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Sex, Doctor style
Friday ended up being a reflection on how the universe enjoys laughing at me. My wife suffers from anxiety. Well it seems the HCG shot put her anxiety at defcon 2. The medication she takes to help her anxiety, she has had to ween off of before this procedure. As an alternative we are sending her to acupuncture, which is helping, but my insurance won’t cover it. The additional cost in turn is causing more anxiety. Then her coworker, out of the blue, files for FMLA next week making her shop short a person when we need flexibility for the embryo transfer. Which is adding more stress. The good news is this week my company is finally giving out our yearly raises. I sure could use a raise to help pay for these expenses my company’s insurance won’t cover, but I make just enough to qualify for the group the executives feel don’t need a raise. (Not blaming you boss, still sucks though.) Everywhere I turned, a new irony was slapping me in the face.
Eventually we got her anxiety under control and went to bed. Now I made sure to have my alarm set for 5:30, what I forgot to check was I had it set not to trigger on the weekend. It’s a good thing my wife is a morning person. We get on the road for the hour-long drive to the main office at the hospital in the big city. I’m estimating we would be about 45 minutes early. We get to the hospital to find the main garage is closed. Ugh! So we follow the signs to the other end of the hospital where there is another parking garage. I didn’t even know they had a second parking garage. We then walk the half a mile through the hospital without a clue where we are headed. By the time we arrive, the wife is laughing at me for my snippy responses to any friendly staff person who offers assistance, and we are only 15 minutes early.
I got called in to give my contribution and was directed to a different room with, you guessed it, a folding chair in a bathroom.
This one has been around the block. I thought the tear in the front was a nice touch. At least this door had a lock and no assassin overhead cabinets waiting to assault me.
You know what is more uncomfortable than leaving a room where everyone knows you are going to go masturbate? Coming back to the same room when you’re done with the same people 15 minutes later, and then walk over to your wife and sit next to her. I think my face discovered a new shade of red. They call my wife in for her procedure. I do a little tweeting, then bury my head in a book to avoid eye contact with anyone else.
About an hour and a half later they call my name. I eagerly get up wanting to check on my wife and see how she is doing. Instead the nurse directs me to the elevator and tells me I have to haul my ass the half mile to get the car, because they are bringing her down to the lobby. By the time I exit the parking garage, the nurse is wheeling my wife down the street looking for me. I almost didn’t notice them in pursuing my goal of getting to the pickup area.
BUT WE DID IT! They harvested 12 eggs from my wife. We will hear back in a couple of days with results on how many successfully fertilized.
Thundercats are GO
This morning we met with the nurse handling our case. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to take a picture of the folding chair. Laughing they permitted me to do so. While the wife had blood taken to check her hormone levels I went back and took a picture of my first mistress.
The nurse then took a quick look at her uterus lining using the ultrasound saying everything looked good. After stupidly arguing with a nurse where a hipbone was, I was glad she marked the location to give the shot, because I would have been way off. Which also allowed me to avoid taking a test shot on myself. I already shot myself 38 times, this is her turn.
In the afternoon the clinic called saying the blood work came back and we are to begin the shots tonight.
tick
tick
tick
I start mixing the shot cocktail at 6:40 and it takes forever trying to get all the medication out of each vial is very frustrating. I finally get it all ready and just as I’m about to stick the needle in my wife…I freeze up. It was a whole lot easier giving myself a shot than it was giving her a shot. I think it was more painful for me as she claims the shot wasn’t too bad.
1 down…9 to go
The verdict is…
…I make bad decisions when I get emotional. Sweetie you were right. All the advice on the internet was correct. Unless you have a condition where the doctors know HCG works to improve sperm production, it just doesn’t work for the rest of us. So there is $1200 out the door. If there had been a reasonable chance this might work, it wouldn’t bother me. The doctor himself said there was only a small chance this might work, coupled with the advice on the internet and from my wife, I knew this was a long shot.
Like betting on a 12 in dice where the rewards are big, but the odds are small; I was blinded by the chance of being normal. That maybe this might increase my production to a level where we could conceive naturally and forget all this IVF stuff. I’m looking at this simply as another lesson on why I need to stop making decisions when my emotions take over, and moving on.
The odd thing is I went from 4 to zero. The doctor wants me to wait a couple of weeks, then do another semen analysis. Except this time he wants me to go to the main office an hour away in a major city to have it done. That way they can freeze any sperm they find. He wants me to create a bank of specimens so when the egg retrieval takes place, he has some backup to go too if my semen doesn’t contain any on that particular day. I’m guessing another affair with a different folder chair.
IVF male 