September 25, 2012

If you believe life begins at conception, I am now a father of nine.

Our egg donor flew to Connecticut on Friday night and underwent lab tests over the weekend. Yesterday, she was “retrieved”. That means that the IVF clinic took eleven eggs from her. It seems weird to say that the eggs were “retrieved” – that makes it sound like I was hiding them in her ovaries for a while and now I want them back – but that’s the terminology they use. Of those eleven eggs, two of them “degenerated”. I’ve seen pictures of this online and it’s not pretty. They look like broken chicken eggs, like the doctor dropped them on the way to the petri dish.

The 9 remaining eggs were ICSI’d and resulted in embryos. Now we wait for them to grow. If they divide to 8 cells or more, they are eligible for transfer. B. leaves for Connecticut tomorrow and will undergo additional lab testing on Thursday. If all is well, the transfer could happen on Friday. If the embryos need a little more time to grow, it could be Saturday.

The embryos that aren’t transferred will be frozen. With current technology, a frozen embryo is just as likely to result in a pregnancy as a “fresh” one, so we will have these embryos available as a back-up if the first transfer doesn’t take.

It’s hard not to think about the embryos growing and dividing in Connecticut while I’m sitting here at my desk in Massachusetts. Is this the way the entire pregnancy is going to be?

September 21, 2012

I’m going to try not to let this blog devolve into a critique on The New Normal, but as we prepare for the events of next week, this week’s episode really hit home. In the episode, Bryan – in a fit of gay enthusiasm – buys a bunch of baby clothes despite his agreement with David not to buy anything for the baby until they are further along in the process. David is nervous about all of the things that can go wrong with the pregnancy and doesn’t want to fully commit emotionally until they are sure they are going to have a healthy baby.

Alberto has only bought two items of clothing for our unborn (actually, un-conceived) child. But we, too, had a pact that we were not going to buy anything until a sonogram detects a heartbeat. Like David, I can’t stop thinking about all of the things that can go wrong. I don’t think it’s because I don’t want to fully commit emotionally to this child (we’re way past that point already) but I think it is just dumb superstition that’s keeping me from telling people and buying baby items. (It might also be the knowledge that, unencumbered by a baby buying embargo, Alberto and I could go buck wild and decimate a Baby Gap.)

I’m not going to be able to stop worrying (I am my mother’s son). But I will try to take the tidy, wrapped-up-in-a-bow advice from the show and learn how to celebrate the wins and enjoy the ride. And the embryo transfer next week is going to be something to celebrate. We can worry about whether it was successful later. And then we can worry about the amniocentesis. And then we can worry about… Well, you get the idea.

There was another thing in the episode that hit home. At the end Nana says, “I assume you gays have wine?” and Bryan responds, “By the cask.” Amen to that.

September 11, 2012

Last night, I watched the pilot of “The New Normal” – NBC’s new comedy about a gay couple going through the process of gestational surrogacy. I think Ryan Murphy might be stalking me. Surely he got the idea for “Glee” from watching me sing to my cat.

But there are a lot of differences between David and Bryan’s experience and ours. First, and perhaps most importantly, David and Bryan are rich. Bryan drives a Range Rover; I drive a Honda Civic. Bryan shops at Barneys; my Barneys jacket was a “gift” from the lost and found closet at my previous place of employment (it had been there 4 months, don’t judge).

Because of their wealth, David and Bryan make the choice to expand their family through surrogacy very easily. It is a matter of weeks between their decision to become parents and their first meeting with a surrogacy agency. (The agency is called “Expanding Families” which is clearly a play on the name of “Company A”, the organization that asked me about my menstrual cycle on their questionnaire.) Alberto and I have been on this path for five years and there have been a number of setbacks and challenges that David and Bryan, with their “platinum plan”, will not have to face. For instance, when things go wrong with their first surrogate, whom Bryan refers to as a “womb terrorist”, they are able to move quickly on to a different carrier. If our relationship with B. devolves into a hostage situation, we’re screwed.

A second difference is that Bryan decides that he wants to be a parent in, like, five minutes. He sees a cute baby at the mall and decides he wants one too. David is easily convinced, but up until then he was content to raise puppies instead.

As I mentioned before, Alberto and I have wanted to be dads our entire adult lives. And as much as I love my cat, he is never going to be a substitute for a child. I think it is dangerous to portray David and Bryan’s quest to become parents as a pursuit of a status symbol because there are many people out there, even within the gay community, that see the recent increase in the number of gay families that way. I get that this is a comedy, and Bryan is already a collection of gay stereotypes played for humor (which I am not generally opposed to), but I don’t think it would have detracted from the comedy to have the intended parents have a more sympathetic or well-considered motive for wanting to become parents.

In the show's defense, it seems to have moved quickly beyond the topic of initial motivation and David and Bryan now appear to want a child for more noble reasons.

Finally, David and Bryan have chosen a carrier that lives in their community. I think it would be great to have B. closer to us so that we could see the pregnancy progress on a daily basis. (And I do mean daily, which is probably why B. will be glad we live a dozen states away.) Unfortunately we will have to make do with Skype, which I understand would be awkward for the TV show.

And now for one of the things that makes me think Ryan Murphy is living under my porch. David and Bryan decide to use David’s sperm because David is an only child and carrying on his DNA would be important to his family, while Bryan has a big family - brothers with kids and a gay sister.

 Ryan, while you’re under there, watch out for the woodchuck.