Another reason I started this blog is because I am going to cut back, if not cut out completely, drinking beer for awhile. Now to those of you that read my other blog, don’t worry, I will continue to post about brewing and probably try to toss in a a couple of guest beer reviews. So there will still be plenty to read.
The reason I am laying off the hooch is, my wife and I are trying to get pregnant with another child. I know what you’re thinking, "Isn’t alcohol the reason for a lot of pregnancies?” and in normal circumstances I would agree with you. However, I am anything but normal.
I’ll diverge quickly just so you can have a little peak into the mess that is me. When I was born I was dubbed a “miracle baby”. I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck and I couldn’t breathe on my own for 45 minutes. From that lovely experience I have very mild cerebral palsy, which gives me a slight tremor, some motor skills issues, and my hands don’t work as easily as they should. Now don’t get me wrong, I am very, very lucky, it could have been a much worse case of CP where I wouldn’t not be able to function without care or help. So I am thankful for my situation. Then on top of CP, throw in Hemophilia, yep I have a blood clotting disorder too. So right off the bat nothing has been easy for me, but it has made me stronger.
So when my wife and I got married and tried to have children, it would only figure that it was me that had the fertility issues. We tried to get pregnant and it wasn’t happening, so my wife’s OB-GYN suggested that I have a battery of tests run and referred me to a Urologist. So I had to go an have a semen analysis, oh what a joy that was, but I’ll leave that for another post. So after all of the testing it turned out a I had a varicocele. To repair this I had to have surgery, then hope for the best. I had the surgery, waited the allotted time to heal and we started to try again. I went for a follow up sperm count check and although my count had come up, it was still low and my motility was low. So trying to get pregnant became much more of a process. To give us a better chance the doctors suggested either trying In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF), which is where they take my sperm spin it down, select the best and manually insert them into my wife’s eggs and then insert the eggs into her womb, or we could try Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI), which is where they collect my best swimmers, spin them down into a concentrated “bullet” and then inject that into my wife’s uterus with a turkey baster. We really wanted to go with IVF because it had a slightly higher success rate, but it boiled down to insurance. My insurance would cover 6 IUI cycles or 1 IVF cycle. We went with the most bang for the buck and chose the 6 IUI cycles, because if the one shot at IVF didn’t work we couldn’t afford the $18,000 for another IVF try.
Now here’s where it gets interesting, every month we would go up to Strong Fertility Center and my wife would have her blood drawn and based on those results they would tell us when to give a shot to wife in her stomach. Then she would take the shot which would stimulate numerous follicles in her ovaries and then we would have to go back to the hospital where she would have to have an ultrasound done to see how many follicles she had and if any of them were the right size to try with the IUI. If everything went well, we would make a third trip to the hospital where it was my turn to be uncomfortable. They would hand me a collection cup, send me in a little room with numerous adult magazines and movies and wait outside while I did my thing. Then I would hand them my “sample” and we would have to wait an hour while it was prepared. Once it was ready they would go ahead with the IUI and send us on our way every damn time with the same “It only takes one!!” smile. Some months Lauren’s follicles would be over stimulated and she would have a cyst which cancelled everything to the next month, other months we would go through the whole process to come to a negative pregnancy test at the end of the month. However through going through this for months and months we were getting discouraged and tried anything we could to better our chances. I quit drinking beer and smoking cigars, and then here’s all of the other voo doo, mumbo jumbo hocus pocus stuff we tried, Lauren bought and started wearing a St. Gerard pendant, I bought more Green Luck candles from the Goya section in Wegmans than I can remember and lit it everyday and left it burning while we were “on the job” if you know what I mean. I drank this juice because it was supposed to increase this, she ate this because it was supposed to do this, we tried this position, we tried that position, we had Lauren put a pillow under butt, and on and on. We tried everything and everything we tried didn’t work, this plus all of the negative pregnancy tests were making us miserable, it was worse on Lauren because she was taking the hormone drugs which were making her have wicked mood swings. We did this intense trying for probably eight months before we were both at the ends of our ropes. We were down to our last IUI try and Lauren decided that all of this was just too much stress and suggested that we take a break before we killed each other.
So we took a break and tried to forget how much we wanted a baby. We got back to our normal, but I felt incredibly guilty that I couldn’t provide the one thing that both of us wanted desperately. So I continued to take a zinc supplement which made me pretty nauseous for the next couple of months. Then one day I was out on the back deck, and Lauren came down with a pregnancy test in her hand. So I just figured it was another negative test, it wasn't out of the ordinary for Lauren to just show me the test rather than utter the words "not this month" again. But this time something seemed different about her, so I looked and was pretty shocked to see that it was positive. So after 3 years of trying and all sorts of voo doo, we were pregnant.
So from that experience I guess I am semi-fertile, but I need all the help I can get. That was a very long story to boil down to the simple point of I'm giving up drinking for awhile to see if I can recreate the magic from the first time.
Bring on the Goya Luck candles, I'm ready!
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