Unsafe Sex
12:15 p.m. -- 2011-07-05
When I was growing up, everybody seemed to be obsessed with safe sex. There was a very strange advert on the telly (�Don�t die of ignorance�) that couldn�t actually show anything sexual, but instead featured quarrying, and a monolith being carved with the word AIDS on it. Apparently Mrs Thatcher ordered it shown in every commercial break... which is odd because if she�d appeared on TV herself every twenty minutes, nobody would have felt like having any sex anyway.
So. I am a product of my time. Avoid AIDS. And, of course, don�t get a girl pregnant.
I�ve said it before, but for the benefit of any new or recently concussed reader:
I don�t like children.
A person with less paternal urges, I really can�t imagine. Unless, perhaps, it�s King Herod. (Although, given that he died in 4BC, I doubt Herod really did order the �Massacre of the Innocents� in an effort to get baby Jesus bumped off.)
I digress. Where was I? Oh yes: I really don�t like children.
Maybe it�s the drool. Maybe it�s the all-hours screaming. Maybe it�s the vomit. Maybe it�s the nappies, and their contents. Maybe it�s the all the plastic paraphernalia that parents have to obtain, covered in stupid bear and butterfly decals, as if by becoming a parent you have yourself become retarded. Maybe it�s the vast environmental harm caused by each child. Maybe it�s the endless drain on your time.
Maybe it�s just not for me. Maybe I think too much - but I never lie to myself.
Strange, then, when I have thought this through and already decided what I want (or rather, specifically don�t) from life... to find myself having some very unsafe sex indeed.
And how very ridiculous that unsafe sex was.
For one thing, I was alone. I have written before about the horrors of the Hospital Wanking Room. I won�t bore you with a repetition, so let�s just say that it hasn�t improved since then.
Victoria was in for �egg harvesting�. She�d been on drugs for about a month. Nightly injections; first a single one in the stomach, and then a pair of injections in each thigh as well. �Down regulation� to give her an artificial menopause, and then something else to exhort the ovaries to cough up as many eggs as possible.
It is becoming clear to me that parenthood costs a fortune. The IVF is free for us... but the car parking at the hospital will break you. And yet, despite the high price, there are never any spaces available. I dropped Vicky off, and then loitered until a parking space became free. I was quite surprised, therefore, to find upon my arrival that they were waiting for me. Get thee to the Hospital Wanking Room and produce a sample, they said.
Now, I pay attention to words. I know a euphemism when I hear one. A sample? A sample implies that it�s not the real thing. That there�s more to (ahem) come. It�s a tester, or prototype.
Which really isn�t the case here, if you think about it.
I asked to see my wife first. After all, she�s about to be sedated and probed, and I wanted to make sure she was OK. This seemed to be a bit of an inconvenience to our team of technicians, perhaps in the light of my being late by five minutes, but they allowed me a couple of minutes. Well, you know what? Tough! The technicians at the baby factory seem to forget that in addition to being patients (and perfectly healthy ones at that), we�re people. Human beings. We have feelings.
In what followed there was professionalism, but there was no warmth. There was no love, sadly. No love.
So I went to the little Room Of Shame, with the �do not disturb� sign on the door. Locked myself in, and so on. Ignored the pile of magazines in the corner. Ew. I had provided my own entertainment, of a more transvestic nature. Sorry, and all that: I wish life was simpler, I really do. I wish I was... �normal�, but that was not the time to worry about normalcy. When the business of the day demands that a dollop of my semen is deposited in a small plastic pot, and that�s the most efficient way to get things done, who cares what goes on behind elaborately-ensured closed doors?
My orgasm was sufficiently copious, but I barely felt it. I was simply thinking I don�t want this. I don�t want this... It was kind of a low-point in my life.
I�m sure that every day, hundreds of pregnancies are announced to men who think Oh shit: I don�t want this! Sometime soon I could be one of them. For most of these reluctant fathers-to-be, however, there will have been some recklessness that reduces the possibility of sympathy. Lust, and a failure to use contraception. A failure to think about the future until it�s too late. Intoxication. Self-deception. Whatever.
I didn�t even get to have sex. I got the Hospital Wanking Room. In fact, I haven�t had sex for ages, what with periods of abstinence for optimum sperm production before tests, Victoria�s artificial menopause state, and a sneaking feeling that things gynaecological have come between us. Somehow, my wife�s sexy bits just aren�t for there for fun anymore. It�s quite upsetting � and a wasted opportunity when one of the many side-effects Victoria has suffered has been to develop rather large boobs.
The hated �sample� was taken away, and then I was able to join Vicky for the �harvesting� operation. My presence was optional, and as with all things at the IVF clinic, that means the woman gets to choose. She deigned to have me in the room. (�I�m not bothered.�)
It was cool in there (thank God, because the rest of the hospital is heated to discomfort) and in a comfortable kind of twilight. Consultant and technicians fussed over Victoria, keeping her lightly sedated and exchanging techno-speak about the �flushing� of follicles. Guided by ultrasound, on a screen that looked completely baffling to me, the consultant guided a probe around, and located a total of ten eggs. (Did you know that the ovaries aren�t fully attached, and can float around within the body? There was some confusion as to which was the left and which the right. Anyway, the harvesting job got done.) Like my sperm, the eggs were spirited away.
Then we got offered tea and biscuits, and we went home. Meanwhile, the sperm and the eggs were introduced, although they didn�t tell us how that might be done. Given that there�s nothing wrong with either the sperm or eggs (just old age...) do they simply put the two together in a pot and let nature take its course? I hope so. I know that for people whose sperm has low motility, the sperm may be injected directly into the egg, but that sounds repellent to me. I hope they didn�t do that. I wish I knew... but they never tell you anything.
I�m sure they�re very successful, and very knowledgeable... but they really don�t tell the �patients� enough. Victoria accepts it. It�s like she�s been hypnotised. Do this, swallow that, avoid the other... and she takes on every new instruction and indignity without question. I still have a sneaking suspicion that we don�t actually need this level of intervention... but there you are. Nobody seems to care what I think. It seems that there is no �snooze� function on Victoria�s biological clock. So full steam ahead, and damn the torpedoes.
It�s a funny thing, to be sent away and to be wondering what might be happening in a petri dish several miles away, for several days.
Meanwhile, Victoria got acquainted with the joys of Utrogestan. The packet says it�s to be taken orally, but her instructions are to shove half a dozen of the things up her front bottom, nightly. If I had entertained any hopes that we might resume lovemaking some time soon, these little gizmos have put paid to that.
I am not a sex maniac. Maybe when I was twenty-something. This isn�t about a need to have sex. This is about a loss of intimacy. In everything else, we were united against all-comers. In this, though, I always seem to be the bad guy. The one with questions, reservations and regrets.
A few days later, we were summoned back to the hospital. Nine of our ten eggs had fertilised, and two of them were of �particularly good quality�. Presumably this means they could grow up and become children who don�t always want to borrow money each time they visit; I don�t know. At this stage, the little tyke is called a �blastocyst�, which sounds like some kind of game you might have found in a seafront penny arcade in Margate in the 1980s, but isn�t.
Thankfully, infertility treatment has become a lot more responsible in recent years, and they don�t just heap all the embryos back in there in the hope that something will work. In fact, they recommended that just a single one went back. I agree with this recommendation; twins would be a disaster. If you�re going to be parents, at least try to outnumber the little bastard so that you can take it in turns to go out and do something sane and adult-oriented.
For once, in a minor miracle of mind-over-baby-obsession, Vicky agreed. Back to the same twilight room, back up in the stirrups, and the blastocyst is put in place. The gadget used for this purpose is then examined under the microscope, to make sure that the thing has actually left the tube... and you�re done.
Cleanly. Quietly. Efficiently. But with no love. No mystery. No romance. No surprise event. We were both there (again, my presence on sufferance) but Victoria wasn�t my girl. Instead, she was their patient. I am filled with sadness.
Then there was the business of deciding what to do with the other blastocyst. It is, as they had explained when describing the variable growth rates demonstrated by each sperm/egg combination �a living thing�. Not a baby, of course... just a few cells of �might-become�... but enough to warrant some pretty hard thinking. They advised against freezing it. Only about half of all embryos survive the thawing process, so they like to freeze a big batch, or none at all. The only real down-side to having just one on ice is that you might arrange to come in to the hospital to be implanted, and arrive to be told that it hadn�t survived after all. We decided to go for it anyway.
An implantation from frozen still counts as part of the first IVF �cycle�. On the one hand, this means that it�s an extra chance of me becoming a father (ick...), but on the other, it means it�s still part of our free treatments, and delays the day when my increasingly baby-obsessed wife will start selling things to pay for more and more IVF. So, we have a single blastocyst on ice, for use in the future.
It�s a strange thing to be immortal. I could smack into a motorway bridge support at ninety miles an hour this afternoon... and my genes could survive. That�s never been true before, but now it is. Of course, certain religions tell us that we can achieve immortality in other ways, but this is a method that science allows me to know will work, after a fashion. And it doesn�t require any choirboys to get felt up, nor popes who were in the Hitler Youth, so that�s nice.
But I have the second verse of Robert Calvert�s �Acid Rain� going round and round my head, now...
Fresh embryos are frozen
And placed in foetus banks
Heredity is chosen
By anyone who wanks
And there you have it: one on ice and one in Victoria�s belly. And now we play the Waiting Game. (Which makes me think of Homer: �The waiting game sucks. Let�s play Hungry Hungry Hippos.�)
Mostly, though, it puts me in mind of quantum mechanics, and the Uncertainty Principle. Schr�dinger�s cat, and the idea that something can both exist, and not exist, at the same time. When does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of states and become one or the other?
And the answer is: one morning, soon. A change in the chemical composition of Victoria's pee will indicate which branch of the future we all find ourselves in: the one where she is pregnant, or the one where she isn't.
Meanwhile, life has to proceed as a superposition of states.
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