Kennebunkport, Sperm Tanks, and Me
Choice Chat
My son Scott was the result of lucky try number 14. Eleven of those tries were at the doctor's office. Just before I started trying to conceive, a hugely pregnant woman had dispensed some well-meant advice: "Oh, don't worry about getting pregnant, it'll happen. Just go at it like a couple of irresponsible college kids, and have fun!" I smiled at her and just kept my mouth shut, thinking, "I wish." I knew it wasn't going to be anything like that for me. In fact, the day my baby was conceived, I lay flat on my back on crinkly paper, my feet in stirrups, while the doctor wrestled my recalcitrant cervix into view of the speculum and poked a thin plastic tube through, causing a small twinge of pain. "Have fun!" Yeah, right.
There was actually some fun to be had, though, in the year I spent trying-mainly the times that I inseminated at home, either because I wanted to up my chances or because my doctor's office was closed for holidays and I didn't want to miss a month.
The first time that happened, it was my second cycle of trying. It was Labor Day weekend, and I had the semen tank delivered right to the front porch of my mom's summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine. The ovulation test stick said it was time. So, after breakfast, I collected what I needed from the kitchen-mixing bowl and zip-loc bag for thawing the vials, bright yellow dishwashing gloves as protection against the subzero liquid nitrogen-and told my mother it was time to "baste" (as in turkey). She looked at me as if I'd just told her I was going to run upstairs to give myself an enema. Clearly I'd lost perspective, expecting my 70-year-old conservative Republican southern mama to be totally cool with all this.
Up in a little blue-and-white attic bedroom overlooking the ocean, I prepared to do the deed. When I carefully unscrewed the two little plastic vials (they were 2-for-1, since the donor's sperm count was low on that deposit day-"sweetie, your Dad was on sale!"), the excited little containers, pressurized from their plane ride from California, exploded all over my fingers. This was way more like the real thing than what happened in the doctor's office.
When it didn't take, it was back to the doctor's office. Three months later, still no dice. My next fertile holiday was Christmas-I was due to ovulate on Boxing Day. I called the sperm bank in California and ordered a tank to go to my Mom's again, this time to her home in Richmond, Virginia. It would arrive, via second day air, on Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve morning broke and my test stick turned, early. I wrapped presents. I paced. I waited. I refused to leave the house to run helpful errands for my mom. We fought about the 5 o'clock church service. I said I had to wait for Fedex. Never came. My sister said she'd heard they were doing some deliveries Christmas Day. So I stayed home again, my egg's time clock about to sound its final alarm, missing Christmas Day service, too, for the first time ever.
At last on Saturday, the day after Christmas, I got some answers from Fedex. Snowstorms in the Midwest. The tank was in the holding area in the Oakland airport. It would arrive Tuesday. I said it actually now had to go back to San Francisco. "Sorry," the agent said. "It's already staged for delivery." Loverboy had to travel 6,000 miles round-trip just to get back across the San Francisco Bay. Worse, he would arrive on the East Coast on his last breath of liquid nitrogen.
I sprang into gear, arranging to have the tank held at Fedex so I could pick it up first thing, and finding a welding supply store that would refill it with nitrogen so the sperm wouldn't spoil. Tuesday morning I drove out to Fedex, located on Studley Road, no lie. I gave my name, mentioning that my package had been delayed, and the clerk went back to find it. As she lugged the tank up to the counter, she said, loudly, in a thick, chirpy southern accent, "Ah swear, it's always you semen people who get the late deliveries!" Then she launched into a funny story about a veterinarian. Right. I'm breeding champion chihuahuas. I guess not much else arrives in tanks like that. I smiled and hurried out the door, sticking my semen into the huge backseat of my mother's wood-grained station wagon. The welding guys filled the tank, twice (first time it wasn't closed properly and started hissing in the backseat like a bomb), and it was back to the San Fran sperm bank's deep freeze for my little swimmers.
Obviously that try yielded nothing. Meanwhile, I called the sperm bank to get Don Juan's pregnancy stats, and they were grim. He was tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed and handsome, but he wasn't getting anyone pregnant. I started to suspect I was using blanks. (Sometimes sperm passes all the tests, but just can't hack its way into an egg. There's a test for that, but it's expensive and unreliable, so banks don't do it.) My next window would open on Groundhog's Day. I decided to do it both at home and at the doc's, for extra luck. I was seeing someone, so I asked her if she would help. Science experiment complete, we forgot ourselves, and, well-afterwards, with traces of semen on my fingers, I was worried that I may have accidentally knocked her up. Crazy in love, I was secretly excited. Aloud, I apologized profusely and pledged full child support. Alas, Mr. Blanks didn't do it for either of us. I gave up on the guy. Then the girl ditched me.
In April, Donor Number 2, a tall, handsome, green-eyed actor ("Favorite color: blue. Favorite pet: dogs"), got me pregnant on his second try. But my HCG levels were questionable from the beginning. The nurse's exact words were: "Well, you're pregnant, but...." They kept hauling me in to the office for repeat pregnancy blood tests, and each time the results were inconclusive. The HCG was rising, but way too slowly. "Maybe you're going to have a baby, maybe a miscarriage," they kept telling me. After hearing that a few times, I threw a fit and told them no more blood tests until such time as it would be one hundred percent conclusive. I was trying to stay calm, and I knew miscarriage was very common and no reflection on my fertility, necessarily, but the excessive intervention was making me crazy. I wanted to be left alone to miscarry or not, in peace. Sadly, I miscarried at about eight weeks-technically a chemical pregnancy.
Emotionally, the long path to pregnancy wasn't too bad for me. I had what I started to think of as fertility hubris. I never once doubted my ability to have a child. But I also had seen friends become emotional wrecks every month when they got their periods, and I vowed not to put myself through that. I kept focused on the fact that young heterosexual couples who are doing it like bunnies are not considered infertile until they've tried for a full year. "Why would I worry about my fertility after just a few months of trying with frozen sperm, which is less effective than fresh?" I reasoned. Still, I had fantasized that I would get pregnant on the first try, like a couple of my good friends had. After my third failed IUI (shortly after I was laid off from my job) I went to bed calm and stoic but woke up the next morning in tears. Also, as the months dragged on and on without getting pregnant, it became harder to keep doubts at bay. For me, deciding to become a single mom was like jumping off a cliff, hoping the water below is soft and warm, with no hidden rocks. So every month, I had to climb back up the hill and jump off the cliff again. It never got less scary. In fact, as time went on, it got more so. The doubts pushed their way to the surface. "Am I doing the right thing? Am I cut out to be a mom? Is this a sign that I shouldn't do it? What if I have the kid and suddenly realize it was a big, big mistake?"
The process itself was grueling. It was a total of 5-6 doctor's appointments per month, all of them early in the morning (9 at the latest), a nightmare for me, a night owl who needs a lot of sleep. Weekend appointments were even earlier-I think I had one at 6:45 am. I started to wonder whether the scheduling was some sort of hazing process to weed out anyone who wasn't really committed to motherhood. It became exhausting to the point where, when I had the miscarriage, I was sad, to be sure, but my main emotion was relief. At least I was doing something different, and getting a break from the constant medical attention. Because of the pregnancy and miscarriage, there were almost three months in which I had very few doctor's appointments! Hooray!
There was a time, more than a year into the process, that one of the women who works at the front desk of my doctor's office made a slightly off-color joke. "Shhh!" said one of her colleagues, laughing. "Don't talk that way in front of the patients!"
The first woman looked my way. "Oh, it's just Louise," she said. "Louise is family."
I gave her a wan smile, feeling complimented but also horrified that I'd been there so damn many times that I was part of the furniture. As warm and fuzzy as it might be, does anyone really want to be considered "family" at her doctor's office?
Two failed doctor's-office tries after my miscarriage, and it was Labor Day again. Time for my annual "inseminate at Mom's summer house" tradition. My tank arrived a day late due to Hurricane Katrina, but the test stick kept not turning. By Friday I wondered if I was just not going to ovulate that month, and I realized the tank was going to run out of nitrogen by Sunday. It was off to Advantage Gases and Tools, welding suppliers for southernmost Maine.
The burly middle-aged guys behind the counter were nice, though my request was an unusual one for them. "This medical?" the shorter one asked. "Yeah," I said, without elaboration. He took it into the back to fill it up while his tall, equally burly colleague futzed with the computer, trying to figure out how to code the sale of a small amount of nitrogen.
We waited and finally the guy at the computer asked, "So-what you using it for?" I figured why not tell the truth, but I wanted to word it delicately. "I'm, uh, trying to get pregnant." The big guy got flustered at first, then confided: "My wife and I didn't have to go the fertility route," he said, "but we lost three before we had our first son." This huge welding supply salesman and I then had a sweet conversation about the kids in our lives.
At last, Short Guy came out from the back, carrying the tank, with a funny expression on his face. "So-you got horses or something?" His colleague and I cracked up. "You don't wanna know!" said Tall Guy in his thick Maine accent.
By the Sunday before Labor Day, I was finally ripe. Green Eyes and I did it the tuberculin-syringe way in my sweet attic bedroom overlooking the sea. This time, as I was stretched out in my nightgown on the bed, basting-actually I was flat on my stomach with my chin on my laptop, typing a work email-my mom came up with some Concord grapes, to chat. The empty inch-long plastic vial was next to me on the sheet I'd laid over the bedspread, so I held it up and said, "I should introduce you to Dad." My mom laughed. "Nice to meet ya, Dad," she said. Then my youngest sister yelled, "Knock knock," and came in, wanting to talk about her new house. Mom interrupted: "Louise, you should introduce Caroline to Dad." I picked up the vial again. "Caroline, this is Dad. Dad, Caroline."
In the year I'd been trying, the whole process had become old hat, and this insemination was turning out to be a family-values event.
That afternoon, I had a three-and-a-half hour drive to "The Forks" Maine (population 35), to meet a couple of friends for a whitewater rafting trip. I had Mom take a picture of me strapping "Dad" in his nitrogen tank into the backseat, with the seatbelt. "Louise and Dad go rafting."
The next insemination (the standard is to do two in a row, each month) was a group effort. I'd forgotten the syringe, so Mae, Susan and I went into Girl Scout mode, crafting a substitute using available objects in our small log cabin in the woods: a cardboard tampon applicator and a thin plastic bag. Rustic-but it worked. Next morning, as I floated in my life preserver in the cold water of the Kennebec River's "swimmer's rapids," it occurred to me that I may not be optimizing conception. But it sure was fun.
I would love to say that was the time Green Eyes got me pregnant again. In fact, conception happened the next month, September, at the doctor's office.
"Accomplished easily with a long Peterson and a Tomcat," my patient chart says, referring to the type of speculum and syringe the doctor used. Sounds like WWII artillery. But in my heart, my son was conceived on Labor Day in Kennebunkport and The Forks, surrounded by my friends and my loving Republican family.
For more info about Louise and her book, go to knockyourselfup.com.
