotional.

I’m a girl about to go into her 5th IVF cycle.

I’m an analogy girl, so try this one on: it’s like I’ve spent the past 8 months sitting on the edge of a rushing river. I’ve known that, when my time was up, I was going to have to cross that river. It was going to be cold, and scary, and god only knew what I was going to find on the other side, if I ever got there. You see, I’ve been in that river before, and each time I go in I get swept away, only to wash up months later, battered and waterlogged, somewhere downstream on the same side I stared on. I used to be eager to jump in again, get it over with. But this time I was forced to sit on my side of the shore and dry out in the sun and heal my bruises, have a snack. It’s nice on my side of the shore, really.

But when my last period started I knew the break was over. Next period = next IVF cycle. Which means it’s time to start getting ready.

Just thinking about it made me feel panicky, like I couldn’t quite catch my breath. J’s been just as bad. Last week I forced the issue—made him dip his feet in the water, if you will. I told J we had to start looking for a donor. So we spent some time on the website of the cryobank we’d like to use. And it was kind of fun, actually. We made fun of the donors’ stupid cliché answers to certain essay questions. (Most of these guys, when asked where they would “most like to travel,” want to go “everywhere,” because they’re interested in “diverse cultures.” Blech! J and I flagged the guy that said he wanted to travel to the moon. We thought he was awesome.) But when we stopped, I found myself getting really sad. Goddammit, it just isn’t fucking fair. I’ve been willing to accept that I’m going to have to go through a lot more heartache to get a child than other women do. I’ve given up four years to the cause, watching my friends and family raise their children while I stand on the sidelines and try not to grind my teeth down to tiny nubs. I’ve accepted that my dream of having two kids is a fantasy, that I’m probably not going to be able to afford to send the one I do end up with to the college of his/her choice. I’ve given up a LOT. But to give up on having a piece of my husband growing inside of me. To give up on seeing his steady calm take root in a child. To give up on passing on to a child the very traits I fell in love with. And to have it all be about me, about my genes.

But now at least we’ve broken the ice. Oops, mixed metaphor. We’ve waded a bit into the shallows of the stream, felt the cold rocks on our bare feet, numbed our hearts a little bit to what’s to come.

But as our cycle is drawing closer, I am more and more overwhelmed by the rushing waters in front of me. I try to take deep breaths, resolving to handle this cycle better, to stay calm, to not freak over the little stuff, to not let it GET to me the way it always does.

And then I called my RE’s office to get instructions on the next cycle, and suddenly all my resolutions seem like a silly fantasy. Here is what she told me:

1. It sounds like my RE is changing my regimen, adding a Lupron cycle where none was before. I am not happy about this. My cycles have been pretty successful before (except for the outcome, of course), and I can’t imagine why we would add a totally new drug this late in the game. What if it totally fucks up my cycle? J and I are at the end of our rope—if we go straight to donor sperm this cycle (almost certainly, but not yet determined), we’re probably only going to do two more. Because at some point we have got to get OFF this horrible ride. And it adds something like another 3-4 weeks to my cycle! ARRGGHH! Anyway, this is not set in stone. My Favorite Nurse is going to ask my RE about it and we’ll see if she really meant for me to change up. But even thinking about it makes me fret.

2. I need to do another water sonogram (SHG?) and another sounding. I guess because it’s been so long since my last cycle. And neither of these are covered by my shared risk program. Which means I have to get preauthorization from my fucking horrid godawful evil ratshit insurance company. Which means I’m going to have to make sure the request is coded right, because if anyone so much as breathes the word “IVF” in the presence of the preauthorization request, United Healthcare will know and will reject my request. ARRGHHGHH! I THOUGHT I WAS DONE WITH THIS BULLSHIT!!! The one good thing about going into shared risk was NOT having to seek preauthorization from the Evil Overseers. The only good thing about running out of coverage was not having to deal with getting coverage.

I swear to god, when I got into this conversation with Favorite Nurse I started to hear roaring in my ears. And when I hung up the phone and rested my hot forehead on my desk, I felt the water sweep my feet out from under me and wash me away, down into the cold, tense, bitter, angry maelstrom. (That’s right, I just used “maelstrom” in a metaphor. So suck it.)

All I can think is how much I don’t want to do this. I can live with the bloodwork, the sonos, the early mornings. I can take the shots and the heavy swollen ovaries. But the rest of it—the contract with the sperm bank and the preauthorizations and the ordering of the drugs and the timing of the acupuncture with the doctor visits (and don’t forget the chiropractor visits) and having to tell my boss I’m going to be out a lot—but I can’t tell you when—(and oh my god I’m SO scary-busy at work). And then the results. Those fucking results.

Oh, and have I mentioned that I’m pretty freaked out about the end result even if it’s “positive”? I’m finally healing my back, after 10+ years of weakness and pain. What would a pregnancy do to it? What would having to take care of a baby do to it? How will I survive the crying, the sleeplessness, the constant feeling that I’m not doing enough?

Well, I’ve managed to totally depress myself. Cheers, all.