IVF HELL!!

Anyway, the wife and I wanted to have another child- the old fashioned way was not working and neither of us was improving in the ability-to-conceive category so we did the fertility thing.

First it was the subcutaneous injections that stimulated her ovaries to produce multiple follicles per cycle. When the follicles were large enough I got the distinct pleasure of giving my sample with no help from anyone but myself and a copy of Barely Legal. They take my semen sample and put it through some type of wash that removes some of the bad sperm and then inject it into my wife's uterus. The hope is that the sperm will have a better chance of fertilizing an egg since it doesn't have to swim through the vagina and cervix.

After three cycles of that method with no success we bit the bullet and started In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Joy of all joys, this procedure (as all the others) is not covered by my health insurance- so I tapped the home equity line for the $20,000 it costs to buy 6 tries at IVF.

This IVF thing is really a bitch for both of us. For my wife it is lots of injectible drugs, fucked up hormones, driving to the lab on a daily basis for bloodwork, transvaginal ultrasounds, and the best of all, intramuscular injections of projesterone in sesame oil given by me nightly for 12 nights. For me is it putting up with all that psychological shit. Fortunately for me my wife is usually on an even keel! She rarely gets moody- one of the big reasons I married her. So the mood swings weren't quite as bad as they could have been.

So with this IVF thing after the mother-to-be takes all these drugs to stimulate her ovaries I get to go whack in the plastic cup again (it seems I have done this thousands of times) and then my wife goes in for the egg retrieval. In order to retrieve the eggs my wife has to go through an outpatient procedure. This is very pleasant. The procedure involves sticking a long needle through the sides of the vagina to retrieve the eggs. Since there are two ovaries there are two different needle sticks. Hmm- another good reason to be thankful I am not a woman.

So once they get the eggs they put on some nice music, lower the lights, pop open a bottle of champagne, put some quarters in the vibrating bed and throw the sperm and the eggs together. In our case we had five eggs that fertilized.

After five days they picked the best two embryos and transferred them back into my wife's uterus. Two weeks later we found out that we are having twins!! Holy shit!