What’s it like to be the partner of someone going through IVF treatment? This week, I sat down to discuss the experience with my husband, E. Like me, E is in his mid-30s and has never had kids before. Here’s what he told me.
We discussed IVF very early in our relationship – it’s been with us basically from the beginning. On our first date we talked about cancer in our families – I lost my mom about a year before you lost your dad, you told me about Lynch syndrome – and we talked about having kids. So we must have talked about it, too. We all get to places in different ways. So, if having kids couldn’t work for you the old-fashioned way, it made sense that we’d take a different route.
I didn’t feel at all panicked when we got started with IVF. I was excited. I told my friends and family that it was exciting news, whereas you sometimes worried that people would judge us for it. You’re doing a science experiment that makes your own baby; it’s kind of cool. In some ways it was more straightforward than doing it naturally, in that we didn’t have to wait every month to see if you were going to get pregnant. We didn’t have to think about timing or rhythm, we didn’t have to deal with the disappointment of you getting your period. To an extent, we were lucky to avoid that stage of the process.
I wasn’t too worried when I went for my sperm analysis at the hospital. First, they give you a little plastic cup. They take you into a room where they show you where the pornographic materials are. In this room it was an assortment of magazines with “barely legal” themes and an Apple TV with videos that mostly had words like “spunk” in the title.
I thought that was weird. Who selects the materials?
The room also has a Lay-Z-Boy recliner of indeterminate age, and on top of the recliner is something that looks like a giant dentist bib for you to sit on. I’ve never done that before. It wasn’t my ideal scenario for creating new life.
Anyway, you do your thing, and there’s a small window the size of a dog door, but at eye level. You open the door and put your specimen in, and then as soon as you close the door you hear a person on the other side opening another door and taking the specimen out. I don’t think that’s the same person who selects the pornography.
My results didn’t surprise me: I had a normal sperm count, but I also had a slightly above-average number of abnormal sperm, which made sense because I consider myself a little weird. I thought the genetic testing was interesting. I’m not going to do 23andMe or a similar test, because I’m worried about them selling my data, so I liked learning those things about myself in an environment where I knew they wouldn’t be using my DNA to start a clone war.
When it came to the injections: you seemed to have a lot of anxiety because you didn’t know what was going to happen, so you were a little scared, and you also told me at first that you felt it was something that you had to do on your own. I would have been OK with that, but I was also very happy when the time came around and you asked me to help, because I wanted to be part of it. I didn’t mind the disruption to our life – if you needed me to be home because we had to do the injections at a very specific time, I was happy to be home. To be honest, the only thing I’m still upset about is the shelf. I really wanted to build that shelf, and we still don’t have it.
When our results weren’t great in the first round, you were worried. You were talking about not doing it again, but we thought through it and decided to persist. The second round was definitely harder for you. I didn’t have to do much more, you just felt much worse from the extra hormones.
Because we’d only been together for a relatively short amount of time, a lot of things came up in our relationship in the IVF process that hadn’t before. We had to discuss a lot of personal things that we hadn’t before discussed – some of them very intimate, bordering on gross. Our patience with each other hadn’t been tried this much in our relationship before. But this also taught us that we can get through stuff together. We focused on what we have to do for the route that works for us. And hopefully everything will turn out the way we want it to.
