Days 6 & 7: The Children of Men

The doctor called after our Friday appointment. According to the message, Leah's estrogen "spiked to 61" (one feature of our conversations with our doctors has been the lack of context to a lot of the information that's provided--the severity of the spike is tantalizingly understated), and so we would have to give her another dosage of Menepur in the evenings. Leah's cell phone had died two days before the call came in, so we found this out at 8:00 p.m. Friday night and immediately administered the dose.

I went back to the pharmacy again on Saturday morning to make sure we had enough medicine to get through the weekend because the pharmacy is closed on Sundays. Another four hundred dollars. They're starting to recognize my face. Whenever we pick up the injectibles, the pharmacist asks if we need more syringes. We have such a back log of needles that our downstairs bathroom is starting to look like a setting in Saw II. When we first started administering injections, we put the old needles and ampoules in a little cardboard box on the sink. Now we are old pros and dispose of our syringes in the pro forma "sharps" container of an empty, repurposed Listerine bottle. When guests come over, it's easy to hide all of the materiel under the sink. It also makes an unpleasant surprise for snooping guests.

In December, I followed a masochistic impulse to read P.D. James's little thriller The Children of Men. I bought the book over a year ago when the Clive Owen movie came out. It sat on my shelf for over a year waiting to get read. When Leah and I saw the movie, we were both impressed with its technical achievements but never really thought that it would be talking about us.

For those who haven't read the book yet, it takes place in a near future when the world suddenly and immediately became infertile. All women immediately became sterile at the same time sperm counts around the world fell to zero. When governments went to check the sperm banks, they found all the sperm eliminated as well. The novel begins with the sudden, violent death of the last child born in the world. The first half of the novel describes such a world.

The Britain James describes in a study in despair. Government has become increasingly paternalistic; as the population gradually ages and becomes smaller, they consolidate the population to the city. Elections are farces. One of the more intriguing aspects of the world James describes is the government-run pornography houses. James follows a conversation between the ruler of Britain and the erstwhile protagonist. For the population of this Britain, sex becomes a pointless exercise when there is no possibility for procreation, but the government has to encourage couples to engage in intercourse in the hopes that a child might be conceived.

This is a long way of saying that Leah tried to seduce me Friday night. She put on the nightie that I bought her for Valentine's Day years ago, and cuddled up to me on the couch as we hurtled through a backlog on our DVR. She kissed my neck once we climbed into bed.

I like sex. I'm pretty good at it, and there's that rush of doing something that you're good at. But this process is the opposite of erotic. I'm injecting her with drugs twice a day to make her ovaries overproduce. We go to the doctor three times a week to check in. I've seen the image of her uterus so often I could to a police sketch of it. Every step is a reminder that we're closer to conceiving a child, but also that I've been unable to provide one for a year and a half.

I probably need to drink more.

Sunday we had our second ultrasound and they checked Leah's estrogen and progesterone levels. No word on the hormone levels is to be taken as good word, and we haven't heard anything yet. The doctor told us that Leah has been slow to respond to the drug treatment and that is going to push our schedule back by a couple days. That's the reason he increased the dosage of the injectibles.

In the ultrasound, overies are large, dark ovals. The follicles look like berries surrounding the ovary. Today, Leah had 9 follicles on one ovary, and 5 on the other. The follicles measured about 10 millimeters. They ideally would be at 14 millimeters. One follicle, when it matures, should contain one egg.

Leah is already feeling defensive about her follicles. She complains that everyone knows that when you ask 14 kids to do something, it takes longer than working one-on-one. She says her ovaries feel heavy and like she's been working hard. I've been asking her to make her "egg face" as frequently as possible. It's hard to define what Leah's "egg face" looks like. I think that it should resemble an infant trying to go to the bathroom--a kind of physical focus of gentle exertion. But when Leah makes it, it's more of a blank stare with mouth agape, a total inward focus. I remind her that the flies she's catching in her mouth are useful protein.