The fertility clinic called today to give me the results of the analysis of the Specimen. I already knew from my previous semen analysis that My Sperm are ready for action, but will need oddly-shaped headwear if attending a royal gala. But now I also know some details about this particular effusion, which is the one that counts.

First, my sperm count is 8x the normal level to be considered fertile. Apparently, under different circumstances, I could have been prolific as an Irish Mormon. (Is there a macho bravado thing that should accompany this revelation? Because I don’t really feel it. I’m more bothered about all that useless fecundity.)

Second, there are more golden retrievers than potheads. They are ready to be combed.

Third, they are at least average in speed, rating a 2.5 on a scale of 0-4. Not exactly Michael Phelps, but they will do. I’m not sure how relevant this is anyway, since we are using ICSI; you don’t have to be fast if you’re being shot out of a cannon.

Now, assuming encasing them in carbonite (or, whatever) doesn’t damage them, there will be no need for a second retrieval. Under the circumstances of that first experience, I’m happy to hear that.

The other medical procedures of Marathon day were more mundane than the production of The Specimen. After our consultation with the nurse and the IVF doctor, the nurse took B. to an examination room and another nurse led me off to the cheerful lab technician. Alberto was left in the conference room by himself.

After the specimen, I returned to the conference room for a brief moment, where Alberto declined to hear the story I posted yesterday.

Next, I filled out a questionnaire about my hematological history. If you’ve ever donated blood, you’ve filled out this same questionnaire – have you traveled to Africa (yes), do you have a tattoo (yes), have you had sex with another man since 1977 (duh), used intravenous drugs (no), had sex for money (no), had sex with someone from Africa (no, but this seems like an oddly racist risk factor).

I took the questionnaire to the phlebotomist and sat down in her chair. I noticed she was reading a Twilight book. “You’re a phlebotomist and you’re reading a book about vampires? Does that make people nervous?”

“Does it make you nervous?”

Um, it didn’t until you gave a creepy response to my playful question. She managed to draw six vials of my blood without its scent whipping her into a frenzy, though, so I’ll assume she doesn’t sparkle in the sun.

Again, I returned to Alberto’s room of isolation. The first nurse that we met with in the morning returned with a stack of paperwork. Apparently the regulations governing IVF are similar to the regulations that govern the purchase of real estate, because the only other time that I have signed that many documents was when we bought our house. The nurse gave a brief explanation of each form, because if we had read every word we would have been there all week.

After we had both signed all of the paperwork, my final nurse of the day took my blood pressure, listened to my heart and lungs and pronounced me healthy. Meanwhile, B. was having similar tests and procedures, as well as having a sonogram of her uterus and receiving instructions on how to take the drugs that she will need to take to prepare her body for surrogacy.

Finally we were all returned to the conference room where Alberto had been reading his book for three hours. The nurse told us that B. had a lovely uterus and it was her turn to blush. These are the sorts of intimate details that you don’t normally discuss with people you barely know, but I’m getting more used to it.

At the end of Marathon Day, as we were driving back home, we were excited about the next steps. We knew that the Egg Donor would have her medical testing the next day. If that was also successful, all the pieces would be in place to schedule the transfer.

The Specimen. It sounds like bad science fiction – like something reptilian, lurking. But yesterday morning a disconcertingly jovial man in a sterile hair net handed me a cup and told me to produce one. When I “produced” my specimen for the semen analysis I was able to take the cup home with me. I was able to “produce” in silence and obscurity. I was able to produce on my own timeline. Then I transported that specimen to the lab in my pocket (it’s supposed to remain as close to body temperature as possible).

But yesterday I had to have conversations about my specimen. I had a particular time and location to produce it. Theoretically I had all morning, but there were people waiting for me. People who saw me enter the bathroom and had a job to do post-production.

One of the questions I asked in the consultation room with the nurse earlier that day was if this specimen was going to be The Specimen. “Yes,” she said, “so make it a good one.”

I appreciated the tension-diffusing humor, but blushed anyway.

She led me down the hall and passed me off to the jovial lab technician. He had a few forms for me to fill out and told me there would be more to complete when I got back. What great foreplay and afterglow – forms.

He handed me a cup and had me write my name on it. We walked down another hallway lined with offices. All of them were filled with people who turned to watch me pass with my cup. The technician was in a great mood, laughing and making jokes. I was deadly serious.

He pointed to a room, “This one is my favorite.”

I tried to put that image out of my mind entirely. I pulled the door closed and got ready to produce. Unfortunately, there were a number of distractions.

Distraction 1: The woman outside the door talking about her son’s stomach flu. She and her co-worker – who must have had offices right next to the specimen room, lucky them – discussed her son’s symptoms in detail. Projectile vomiting, diarrhea, cold sweats. The works. I’m sorry for her son, but for God’s sake, I’m trying to make a baby here.

Distraction 2: The porn. In the rack on the wall, in full view, was a magazine with a naked woman on the cover, holding a gasoline nozzle in front of her crotch. I did not open the magazine, but I hope that in its pages the use of the nozzle never ventured beyond the realm of the symbolic. I do not pretend to understand this image or its erotic appeal, but it remained within my peripheral vision. Eventually, I turned the magazine over revealing all manner of other perversions.

In desperation I reached for the Purple Folder, labeled “Alternative”. It was offensively thin in comparison to the legion of materials on hand for the production of heterosexual specimens. It too contained all sorts of odd scenarios: naked man on the deck of a ship, naked man by a lamppost, naked man with a shotgun (presumably for the Log Cabin Republicans in the audience). I closed the folder, but used it to cover up the other magazines, so now I was only looking at a purple rectangle. (And can we talk about the fact that the gay porn was concealed, while the straight porn was out in the open? Can they get a filing cabinet or something?)

Distraction 3: Bette Midler, on the radio, singing “God is Watching Us”. Here I am, holding a folder full of gay porn, the image of the lewd service station attendant burned into my retinas, trying to produce, and Bette Midler is signing a song about how we are never out of sight of the Divine.

Eventually, miraculously, triumphantly, I was able to produce the Specimen. I took it back to the lab technician and handed it over.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

Today was “Marathon Day”. That’s what our IVF clinic calls the series of tests and procedures we underwent. But the medical exams were secondary to two of today's events: We met our carrier in person for the first time and I produced the “specimen” that will become our baby.

I’ll get to the specimen tomorrow (because there is a whole, absurd story there) but let’s start with meeting the carrier. For confidentiality, I’m going to call her by her first initial: B.

B.’s flight was delayed by 9 hours. She was supposed to arrive the night before, stay in a hotel and arrive fresh and rested at the clinic the next morning. Instead, she had to get up at dawn, catch two planes (one from a local airport the size of a small Costco) and then find the car service to take her to the clinic. Our surrogacy agency handled most of the arrangements; another reason not to do this without professional guidance and administrative coordination.

She happened to arrive at the clinic at the same time we did. When we saw her get out of the car, we thought it was her but we weren’t sure. I called out to her, with a question mark at the end of her name.

I wonder if we were what she was expecting. Skype is a great tool for our time, a great advance over the telephone, but it doesn’t give you the sense of someone like being in their presence. In our weekly video chats, B. had been shy, but gradually more open. In person we found her easy to talk to. Despite what must have been an exhausting journey already that day, she was friendly and warm. I think we were all more at ease than we expected to be, at least with each other; I think we still found the clinic to be a bit daunting.

We entered the drab, concrete-block building and were taken to a conference room where a nurse explained what we had to look forward to that day and in the days to come. I’ll talk more about the medical procedures in a future post, but we were able to clarify some things that I had been unsure of.

• We confirmed that the egg donor will be anonymous. We know an extraordinary amount of information about her, more than many people know about the people they make babies with, but we will never know her name. 
• We learned that the specimen I was about to produce would be frozen and would be sent away for testing before being used to create the embryos that we will transfer. I thought that a “fresh” transfer meant that the egg would be fresh from the ovaries and the sperm would be fresh from the testes. Apparently though, according to FDA rules, the sperm must be frozen and tested no matter the type of transfer, fresh or frozen. A fresh transfer means that the completed embryo was never frozen, but either of the two source cells could have been previously frozen. 
• We will definitely be using intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) so I don’t have to worry that my sperm is too gay to find and seduce the egg in the pick-up bar of the petri dish. 
• The transfer will occur in four to eight weeks. We don’t need to be present for the transfer, but we would like to be. Even though everything important will take place in labs and exam rooms, it will be nice to be able to see B. again and to hear first impressions of how everything went from her and the IVF Doctor. 

After all of the tests were done, we still had a couple hours before the car would return to pick B. up to take her to the airport for her third and fourth flights of the day. We walked a few blocks to have lunch at a nice place the nurse recommended. At lunch we talked about B.’s kids and her job and if she likes to cook. We talked about our families.

It was nice to be able to spend time with her. Our lives are intersecting with her life in such an unusual way. She’s not really a friend, or family or (yikes) an employee. And yet she will turn out to be one of the most important people we will meet. Since she lives so far away we will probably only see her in person twice more – once at the transfer, and then at the birth. I guess Skype will have to suffice.

As part of this process we have to write our wills. We have to make sure that there will be someone to take care of our unborn child if we die before the birth. If we die after the child is born and fully adopted by the non-natural father, there are laws in place to govern what happens to the baby. But an unborn child in the womb of a woman who is not his or her biological mother is a legal gray area.

Of course, there’s no reason to write a will that just governs what happens to the child in utero. We needed to decide what would happen to our child no matter when our untimely death might occur. We also needed to come up with a way to divide our meager assets.

We were concerned that we were going to start a minor territorial war when we started asking the questions necessary to make these tough decisions. Luckily when I gingerly asked my mother what she would want to happen to our child in the event of my death she exclaimed, “I can’t take care of it, I’m too old! And your father is ancient!”

Well, that’s one way to make a decision. Alberto’s parents expressed similar concerns about their age, but were not quite so absolute. And so, should we pass on before our time, they get the kids.

It’s a strange thing to contemplate. We know a lot of people who we think would be great parents and who we would trust to raise our children. But how do you ask someone to whom you’re not related to take on that responsibility. Especially given two sets of grandparents that intend to be very involved in the child’s life. You can’t ask your best friend to take on a child and four senior citizens, right?

Ideally, if Alberto and I were to die, I would want my child to be raised by Ina Garten. Yes, the Barefoot Contessa. Not only do I think that she and Jeffrey would be good, loving parents, but they live a magnificent life. They have a majestic house with a lush garden in the Hamptons. They eat simple, but delicious and creative foods. They fill their life with short excursions and exuberant picnics. She infuses small moments with fullness. And it doesn’t hurt that she surrounds herself with gay men.

Maybe I can bequeath my shelf-full of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks to my mother-in-law along with my child. But I don’t know where she’s going to get the house in the Hamptons.