Finally, finally our egg donor has signed the contract and we are moving forward again. There were many events that couldn’t happen until she signed and now it seems that they are all happening at once.

The first thing we need to do is to fill out an application for “complications insurance” for both the donor and the carrier. This is separate from the insurance that will cover the pregnancy. If either woman has a bad response to the medications they will have to take before we can attempt an embryo transfer, this is the insurance that will cover them.

I do not have a problem with this insurance; I think it makes sense. Other than the possibility of an adverse reaction to the medication, the doctor is going to be inserting a hollow needle into the donor’s ovaries. I can understand why we’d all want some coverage for that procedure.

However, I do have a problem with the (ridiculously expensive) insurance that we have to buy to cover the pregnancy. B. will be pregnant with my biological child. If she had become pregnant with my child through an improbable, random encounter, my insurance would cover her pregnancy (assuming I survived after Alberto found out). But since this pregnancy is planned and wanted, it is not covered. Although I understand the financial reasons to have such a policy, I think it sends an inappropriate message to society.

Despite the fact that the complications insurance isn’t in place yet, both women have been sent their medications (I hope this blog post will not be used as evidence in a denial-of-coverage hearing). We spoke with B. over the weekend and she will now give herself a daily shot of hormones in the leg. She said it wasn’t so bad, but I’m glad I’m not the one who has to get a shot every day. The shot will make her uterus into a more welcoming environment, like a Starbucks.

Instead of world music and soft lighting, her uterine walls will grow more robust. They will develop an infrastructure of capillaries that the embryo can cling to. Picture a cliff with vines growing on it. Now picture someone being throne off that cliff, clamoring to grab the vines on the way down. This medication grows more vines. I guess that's not really like a Starbucks.

Since the donor is anonymous, we don’t know much about her experience with her medication, but I know that it’s supposed to suppress her menstrual cycle so that there is a traffic jam of eggs in the ovaries. Another drug is supposed to “ripen” the eggs. Finally, just before retrieval, she takes something called the “Trigger Shot,” which is kind of like the starter gun at a track meet. It releases the eggs from their follicles and makes them available to that probing needle.

The final thing we need to do now is to make travel plans because the first attempt at an embryo transfer will be September 28 (give or take a day). Keep us in your prayers.

I haven’t posted in a long time because nothing is happening. So I decided today that I would post about the fact that nothing is happening.

The Egg Donor has had our contract for almost a month now. According to our surrogacy agency’s policy, she was supposed to have her requested changes back within five days. The agency has been in contact with her and assures us that she is working on the contract. They say that she has started her medications, which she is not obligated to do until the contract is signed. They say that she is just being “meticulous”.

Honey, I get meticulous. You are about to create a life. You will most likely never meet this child and you are entrusting him or her to a couple of people about whom you only have a few pages of information. But you knew the deal when you added your name to the registry of potential donors. It became more real for you when you were chosen and you got to see pictures of the two people who will raise the baby you will help to make. It got damn real when a doctor gave you a pelvic exam during your medical screening. You have had many chances to pull out along the way, but you have continued the process.

Sign the contact.

Under our original timeline – the timeline that included five days for donor contact review – B., our carrier, would have delivered the baby around the first of May, assuming the first embryo transfer was successful. This would have allowed Alberto to take his two weeks of paternity leave and then a small, unpaid leave of absence before his summer vacation started. If the first transfer was unsuccessful but the second transfer worked, the baby would be born about two weeks into Alberto’s vacation. In either of these scenarios, we would have had a few months with the baby before we would need daycare. Every week that you wait to sign the contract reduces the amount of time we will have with the baby before he or she needs daycare and makes it more important that the first transfer is successful.

Sign the contract.

In addition to the timing issues this delay creates, there is also the psychological effect of waiting. We don’t know if you are having second thoughts. We don’t have a back-up egg. None of the other donors we looked at were as good a fit. If we need to go with a different donor, that only adds more weeks to the journey. We keep having our weekly Skype conversations with B. and she’s waiting to move on to the next step of this process, too.

Please, sign the contract.

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.

Today we signed the Carrier Agreement, which governs our relationship with the surrogate. I can’t say too much about our carrier because of confidentiality clauses in the agreement, but I will disclose the one thing that caused us the most concern in this relationship. She lives in Tennessee.

We originally hoped that the carrier would live somewhere in New England. We hoped that we would be able to visit her regularly and attend all of the doctor’s visits with her. We thought maybe we would be too involved, and we would start to annoy her.

But with the surrogacy agency we are working with, you don’t peruse a list of potential surrogates like you do with potential egg donors. Instead, the agency matches you with a carrier they believe shares your expectations for the pregnancy. Both the intended parents and the carrier fill out a questionnaire. In order to be matched, both parties must agree on communications preferences - during the pregnancy and after the birth - and on more difficult questions such as abortion. We were asked if we would choose to abort a child with severe genetic defects (we would) or if we would “selectively reduce” a multiple pregnancy (we wouldn’t, unless the health of the carrier were at risk).

Other than those decisions, I’m not sure what criteria the agency uses to make a match. I’m not sure if our religious backgrounds or personality traits were taken into consideration. We have “met” the carrier three times now, via a video call through Skype. She is quiet, but friendly. We decided to move forward with her after the first call. She seems to be a responsible and conscientious person, who will care for our child while it grows inside her. As I mentioned before, she passed numerous psychological tests and had an extensive interview with a social worker before she was eligible to be matched.

There’s just that one geographical issue. If we had decided to wait for a different carrier, closer to home, we could have extended our wait time by six months or more. Because she is so far away, we will probably only be able to visit her once during the pregnancy. If she has a quick labor, we may not be able to attend the birth.

We expressed our concerns to the agency. They said that this is a relatively close match for them. A slight majority of their clients are from foreign countries. Clearly it is a much more difficult thing for intended parents to make it from Paris to Denver than it will be for us to make it from Massachusetts to Tennessee. According to the agency, almost 80% of their intended parents are able to be there for the birth of their child, even given the distances involved.

How does this work? We were told that we need to trust the carrier and her knowledge of her body. That is a little imprecise for me, but what can I do. It’s just another part of this process that I have to admit is out of my control.

I have asked Alberto to stop referring to my sperm as my “little buddies”. I think I’d prefer that people don’t discuss my sperm at all, but I guess it is a necessary part of this process. My sperm has been frequent dinner table conversation recently. Still, there’s something infantilizing about “little buddies”.

He asked what he should call them instead. I tried out the Swim Team, My Soldiers, SWAT, the Sailors, My Missiles, and The Force. Unfortunately none of those have stuck. Maybe we should just go with My Sperm.

In any case, the results of the semen analysis came back today and My Sperm are of sound body and fitness. They should be able to get the job done. Congratulations to me.

However, there was one odd thing on the report. Apparently, 82% of My Sperm have “irregular heads”. The doctor didn’t list this as a concern, but it’s still strange. I don’t know if they are too big (My Giants) or too small (My Roaming Gnomes) or shaped like a heart (My Lovers). As long as they’re not shaped like swastikas (My Nazis?).

I kind of want to see pictures. It would be like a yearbook (Class of 4/25/12, the next class will graduate in a few days, if the mood is right). Or maybe more like one of those moments from nature at the end of CBS Sunday Morning (Charles Osgood: “We leave you this morning at a recent ejaculation in Massachusetts, where a group of sperm are showing off their irregular heads.”).

I don’t think that’s one of the services offered at our clinic, though. Maybe someday I’ll have access to a microscope and some privacy. Until then I’ll be wondering what’s wrong with My Missiles’ warheads.

We have chosen an Egg Donor. Unsurprisingly, she is Colombian. She has impeccable cheek bones. She is smart and healthy. I can’t reveal too much identifying information about her, but one factor that lead us to choose her from the Egg Bank over the other twelve or so Latina donors was that she listed Scrabble as one of her hobbies, with the added information, “I rarely lose.”

Bring it on Egg Lady.

Actually, the donor and I will probably never play Scrabble with each other. There are differing philosophies about “open” vs. “closed” donation. Our surrogacy agency is a big proponent of open donation, which is when the donor and the intended parents meet and exchange contact information. The intended parents may or may not share regular updates on the child’s life with the donor, but if the child eventually and at an appropriate age wants to contact the donor, he or she can. The agency believes this is the best way to answer a child’s questions about his or her origins and that he or she will feel more comfortable having the option to meet his or her biological mother.

Our IVF clinic feels that closed donation is best. They believe in a donor’s right to privacy and that the donor should have the right to move on with her life. She will process her feelings about donation and trust that the intended parents are raising their child in a loving environment. The clinic retains the genetic information on the donor, so there is no medical reason why it would be necessary to contact her.

We are open to either type of donation. Ideally, we wouldn’t meet the donor, but we would have her contact information in case the child wants to get in contact with her in the distant future. We want to think of this child as wholly ours and we don’t want to know the biological mother enough to wonder if he or she got some trait from his or her mother. At the same time, we aren’t willing to pass up a good, Scrabble-playing donor, based on her philosophy on open vs. closed donation.

Because this donor did not come from either the IVF clinic’s or the surrogacy agency’s donor pools, but from a third party, I am not sure what her preference is. But either way, we have chosen to work with her and we will work with her choice on this issue.