A year ago, we started pursuing this “maybe we should have a baby thing” as intensely as we ever have. (I want to be really clear, I don’t know that we slaved and prayed and cried the way some people do/claim to do.)
Anyway, we took it seriously. Because it wasn’t happening naturally, we started making appointments with doctors to see what could be done.
Last July, we met with a doctor who practices NaPro (natural procreation) methods, with the intent to try to address the root causes of why we weren’t having children. NaPro claims to be as effective as the most aggressive methods (IVF) for reproduction, without having all the excessive amounts of drugs added to your body.
Long story short, it actually doesn’t work at all if the guy is the main cause of the problem. (And these couples aren’t included in the success statistics. So NaPro is actually quite a bit less effective than it claims to be.)
So we move to a men’s fertility specialist who told us all the things we already knew from the test results and offered a potential solution: have surgery that might (~30% likelihood) solve the problem.
Because this is a journey a couple goes on, I figured it was worth going under the knife to see if we could save Jordan a bunch of drugs, injections, and hassle. So in October 2019, I got two new scars just above my pubic bone, where they removed 1.5x the normal number of varicoceles. (Yes, I had trouble running and jumping fro a while.)
Post surgery, they wanted us to wait 3 months to see if my counts improved. They didn’t so we were on to more and different fun.
To this point, we’d worked exclusively with the University of Utah medical system. It’s the first system I’ve dealt with that seems to have its act together, and I really didn’t want to go to a new set of doctors.
But Utah Fertility Center is literally 5 mins away, and Jordan didn’t want to go to SLC for all her appointments (possibly a good thing, but for different reasons). She got what she wanted. That story is elsewhere.
(It was a good thing we went through UFC, even if the customer service has been poor: UofU shut down all non-essential things, including fertility, and UFC didn’t.)
We implant today. We have some (unknown at the moment, but we’ll know in less than 90 mins) number of viable potential humans in test tubes (or petri dishes) that will get a chance to grow up into little gods.
So it’s been a year. The next step of the journey will be almost another year, but by March next year (assuming the worst statistics still ignore us) we’ll have a little human running around.
Well, lounging. It won’t start running around till October 2021 at the soonest.
It’s quite the progress for a year. And we need to start looking into what the next leg of the journey looks like, and how to balance new requirements with good things we already do.