I took my last blue pill this morning. The blue pills are the Theralogix "Reproductive Support" supplements that I've been on for the last 2+ years - basically a men's pre-natal vitamin. My wife ordered the first bottle back on March 6, 2012; I've placed 7 more orders since then. Twice a day, morning and night, every day for the last 25 months. 1440 pills. This morning was the last one. I "celebrated" this morning with a cup of coffee from Taco Bell - the fully leaded variety - and I have to confess that, yes, it will be nice to not have to take those pills any longer. But it's not a conventional cause for celebration, and I don't really feel like celebrating. All those pills were taken in an effort to convince my body to work the way that nature intended. To try and bring a brand new life into the world. But I won't take another pill tonight, not because I'll forget or because the next order hasn't arrived yet. I won't take another pill tonight because another order hasn't been, and will never be, placed.
I've done more semen analyses than I can honestly remember now. I've been through varicocele surgery - invasive, embarrassing, and extraordinarily painful - to try and correct my "issues." 2+ years of twice-daily vitamins. Changed my coffee intake from regular, to half-caff, to decaf, and given up sodas entirely. I've been on Clomid pills, then hormone injections, when Clomid didn't help. I've shoved ice packs down my pants, focused desk fans on my crotch, because our office heater has a tendency to run wild on cold days, and I was scared to death that just going to work was going to compromise our chances for a kid. I've had my semen cryogenically stored, "just in case," and then we went through IVF. I put my wife through the invasiveness, humiliation, and physical/emotional pain of IVF, and all that goes with it. All to try and bring a child with my DNA into the world. A "little piece of me." But today it finally stops.
It means that I'll be able to go back to regular coffee again - the one thing I used to look forward to getting up for on work mornings. It means that I'll be able to go to our family doctor and ask to start treatments for my "low T"; I should be too young to have this issue, but I do, and addressing it will have numerous benefits for my health in general. It means that I won't have to be paranoid about the temperature of my office anymore, and I won't have to pay for and take any more blue pills. Those are all good things, and I'm glad for them. But I don't feel like celebrating. Because it also means the start of the end of a dream.
There will be no "little me" in this world. Ever. The one cycle of IVF that we did resulted in two precious embryos with my genes and my wife's, but neither of them made it. That loss nearly killed us both. We could try again, but the doctor was honest, and the odds are very stacked against us. It took a miracle for us to get as far as we did with that one cycle, so the seeming almost certainty of doing another cycle is that it would only result in more loss, more pain, and still no baby in our arms. The tiny chance of success is not worth the overwhelming risk of failure. "But you could always have a miracle on your own! There's always that chance!" - no, really there's not. Most of the treatments we've tried on me have made my numbers worse, not better, and I've been teetering dangerously close to the edge of azoospermia already (two sperm counts of single digits). Once I start testosterone treatment, I know that will take my sperm count from "low" to "no," but it's a treatment that I want and need to do for my general well-being. So it's time to give up on my genes.
And that sucks. Boy, does it. It really sucks for me, and it sucks for my wife too, because she wanted that "little piece of me" just as much as I did. It's not fair to either one of us for this to be happening, but this disease is not fair to anybody. In recent weeks I've felt my old familiar, the black dog of depression, scratching at my door again. Oftentimes he's made it inside. Music is therapy for me, so I've made a playlist of sad songs on my iPod, most of which have nothing to do with our situation specifically. But music conveys feelings that words never can, so I'll play those songs and sing along as I'm driving to or from work, because expressing those emotions helps me to deal.
One week from right now, we'll be sitting in the doctor's office at our fertility clinic again. After our loss last July, and our post-IVF follow-up in August, we took the next several months off to focus on our physical and emotional health. I'm glad that we did, because I feel like it's helped us reconnect with each other, and grow even closer. But it's time to go back now. Neither of us is ready yet to quit and live childfree for the rest of our days. So it's time for us to go and talk to our doctor about using donor sperm.
There was a time when I didn't think that donor sperm would ever be an acceptable possibility for me. When I was first diagnosed infertile back in October of 2011, my knee-jerk reaction to the idea of donor sperm was one of revulsion. I was later offended when my wife told me that her mother had asked/suggested if we had considered using donor sperm. (I still kind of am.) I was hurt a couple of months ago when my wife brought up the topic of donor sperm again, as in my mind, that door had been shut for good. She later regretted bringing it up again, and she apologized to me multiple times, but she had brought it up for good reasons. And I'm honestly glad now that she did.
The door to donor sperm was shut in my mind, so the only door I still saw open was another cycle of IVF. On the bad days, my wife had told me several times since last summer that she didn't want to do IVF again, because we knew the odds, and we knew how much it hurt the first time, and deep down I agreed with her. I didn't want to do it again either, was scared to try it again, felt terrible for having asked her to go through all of that in the first place. I wasn't willing to admit how I felt, though, because I thought that by saying so, we'd be closing the final door on ever having any children at all. We had talked about calling the clinic to schedule another appointment, but the thought of that conversation only ever filled me with dread. I had felt hopeful going into our first cycle. Knowing how it turned out... not so much anymore.
But once I got past my initial negative feelings about donor sperm, I realized that calling for that kind of appointment didn't carry half the anxiety associated with IVF. Suddenly the focus wouldn't be on my "brokenness" anymore, or on forcing my wife through IVF to try and overcome my body's issues. Our odds with IVF were poor at best, but given our particular medical situation, IUI with donor sperm should have a better than good chance at success. Nothing guaranteed, of course, but life comes with no guarantees anyway. The physical and financial obstacles to doing donor insemination seem to be much more surmountable than those with any other option left to us, and even failure doesn't carry the fear of more lost embryos. It was only the emotional obstacles that I was still dealing with.
Because using donor sperm is inherently unfair - to both partners, but especially to the man. If it works, the wife will forever, 100%, in every sense of the word, be a "mother." But deciding on donor sperm means that the man is forced to give up on being a "father" - biologically, anyway. It means giving up the fight to beat his physical inferility; the disease wins. Yes, he'll still raise the kid, yes, he'll still love them, but the only part he'll play in bringing that life into being is writing the damn check. (Unless his wife pays for it, and then he won't even do that.) And that bothers me. A "daddy by donor" is only ever a step-father, or an adoptive father... and I've had three step-dads thanks to my mom. None of them good. It feels wrong to place another man's sperm inside your wife's body, it's unfair then to be forced to watch her belly grow for 9 months with a child he didn't put there, and even the announcements that were so longed for for so long would carry with them mixed feelings. "Congratulations, you're pregnant!" "Finally! But... oh." How do you tell the kid? How will he or she take it? What will friends and family think, when the kid inevitably lets it slip? And - this scares me most of all - what happens when the kid inevitably gets angry at you, and hurls the javelin, "You're not my real father!" Right through the heart. This path will open wounds that I know I'll carry for the rest of my life.
But. But. One thing that happened in the wake of our failed IVF was that I finally found myself open to the idea of adoption. My wife did too. Then we discovered that more of our friends were adopted than we ever realized, and every one of them only had glowing things to say about their adoptive parents. If I was willing to be a dad by adoption, if I knew that I could love and raise that child as my own, then why couldn't I do the same with donor sperm? Of course, if adoption is more palatable, then why not do adoption now? Or at least adopt a donor embryo? But reality is that adoption can cost as much or more - possibly much, MUCH more - than IVF, and we exhausted the only big source of funds we could get when we took the IVF step. Donor embryo still carries with it the fear of losing those embryos should you fail. And honestly, if I'm willing to adopt and love a child that's not biologically mine, then why not adopt a child that's at least half a "little piece" of the woman that I love more than my own life?
Unlike adoption, it means I still get to do all the "dad" things that I looked forward to if we'd been able to get my own sperm to work. My wife will get a "you're pregnant!" announcement, and I'll get to hold her as we inevitably laugh, smile, and cry, all at the same time. I'll get to see the sonograms, get to hear that first heartbeat. I'll get to make 2:00am taco runs when my wife craves Taco Bell, I'll get to be the nervous dad rushing her to the hospital for every false alarm. I'll get to be the nervous wreck of a dad waiting in the waiting room, or (hopefully) by her side in delivery, and I'll get to hold that newborn child in my arms. It won't be biologically mine, but I'll still get to be there every single step of the way, just as if it was. And it may not have come from my sperm, but it's still a life that would not exist if my wife and I hadn't wanted SO MUCH to bring it into this world. There will be no mistake, no "oops" baby. That child will be utterly, infinitely, and forever loved, and wanted.
No, I don't like the "other man's sperm" idea, but I can accept it by knowing that I'll still be the only lover my wife will ever have again. I was finally able to bring myself to begin looking at donor profiles last night, and I was actually getting excited. Not put off by the process, as I'd thought I'd be. The two biggest things that I wanted to pass down to my own children were my red hair and my intelligence, and a quick search for red-haired Caucasian donors turned up several promising results. No, if they have red hair, they won't have gotten it from me, but it will still be a point of connection for me and the child both - "I have red hair like daddy." I'll still raise them exactly as if they were mine. I'll still love them exactly as if they were mine. Because they will be mine.
I want to be open with the child about where they came from, as early as they want to know. It will be their information to share, and if questions come up from friends and family, then we'll deal with those as they come. No shameful secrets. If that child ever asks me, "Daddy? Do you wish you were my bio dad?" I'll tell them - truthfully - "Yes. But I'm still your dad in every possible other way. And I wouldn't change anything about you, because then you wouldn't be who you are. I love who you are." My parents were married, but they got divorced while I was on the way, so my dad was functionally a sperm donor too. I've never known him at all. So I know what that's like. So, too, if our child ever decides that they want to find out more about their bio dad, or about that side of the family - I'll be the first in line to help them find out.
My desire in having kids was to be for them and do for them all the things that I never got, growing up without a dad. It's a cruel twist, then, that any kids I'll get the chance to be a dad to will carry with them the same wound of not knowing their biological dad. That's absolutely exactly what I never wanted to do to my own children. But because I do know what that's like, maybe I'm better equipped to handle it than most? And they will still have 1000% more than I ever did from my own dad, because they will have a father who is there, and who loves them, and who will always be there and always love them, every step of the way.
I never wanted to be here, forced to make this decision. I never thought I'd get here, willing to accept it. But here I am. I celebrated that last pill this morning anyway.
