Science Baby 7

My wife J and I finished our 6th and almost certainly last IVF cycle ever yesterday.  I drove us into the clinic, she got put under and had six eggs extracted, I went into a small room with a television with a single channel available labeled PORNHUB and an easy chair draped with a sheet of medical tissue paper and jerked off somehow into a small sterile cup, trying not to think about the thousands of dudes who came before me in this very chair, literally and figuratively.

J and I sometimes argue, in a joking way, about who has it worse.  We both know that she wins — she has to be on hormones for a few weeks prior to the egg-harvesting, and the hormones make her gain weight, feel lousy, tired, super-emotional and nutso sometimes, depressed at others.  Plus strangers push and prod and examine her vagina.  Plus she has all of the ego-related issues of feeling too old to have a kid, or that she’s defective in some way (a failure as a woman!) because we are resorting to IVF to try to have a kiddo.  I don’t have any of that shit.  I just have to rub one out in a doctor’s office.  But when we joke-argue, I add the following:  I have to cook and clean, to be a house-bitch, do 100% of everything for the two of us, to try to reduce stress for you to help with the cycles.  When you get upset because your hormones are going bonkers, I am the one who handles the brunt of your She-Hulk emotional outbursts, taking it like a champ, not getting offended or escalating.  I provide reassurance even when I don’t feel it inside, so that you feel better.  I lay awake in bed sometimes with my eyes open in the middle of the night and wonder what it will do to our relationship, our marriage, if we fail together — if we don’t have a kid.  Will you still want to be with me?  Will you still love me?

One thing I know for sure is that I will not miss these cycles.

My least favorite and favorite part both are when the nurse comes to pick up the load.  They refer to it as “product.”  They ask questions like:  Did you capture the full product into the cup?  Or is some production missing?

There is a twelve year old inside of me that wants to reply crassly:  No, I jizzed on the floor by accident.

But I know they are just doing their job, and having medical vocabulary to use to describe these acts of sex makes things easier for them.  If anything I ham it up a little.  This time I said that everything went as expected with production.  The project was completed on time and under budget, delivered exactly to specifications.  Plenty of product produced.

This morning we got the news.  Four eggs fertilized.  Three of the four are growing rapidly.  The other they are still watching, hopeful it will continue to develop.

J was happy.  She texted me around 11 in the morning to let me know.  I called her to celebrate.  I wanted to hear the joy in her voice.

We won’t know more about how they are developing until next week.

Sometimes I think I should write a book about this.  IVF for Dudes (a 3-part tragic comedy)

It would include a lot of silly pictures and diagrams but also painful chapters about how terrible this process can be emotionally for both partners.  Then I’ll lighten the mood again by drawing me, upside down, with my junk stuffed awkwardly into a cup, to aid in the capture of production.

We’ll know by next Monday if any of the four eggs result in a viable blastocyst — that’s the term for a healthily dividing pre-embryonic fertilized egg — a state which is considered viable for transfer into a womb.

I really hope that we get one.  We already have one in a lab somewhere, frozen, waiting to be transferred, but having a second — a Plan B, to be used if the first doesn’t take — would take an enormous load off of our minds.  I’ve read that low stress levels are extremely important for a successful transfer, and having a second blastocyst will, even if we don’t end up using or needing it, make the chances of the first transfer more successful, purely because they will reduce the pressure and stress during the ordeal.

The only thing I know for sure is that it’s out of my hands at this point.  I’ve done what I could.

Now, we wait.