Day 9: What I Do

When we began the in-vitro cycle, our very kind and understanding IVF Coordinator Lynn gave us a calendar where we could keep track of all of our medications and injections and everything else. The first page was dated, but the second page--beginning with the injection that will cause Leah's eggs to mature--was absent of dates. Frustratingly so.

I've been highlighting the dates to assure that I'm giving the injections on time. We're halfway down the page. It would seem like I'm pretty good with details, but I'm actually really bad at planning--hence, the highlighting. It's Wednesday now, and Leah reminded me that initially her egg extraction would be scheduled for Friday or Saturday. Even if we're two days behind the schedule, that's tantalizingly close now.

It also means that I get to become involved in a meaningful way. The next time Leah visits the doctor, he should be writing another prescription--for me, this time. I will be going through a cycle of antibiotics to make sure that my boys are clean and that there won't be any problems with the sperm side of the equation. I shouldn't really be that excited about taking antibiotics--I'm generally the kind of man that won't go to the doctor unless I'm in severe pain that won't go away. I passed out in the shower last year getting ready to go to work when I was ill and still didn't head over to Urgent Care. It's not just because I don't have health insurance, either (help, please, President Obama). But I am.

One of the great ironies of this whole process is that there's nothing that we know wrong with Leah. Her ovaries might be a little slow to respond (and have been through the last four cycles), but there's no reason to believe that she can't conceive. But despite there being nothing wrong with her (a fact that she's had to get used to), the responsibility for the procedures has remained on her.

It has been distressing that not being able to conceive a child has made me feel so, well, impotent. One of the reasons that I started this project was to provide myself with a little bit of agency but also for all the test tube dads out there to find some support (and it's 15% of couples trying to conceive that suffer from male-factor infertility). Honestly, after doing a lot of the research, I have begun to count myself fortunate that I suffer only from low sperm count (oligospermia) and not zero sperm count (azoospermia). There have been a couple of things that I've been trying to do to improve our chances of the doctors finding at least a handful of live ones when I make the meaningful deposit later this week (hopefully).

I take my mulivitamin every day with dinner. I also take a zinc picolonate suppliment with dinner, which is supposed to help with sperm development. I gave up pork for six months and have switched to decaf coffee. I've also started "hydrotherapy," which really means thirty seconds of blindingly cold shower after the usual ten minutes or so of lukewarm shower (upside: No steam to wipe off when it's time to shave). I've also started "dry skin brushing," which is exactly what it sounds: I run a brush over all my skin before jumping in the shower in the morning, brushing upward toward my heart from my hands and feet inward. I think I've made my routine intentionally onerous in order to offset Leah's injections.

Despite all that, though, I still haven't called the andrology lab to check the results of my last semen analysis.