You, Me, and Dr. Sperm Makes Three
When all else failed, my wife and I turned to a man we were told was the very best
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My wife Sarah and I sit in the doctor’s office in front of a large mahogany desk. It is a desk belonging to a serious man who does serious deeds. Upon his walls hang citations and framed magazine covers praising his brilliance at joining seed to egg in such a way that it very often results in the birth of a human baby. No alien DNA here, that would be cheating. The thought of alien DNA, in addition to its intrinsic coolness, is a fine example of how my mind copes with stress. Whenever I’m in a stressful situation, like awaiting the latest results in a series of disappointing fertility tests, my mind wanders far into the absurd. I envision gray aliens impregnating my wife as they deride me for failing at my one biological duty and sole reason for being alive. The aliens are short and bald and smell like cheese.
What Sarah and I have endured over the past year is as alien to me as this extraterrestrial vision, and nearly as unromantic. It certainly does not match the blessed expectations of conception that my parents had drilled into my head, right after they stopped scaring the shit out of me with tales of unwanted pregnancies, and right before they started bugging me for grandkids. I have always imagined the act of conception as the very height of romance, complete with mood lighting and “Hungarian Dance” playing in the background.
Our names are spoken abruptly by a man standing in the doorway. It is a serious voice that snaps me out of my other-worldly reverie, a rich baritone that would be perfect for Schumann’s “Ich Grolle Nicht” or other art songs.
“Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht.”
Roughly translated: “I bear no grudge, even though my heart is breaking.”
We had decided it was time for a new fertility doctor, and the man we are meeting is the best (or so we’ve been told). He walks into his office and sits down in his command chair across the desk from us. He is really short, which I note because his voice does not match his stature. Despite this, he is what I guess women would consider handsome, and has a powerful presence designed to win respect quickly. He has intelligent eyes, a full head of black hair, and very muscular arms. He wears scrubs like he was born in them, and his black chest hair pops from the v-neck of his scrubs, reveling in its hairy, retro-style virility. My eyes cut to his eyes, then to his muscles, then to his chest hair, back to his eyes, to his head, to the gray aliens, back to his chest hair, to the orchestra playing “Hungarian Dance,” to his chest hair, and then to the door through which we can make a dash.
Ultimately my eyes come to rest on Sarah, who sits quietly awaiting the results of our tests. Her smile is soft and her face warm and hopeful. Her large brown eyes look at me and then narrow into a little squint that raises the corners of my mouth. I fell in love with that face. She would make such a great mom. I know how anxious she’s been about our meeting with the doctor, and the least I can do is control my thoughts and keep them positive. I have as much at stake as Sarah does, maybe even more. I donated a lot of sperm for this test.
“Let’s not waste each other’s time,” he says. That doesn’t sound good.
Sarah shoots me a glance, her eyes already filled with anxiety.
“With fertility, as with comedy,” he continues, “timing is everything.”
He pauses for what seems like a long time and then lets out a booming laugh that startles me. But Sarah laughs with him. I turn to see a look of relief on her face. He must’ve sensed her tension and made her relax with an icebreaker joke. Maybe this man is as good as all the magazine covers say he is. If that’s the case, then I should be laughing too.
I laugh, but by the time I do it sounds out of place. The time to laugh has passed. Is this the comedic timing he spoke of?
“Now,” he begins, with a controlled intensity. “Here’s what we know.” He lowers his voice so we’ll lean in close. The bush on his chest seems to increase as he speaks, the hairs multiplying with the promise of our own fertility. “We’re going to be upfront and honest with each other,” he says. “There’s no point in sugarcoating things. That would be a waste of your time, and of my time. Understand?” Sarah nods her head in agreement. She’s all in.
He tells me that my sperm have good motility (good swimmers) and good morphology (won’t be featured as circus geeks), but that there are too few of them. The doctor adds, “You’re playing in an arena, my friend, for a crowd of 100.” That inspired me to join in the fun.
“So there’s not enough baby batter to make a cake?” I say.
There is no sound but for the faint buzzing of the doctor’s cell phone. Sarah gives me her you’re-killing-me-softly look, and the doctor becomes stone-faced, all trace of humor gone from the once jovial atmosphere.
“This is a very serious matter,” he lectures me. “It is not a time for levity, and we never use slang when speaking about reproductive material. Please use the proper terminology to show some respect for what I do, or don’t talk about it at all.”
I apologize to him in a stunned sort of way. He turns to Sarah.
“Naturally,” he says, “I will play an important role in your artificial insemination.” He turns to me. “Mainly, my job is to make sure your wife doesn’t bring a big blonde guy with her to mix his in.” His laugh rings out and bounces around the small room. I look at Sarah for some acknowledgement that she also heard the most inappropriate thing I’ve ever heard, but her mind is elsewhere, probably planning her baby shower. I wish my mind could be.
“Ich grolle nicht.”
As we shake goodbye, he tries in earnest to break every finger and metacarpal in my right hand.
“Come back next Tuesday, and let’s see if I can knock up your wife.” He laughs again and slaps me on the back (really hard) and sends us on our way.
Sarah is silent in the passenger seat as I pull out of the hospital parking lot.
“Can that guy try any harder to be macho?” I ask, once I think we are a sufficient distance from the hospital.
“I thought he was nice,” she says.
“Nice? Did you hear what he said to me? Where did that guy learn his bedside manner?”
“All I care about is that he’s good at what he does. He can tell as many bad jokes as he wants, so long as we get pregnant. Right?” Sarah has become very pragmatic during this whole baby-making process.
What Sarah doesn’t appreciate is that I will be interacting with him much more than she will. I will have to make several deposits of semen so they can be spun in a centrifuge to make one good, concentrated batch. That means lots of quality time in Dr. Sperm’s lavatory for me.
I say “Dr. Sperm’s lavatory” for two reasons. First, I have nicknamed him Dr. Sperm because my main interaction with him will be handing him cups of, well, sperm. Second, I have already decided that I will produce the samples only at the clinic. I don’t want to do it at home, even though it means doing it in a bright, stark hospital bathroom with people waiting outside who know what I am doing inside.
But it’s better than doing it at home.
The headline “Man crashes while masturbating in car” flashes before my eyes for an awful split second.
At home would feel all wrong. It’s bad enough that I’ve had scheduled sex with my wife for the past year; having scheduled sex with myself in my own house is too weird to consider seriously. I also feel that as a general rule, freshness matters, plus it will eliminate the chance of something terrible happening, like getting into a car accident on the way to the doctor’s office, and the police finding me walking around dazed, covered with my own semen. Would they believe I had done the deed at home and was simply delivering the sample to our fertility doctor? Surely they would want to know how the accident happened. They would interrogate me under a 120-watt bulb and deny me a moist towelette. The headline “Man Crashes While Masturbating in Car” flashes before my eyes for an awful split second. Not for this man. No, this man will be safe within the confines of the white, tiled walls of Dr. Sperm’s bathroom. It’s like anything else in life: You pick your indignity and move on.
I complain about Dr. Sperm all the way home until Sarah tells me to shut up. I devise a million retorts to his jokes that I should’ve said at the time until I feel I’ve somehow redeemed myself.
Then something strange happens. I begin to empathize with Dr. Sperm. I begin to think that maybe I’ve judged him too harshly, that maybe there is a reason for his attempts to inject humor into the process, no matter how seemingly misplaced. Within the myriad sob stories and desperate pleas, perhaps he has lost sight of the humanity in his art. I can hardly blame him for that. He can’t dwell anymore on our particular misfortune as any other. Any couple who wants a child so badly that they are willing to seek him out is deserving. Doctors need some distance between themselves and their patients because without it, Dr. Sperm might empathize with us too much. He might hear what remains unspoken in our house, of lifting the toilet lid for the nth-consecutive month and seeing the diffused, reddish tint that tells me we’ll have to try again. That is the only communication.
Well, next month will be the one, next month for sure. The color red becomes the enemy, the harbinger of further disappointment in our attempts to have a child. It becomes the color of heartbreak. The doctor would have to walk down the steps with me to where Sarah stands in the kitchen, walk behind her and gently place his arms around her. He’d have to tell her that it will be okay and that he loves her, all without saying a word. He’d have to hear the sounds of a house filled with children as the pitch bends and drops as they move away from us, farther and farther into the dark distance until the sounds disappear completely. He’d have to see the lights in each bedroom, each one where a child would sleep — each the sole justification for buying a home with more rooms than Sarah and I would ever need — and then watch them go out one by one. The tiny socks and shoes, gone. The toys from birthdays that never came. Everything slipping into an uncertain, lonely future.
Months pass as I am ambushed by horrible thoughts, ones I must forever keep to myself. I envision the family I could have if only I had married someone else. I see the face I fell in love with become pixelated as I gaze at it too closely, deconstructing it, stripping it down to its genetic components. I fight the thought and win; it dies, but not before it infects me.
Through all of this, I perform my many clandestine, lunchtime trips to the fertility clinic to “do the deed,” as I’ve taken to calling it, with pornographic magazines I’d never buy in a store without wearing a disguise. The sessions are taking longer, each one longer than the one before. I can’t feel anything anymore. I need more stimulation. A month later they put a TV and DVD player in the room. I pop a DVD into the player. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve seen this one.
Each time I slink out of the bathroom, I see Dr. Sperm walking down the hallway in his light blue scrubs.
“Hey, no Big Blondie last month.” He gives me a thumbs up. I can’t think of any one of those million retorts.
Another month comes and goes. Sarah and I have ceased having sex to save my sperm for the inseminations. The doctor said this isn’t necessary, that one week of abstinence is enough, but I don’t want to take any chances. Sarah was four days late last month and we celebrated too early. We don’t want to do that again.
There’s blood in the toilet again, so it’s back to Dr. Sperm’s lavatory. I’ve decided to shake things up a bit today. I choose a film about a fortyish social studies teacher instructing her ingénue about the ways of the natives of ancient island Lesbos. I have a meeting in an hour about the fee schedules for unified managed accounts — our new investment vehicle — and I can’t concentrate. I walk out of the room 40 minutes later with my cup. I hear a deep voice crack another joke that now seems filled with malice.
At home, things seem fine, but they are not. Sarah and I both have fertility problems, but I find myself thinking about how hers are worse than mine. The doctor can compensate for my problem, but little can be done about hers, making it the chief culprit of our conception troubles. Lately, that’s all I can think about when I look at her, that it’s more her fault than mine. I don’t want to have this thought, but I do.
More red, more porn, more samples, more jokes from Dr. Sperm, more Dr. Sperm trying to crush my hand.
I’m not sure how many more rounds of this I can take. It’s expensive, it’s time-consuming, and I’m having less sex than ever, which is completely counterintuitive considering that we’re trying to have a child. Worse, the whole thing seems pointless and has propelled me into existential despair.
That’s why I’ve decided today will be my last session. Maybe it’s the lack of positive results, or maybe it’s the inappropriate remarks and jokes from our doctor, but I suddenly feel that this is all Dr. Sperm’s fault. He is supposed to be the best, but instead of getting Sarah pregnant, all he did was hone his stand-up comedy act at my expense.
I know what’s going to happen now: I’m going to walk out of here with my cup, and Dr. Sperm is going to walk toward me, chest hair popping out of his scrubs with his perfect smile and perfect hair and perfectly tanned skin. He’ll nod to his nurses and patients as he prepares to emasculate me with a well-timed zinger. I think it’s time to find out if he really has a sense of humor after all. Right after I finish washing my hands, I put a dime-sized dab of soft soap in the center of my palm.
I know what I’m about to do is childish. It is probably the most childish thing I’ve ever done, even more than when I was six-years-old and convinced Richie Harvey that his mom’s anus was the Sarlacc Pit on Tatooine, and he had to send in his Jedi Luke Skywalker action figure to kill it. My justification is this: since having a child is good, and the word “childish” contains the word “child,” doing something childish is inherently good.
Somehow, I want this man to like me, which is the biggest indignity of all.
I walk out of the bathroom and down the hall. Dr. Sperm walks toward me, teeth glistening, chest hair teasing the V-neck of his shirt, right hand clenching and relaxing as the warm-up to our handshake. I continue toward him, grinning ear to ear, with my soft soap hand extended. He approaches and reaches out to grab my hand, but his annoying level of self-confidence breaks my resolve and I pull it away. Somehow, I want this man to like me, which is the biggest indignity of all. I shake his hand with my left and make a speedy exit. I arrive home, eat dinner, and plant myself in front of the TV.
Sarah and I say nothing to each other because there’s nothing to say.
Some indeterminate time later, I find myself in a strange dream. It is autumn and the weather has just turned. It’s getting cold. Any hint of youth has gone out of my face. My skin is ruddy yet fragile, and my body aches all over from arthritis that has invaded my spine and joints. Sarah lies next to me. Her long, dark hair and figure that once made me drive nine hours to see her are now only memories. Her presence holds the more valuable feelings of comfort and security: the warmth of her body, the chill of her feet pressed against my legs and how they draw warmth from me. Our aged bodies fit together perfectly, molded into our shapes by time and pressure. We are happy and our lives lack nothing because we have each other. The fears of growing old and childless have passed into that space between a fearful dream and the waking realization of safety.
As I lie next to Sarah, I hear a voice, deep and low, a powerful baritone that calls to me by name. It is accompanied by music, a song I used to know. It is in German.
“Ich Grolle Nicht!”
It’s true, I bear no grudge. I am perfectly happy. Society tried to convince us that we needed a child to be happy, but we proved society wrong. We have led a rich and rewarding life without children. We’ve traveled the world, we’ve dined lavishly, we’ve taken language classes together, we’ve been involved with a local theater, and performed charitable works. We’ve never had to worry about babysitters or cleaning diapers. We haven’t spent years of our lives preventing other human beings from committing suicide on a daily basis by drowning, drinking pipe cleaner, electrocution, or jumping out a window because they think they’re Ant Man.
I want to stay where I am, but the voice will not allow it. I rise from my bed without waking Sarah, and I notice I do so without pain. I stand straight and tall, like I did in my youth. I follow the voice out my front door. I do not feel the cold. I feel nothing but warmth and an anticipation that something new and great is about to happen.
Light streams from the side of the house. I follow it and turn the corner. The music crescendos.
“Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht!”
In the middle of my flowerbed stands a burning chrysanthemum. Above it hovers a blinding light. When I shield the glare, I can make out golden hairs, more numerous than the stars, popping from a glowing chest under a V-neck scrub shirt.
“Abraham!” the voice booms. “Let’s see if we can knock up your wife!”
“Sarah is ninety years-old,” I shout. “You couldn’t knock her up when she was in her thirties.”
He laughs a righteous laugh. “Was it my fault you have the Bill Buckner of testicles between your legs?”
Ouch.
“I can impregnate anyone!” the voice booms.
“How?”
“I mix in my own divine seed! Your son will have a flowing mane of chest hair, and a lucrative career as a jockey!”
I wake. It is morning and Sarah is not in bed. I hear the toilet flush. I prop myself up on my elbow. She turns the corner and into my view. She looks like she’s been crying.
“Is everything all right?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says through a sob. “Abe, I have a surprise for you.”
“What?”
She holds up something that I don’t recognize initially. Instead I focus on her face which has a look of joy and relief, but mostly joy. The thing she holds comes into focus. It’s a pregnancy test.
“It’s positive,” she says through a giggle.
“Really?” I say. “But how?”
“I guess the man really is a genius.”
Genius? This is almost too much to bear. But then it sinks in. We’re having a baby. This is not a dream, this is not a construct of my imagination. This is the single greatest moment of my life. “Oh, Sarah!” I exclaim, and run to her. I grab her and hold her and swing her around the small space near our bed.
“Thank you, Abe, for going through this with me. You know, all the treatments. You didn’t mind too much, did you?”
I don’t know if she realizes what an excellent question that is. I used to think that nothing could ever take the fun out of doing the deed. Turns out I was right.
“There’s one last thing I want you to do, Abe.”
“What is it?” I’m giddy with excitement.
“If I tell you what it is, will you promise to do it?”
“Yes.” There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her.
She tells me to go back to Dr. Sperm’s office with a gift and a card, and thank him for getting us pregnant.
Ich Grolle Nicht.
