Column 10 – Seeking two more footprints in the sand

Originally published by reminagine.me
Photography: Joe Donnelly

On New Year’s Eve, 2012, my wife and I pulled a U-Haul containing a few items salvaged from our many years in Los Angeles into an exorbitantly priced little cottage near Miramar Beach in the Santa Barbara village of Montecito.

Montecito is where super-rich celebrities such as Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres keep weekend estates that backup against the avocado-colored Santa Ynez Mountains while the shimmering Pacific Ocean spreads out in front. We were there because I was about to start an exciting new job heading up a non-profit investigative and narrative journalism site covering Santa Barbara.

This was particularly fortunate because the previous summer, Ingrid and I had spent her 37th birthday in Summerland, a cute and modest little beach town just south of Montecito. It was a perfect weekend—great weather, clean air, and an easy and romantic vibe all around. Walking down the beach one gentle afternoon with dogs running around and kids dipping toes in the water and dolphins frolicking just off shore, we mused out loud about living there.

After all, there was nothing keeping us in Los Angeles. Jobs, projects and identities as Echo Park bohemians had run their course. The time seemed ripe for change. Now here we were toasting the New Year and its new horizons. The next morning we carried our coffee down the stone steps to Miramar Beach and wriggled our toes in the wet sand while our 10-pound Chihuahua, Penny, chased birds to the water’s edge.

Aside from offering a chance to step away from the creaky constructs of our Los Angeles lives, the move to Santa Barbara provided Ingrid and I with something of a cocoon from which to hatch our biggest change—adding another human to our nuclear family.

Ingrid was eager to get pregnant by her 38th birthday, which would come 8.5 months from the time we arrived in Santa Barbara and a year after our sweet, Summerland sojourn. The reason for this is that egg production drops precipitously for women after the age of 38. As for me, my nearly half-century vintage sperm was behaving like cars in a demolition derby, going around in circles crashing into each other.

With enough time, one of my wayward darts would probably have found the bull’s-eye, but time was running out. So, we decided to step into the brave new world of reproductive medicine. It didn’t hurt that we’d be doing it in Santa Barbara. When you’re having trouble getting pregnant, the last thing you need is people asking everyday if you’re pregnant yet.

The move to Santa Barbara provided Ingrid and I with something of a cocoon from which to hatch our biggest change–adding another human to our nuclear family.

Speaking of which, these days, it seems almost anyone can have kids if they can afford to—gay couples, single women, infertile women, infertile men, dead men, even. Yes, sperm can be extracted post-mortem and used to inseminate a viable egg. Given all that, surely, we wouldn’t be the toughest nuts to crack.

We first tried artificial insemination, a relatively simple and inexpensive technique by which sperm is sort of cleaned up and sorted out and then placed in the uterus in close proximity to a just-dropped egg. In this procedure, sperm’s long and winding road to conception is cut short (scaled for size, sperm schlep a distance akin to driving from Los Angeles to Seattle in order to inseminate an egg). Artificial insemination pretty much has them knocking at the front door.

You can do this procedure once a month for however many months you care to. After we did it, Ingrid immediately got the flu and pretty much ejected everything from her body that wasn’t a vital organ.

Some time passed and we debated whether to take the next step—in vitro fertilization (IVF). While IVF is practically a household word now, the first “test-tube baby” was born in England in 1978. Louise Brown is younger than Ingrid. Since then, more that 5 million people are here as a result of IVF, making it easy to forget that conceiving a baby out of the womb seemed like something out of a dystopian science-fiction novel just a generation ago.

In lay terms, IVF works like this: Normally a woman produces one egg (sometimes two, obviously) during ovulation. With IVF, though, she is hormonally induced to produce multiple eggs. The eggs are medically ripened and retrieved just before they emerge from the follicles in the ovaries—the ovulation stage. On the egg extraction day, the sperm donor goes into a room and hopefully produces the sperm that will inseminate the viable eggs—in a lab, not in the uterus.

Then, you wait to see how things develop, literally. If it goes well, you’ll have an embryo that can be inserted into a uterus that’s been hormonally prepped for pregnancy.

All that says nothing of the major financial and physical commitment IVF represents. We were lucky enough to be able to afford the process and even though it would pretty much tap us out, we decided the risk was worth the reward.

The grueling physical aspects of IVF are born solely by the woman—weeks of hormone injections and other medicines to mimic, regulate, control, enhance and induce the body’s natural processes. What Ingrid went through to get us to the day of egg retrieval, while also commuting four hours a day to a job in Los Angeles, is testament to the pull of motherhood and the strength of women. All I had to do was jizz in a cup—old hat by now.

The facility that would handle our egg retrieval and insemination was in West Los Angeles. The night before, we stayed at a little bed and breakfast in Santa Monica and ate takeout from Patrick’s Roadhouse. There was plenty to be nervous about, but for some reason I was relaxed. I had a beautiful and loving wife, a tiny weird dog and supportive family and friends. Whatever happened would be just fine.

The next day, Ingrid went in for the extraction and I went into a room to once again masturbate into a cup. Whereas my previous, now well-documented adventures in cum-on-demand had been dull and perfunctory, this time felt almost inspired. I was in the masturbatorium all of a minute. When I left, my cup was full.

A week or so later, we got the news that 15 eggs had been retrieved, eight of them were viable and from those eight we had four A+ blastocysts—two male and two female embryo candidates. All in all, it was about the best we could hope for.

The next step would be implanting one of the embryos and hoping a pregnancy takes—a fifty-fifty proposition. Ingrid and I took a walk on the beach with Penny and contemplated the day we might have two more footprints in the sand.