Buns in the oven.
January 30th, 2005 by Jim Clark
It’s official — the wife is pregnant.
We just found out two days ago — blood test, peeing on sticks, the whole works.After a year-and-a-half of trying to conceive with no luck (and yes, I’m pretty sure we were doing it right), we decided to try In Vitro Fertilization. The whole IVF process was pretty interesting, actually. Not particularly pleasant — just interesting. The wife had to pop pills and take daily hormone injections for about a month to control the timing of the cycle and stimulate the development of multiple follicles.
We had to go to Beverly Hills to do the egg retrieval, but that was a bit of a challenge. When we had a huge storm here in Santa Barbara earlier this month, there was a terrible mudslide about 20 miles south of here in a little seaside village called La Conchita. It’s located right along the ocean, nestled between the 101 freeway and an enormous cliff face. We had so much rain that it saturated the hillside to the point that it couldn’t hold any more water and the whole hillside just gave way, crushing about a dozen homes, some with people still in them. Maybe you saw it on CNN. Pretty awful stuff.Anyway, my point here is that the mudslide took out the freeway that goes south into L.A. Completely submerged it under three feet of mud. We were scheduled to have the procedure to extract the wife’s eggs only two days after the storm, which had closed every single road leading north and south out of town. We had to buy one-way tickets to LA, fly there, rent a car, get the procedure.
Yeah, nobody was going anywhere in this.
The retrieval was performed under anesthesia. Guided by ultrasound monitors, the doctor inserted a needle through the vagina and into the ovaries, then drew back the needle to remove the eggs from the follicles. The thought of the whole needle-up-the-special-place makes me cringe, and fortunately they wouldn’t let me in the room to watch. They retrieved a total of 8 eggs. While this was going on, I was in the special pornography room doing my part thanks to their collection of fine cinema masterpieces such as Big Trouble in Little Vagina and Once, Twice, Three Times a Labia.
Because the wife was all doped up afterwards we couldn’t fly home, so we had to drive up through the middle of the state about 150 miles north of where we needed to be and then cut over to the coast and back down in order to get home. A nice three-day hellish ordeal. (Now not only can my wife guilt the kids with stuff like “I was in xx hours of labor to have you” but we can also say we braved storms and mudslides, and spent all their college money just trying to have them in the first place.)
A few days later we heard from the doctor that they were able to make 4 embryos from the 8 eggs that were taken. They did genetic testing on them, and of those there were 2 that were viable for implantation. We even learned the sex of the embryos — a boy and a girl.
Our first baby pictures. They look just like me, don’t they?
We went back a few days later for the implantation, when the freeway had finally opened up again. The doctor used a small catheter to pass the embryos through the cervix and into the uterus while I got to watch on the ultrasound monitor. We even got to take a picture:
The embroys are the left-most white dots in the circle.
The wife had her pregnancy test on Friday. The bloodtest confirms that she’s pregnant, and the hormone levels are so high that they think both the babies are in there. We won’t know for sure whether both embryos implanted for maybe a couple weeks, but we’re hopeful that there will be twins.So. It looks like I’m going to be a dad.The world will never be the same.
