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| … and baby makes three |
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First Trimester, First Month |by jerri andreasen
I rolled towards Liz and nuzzled my face against the smooth skin of her shoulder. Her soft snoring stopped. She'd gone to bed queasy, and I was worried that I'd awakened her. "Are you OK?" I asked quietly, hoping that she was still asleep, but wanting to atone in some way for waking her if she wasn't. "I just have to change." "Change what?" I asked, thinking she meant to take off the T-shirt and shorts she fell asleep in. "Change my order," she said, falling back asleep. I lay there thinking how typical that was of her — of us. She has a habit of carrying on nonsensical conversations with me when she's asleep. Sometimes, in the dark, I don't know she's asleep, and I keep questioning her, trying to understand what she's telling me. Sometimes I do know, but question her anyway, just to hear her voice (and, I admit, to giggle at her answers and tease her about them in the morning). Either way, my prodding usually winds up annoying her, and she'll sigh and grumble, "Never mind!" in her exasperated, sleepy voice, and turn over. This familiar sleepy exchange makes me smile at her through the darkness. "I love you," I whisper. "You do?" comes her soft reply. "Ummm hmmmm." "That's so… " *yawn* " …nice." And her quiet snoring resumes. That's why, I think. That's why I want to have children with her. Because she is so precious to me. Because who we are together is so powerful and strong. Because I can't imagine not passing this depth of feeling and love on to someone else. A child deserves to have parents who share this between them — and with the child. More than anything, I really want to give this to my child…. This is our third time around, and three seems to be a charm for us. We first met in college at U.C. Berkeley. We dated for a few short months in 1982. We got back together again in 1984 and lasted a little over a year. In 1989 I moved to Seattle. I thought about Liz quite often, though, and eventually went to California to look for her in 1992. We had a long-distance relationship for a few years, and finally had a wedding ceremony in front of family and friends on July 1, 1995. She moved up to Seattle right after our honeymoon. We're really different, but we seem to complement each other because of it. I like being with someone I've known for so long — someone I have a history with. Someone I know so well. One of the things I've always known about her is that she wanted to have children. When our involvement this time became serious, I knew that I'd have to decide whether children were something I really wanted. I'd thought about it before, with other lovers, and I liked the idea in a generic way, but somehow I didn't feel sure about it. Thinking about it with Liz made me happy. And excited. I realized it was something I wanted. But I was an only child, and my parents were very young when they had me. When I think back on my childhood, I have this sense that I pretty much raised myself (I'm sure my parents would disagree). I was lonely a lot. I don't want that for my kid. I told Liz that I didn't want an only child. We decided that two would be a perfect number. And so it was settled: We would each have one. Artificial insemination was the only choice, since we weren't about to get pregnant the old-fashioned way. We started charting Liz's periods and taking her basal body temperature[1] every morning so we'd be ready when it was time to inseminate. After much discussion, we decided we wanted the donor to be someone who would be involved in the children's lives. Some friends of Liz's had had a baby via artificial insemination, and they'd kept the styrofoam box the sperm was shipped in. While Liz was visiting with them, she saw the baby playing with the box, and one of the moms said, "Oh, look, he's playing with daddy!" We didn't want that for our children. Liz had a gay male friend who was interested in co-parenting, and we began discussions with him on how the situation would work: where the children would live, who would be the official parents, how involved he would be in the children's lives, etc. We talked with him for at least a year, but when Liz and I showed up with legal papers for him to look over, he began to get cold feet. He finally bowed out and it took Liz and me another year of discussions and financial planning to move forward with unknown donor insemination plans. We had really wanted to have someone the children knew as their father, but we didn't know anyone else we would be comfortable enough with in that kind of situation. Besides that, the legal issues are overwhelming; we would have exposed ourselves and the family we were trying to create to a huge amount of risk by allowing the father any role in parenting. And Liz and I weren't getting any younger. Liz was 35, I was 36 and would be 37 or even 38 by the time it was my turn to inseminate. Both of us were already old enough to be classified as a high-risk pregnancy. We just didn't have the time to find another acceptable man and form the kind of bond necessary for co-parenting. Unknown donor insemination was the only solution. We researched several sperm banks and finally settled on Pacific Reproductive Services (PRS) in Oakland, California. There were several reasons for this: They were one of the few sperm banks that had donors who were willing to be known when the child turns eighteen years old. This meant that daddy didn't always have to be the styrofoam box. The people at PRS were also incredibly nice, had worked with other lesbian couples, and had just about the best information of all the sperm banks on their donors. You can even see very brief donor profiles on their web site. Also, since we don't live in California, there is much less risk that any of our friends who inseminate will be using the same donor. Choosing a donor was fun and nerve-wracking at the same time. I guess now I know what choosing a mail order bride from a catalog is like. Except the catalogs advertising brides have photos. We began to narrow the candidates down. The donor had to be willing to be known when the child turns eighteen. Liz has asthma and allergies, so the donor couldn't. Liz is Puerto Rican/Italian/WASP, and I'm Irish/English/WASP, so we decided to look for someone who reflected that mix. I wanted someone tall. Slowly the choices dwindled, until we had a list of about seven possible donors. Our first pick was a very popular guy, so he wasn't available for several months. The next few either weren't available on our timetable or weren't processed for intrauterine insemination (IUI)[2]. As we moved down the list towards less desirable donors, we began to realize that we would have to compromise again or risk not starting our insemination on schedule. I called around and found an infertility lab that would store the sperm samples for us, and process them for IUI when we were ready to do the insemination. Fortunately, it was in a building connected via a sky-bridge to our doctor's building. With this, we were able to select our second choice donor. It seems like the next steps should be easy: have the sperm shipped to you, take it to the lab for storage, call them when it's time to inseminate so they can thaw and prepare it, pick it up, bring it to your doctor and have it injected into your uterus. Not necessarily so. The folks at PRS wanted us to call a couple days before Liz was due to ovulate so we could order and they could ship. When they ship, you usually have a choice of having the sperm packed in dry ice and sent in a styrofoam box, or you could get a special temperature-controlled canister. The canister is better, because it lasts longer, so if your frozen sperm winds up stuck in a UPS warehouse somewhere, it won't defrost and spoil. Of course, the canister is more expensive to ship. The first time we inseminated, PRS didn't have any canisters available. Liz was due to ovulate on a Monday, and we couldn't get delivery on Sunday, so they had to ship Friday for a Saturday delivery. Unfortunately, the lab that was going to store the sperm for us was closed after 11:00 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. The sperm arrived in the styrofoam container, packed in dry ice at 11:05 a.m. on Saturday. We would have to keep it overnight. But it had already been in the dry ice for 24 hours. How long would the ice last? By 5:30 p.m., we realized the answer was "Not long enough." Where do you get dry ice after 5:00 p.m. on a Saturday? We started calling dry ice companies in the phone book. Most weren't open. The last couple were quite far from our home. Fortunately, a nice woman at one of the companies took pity on us and asked, "Have you tried the fish department of your local grocery store?" Well, duh! We called the QFC (a popular northwestern grocery store) just up the street and they had loads of it, real cheap. When we got there, we didn't know how much to get. The poor guy behind the counter said, "Can I ask what it's for?" I was just about to tell him when a flustered Liz said "No!." He brought out a hunk, we told him half of it would be plenty, and we had our dry ice. The next day we hustled to the lab, gave them the styrofoam box and its contents and breathed a sigh of relief. The ovulation predictor kit confirmed that Liz was due to ovulate on Monday, so we called the doctor's office Monday morning to make the insemination appointment. Then we called the lab to let them know what time our appointment was so that they could pull the sperm sample out in plenty of time to defrost and process it. We showed up at the lab about 10 minutes before our appointment and collected our sample, now in a test tube, which was cocooned in paper towels and nestled in a styrofoam cup. Liz held it firmly to her chest, and we headed out the door to the sky-bridge. She was sure everyone knew what she was carrying. I told her they probably just thought she had a cup of coffee. Or at least they would have if she hadn't been clutching it to her chest like that. We got to the doctor's office and were shown to the examination room. Liz stripped below the waist and got into the usual pelvic exam position. That's when the torture started. Normally they use this very very thin plastic tube (I'm looking at a mechanical pencil lead that's .046 inches in diameter, and I think it was thinner than that) with a metal wire inside to inject the sperm into the uterus through the cervix. The metal wire keeps the tube rigid enough to get it to the right place. Then the doctor (or nurse practitioner, in our case) pulls the wire out, attaches a syringe filled with the sperm to the end of the tube and shoots it into the uterus. Unfortunately for Liz, her uterus is tilted, so Cathy, our Nurse Practitioner, was having a hard time guiding it to the right place. She got out some tongs and used them to guide the tube. No deal. Liz was grimacing by then. I held her hand and stroked it, trying to keep her calm. The nurse practitioner pulled out this long metal rod, about as big around as a straw and inserted it into Liz's vagina. Several times. Still no go. Liz's eyes were streaming tears. My eyes were tearing as well, because Liz was crushing my hand. Cathy pulled this nightmare metal clamp thing out of the drawer under the table. I wondered if I would be able to learn to write with my left hand. Cathy inserted part of the clamp inside Liz and attaches it somehow. I could swear by then that the molecules of Liz's hand and mine actually start to bond together. Finally Cathy reinserted the metal rod and slid the plastic tube alongside it. She smiled and pulled the metal wire out of the tube, then she attached the syringe and the sperm shot into Liz's uterus. Cathy removed the appliances attached to Liz. Whew! Our molecules started to recall the body where they belonged. Cathy instructed us to keep Liz horizontal for at least 10 minutes and left the room, promising to draw a map to Liz's uterus on her chart so it wouldn't be so difficult the next time. We sighed and waited, hoping that the sperm would reach its target so we wouldn't have to go through that again. Cathy remained true to her word, and drew the map. It must have been a good one, because the next three times we went for insemination, it was quick and easy. The fourth time she it struck me that Cathy knew the path so well, she could have done it blindfolded. And the fourth time it worked. That was Friday, June 19, 1998. A week later Liz starting thinking that she might be pregnant. We tried two pregnancy tests over the weekend and got a really faint line indicating yes. That was good enough for Liz, but not for me. We bought a different brand of test would gave us a very strong positive test. But I still wanted to go to the doctor's for a blood test. We went later in the week. The results were positive. I finally realized, oh my god! we're pregnant! 
Notes 1 Basal Body Temperature (BBT): The body temperature when taken at its lowest point, usually in the morning before getting out of bed. Charting BBT is used to predict ovulation. Most women's BBT is biphasic, meaning that it has two phases: before and after ovulation. Following ovulation, the glandular structure called the corpus luteum forms from the ovarian follicle. This gland produces progesterone, which is responsible for preparing and supporting the uterine lining for implantation. Progesterone also causes a half-degree elevation of the BBT at midcycle during an ovulatory cycle. This is the indicator that ovulation has occurred. 2 Intrauterine insemination (IUI): just what it sounds like: insemination directly into the uterus. In this case, if the sperm isn't processed properly — that is, washed free of seminal fluid — it can cause cramping and also make insemination more difficult. The other type of insemination, intracervical insemination (ICI), requires no special processing, but the sperm is only deposited in the vagina. This is less efficient and not as likely to result in the recently defrosted sperm inseminating the egg waiting in the fallopian tube. |
