Precious Bodily Fluids
Here’s something that any spy, documentary film student, or reporter knows: a clipboard and an attitude of “I belong here,” will open almost any door. A camera will do the same thing in a lot of situations. You’d be amazed how far you can go just by saying “I’m with the film crew. Didn’t Shelly* clear it with you?”
*There is always a Shelly (or Donna, or Robin, or , occasionally, a Rhonda). She’s not the technically the boss, but she’s running things all the same.
Anyway, in all my time spent as a filmmaker and journalist poking my nose into places my nose had no business being poked, it never occurred to me that a vial of semen would be equally as effective in opening doors as a clipboard. But it makes sense. We seem to be hardwired to avoid each other’s precious bodily fluids. Doubtless some of you feel icky just reading the phrase “vial of semen.” And so it tracks that waving a container filled with suspicious liquid* and papered with orange bio-hazard stickers above the desk of a doorkeeper while shrieking “this is time sensitive material!” would shake the willpower of the most stalwart Rhonda.
*Semen. If you are still having trouble, you might want to just skip this post. And this blog. And, possibly, this human existence. We are wet sacks of goo, folks. Sometimes it leaks out**
**Of course, this does not keep me from fainting at the sight of it, or indeed, the mere idea of it.
See, the problem is, our little mountain town has a lot of walk-in clinics that specialize in broken wrists, sprained ankles, busted knees - it’s a ski town*. There’s only one place that specializes in preparing a semen sample for IUI, and that place is thirty minutes from our cabin - with nothing in-between but a mountain pass, pine trees, and snowplows committing flagrant acts of socialism.
*So far as I can tell, people don’t actually have babies in our mountain town. They have babies elsewhere and move here, where they immediately strap skis to their toddlers and send them screaming down snowy 30 degree slopes.
In order to remain viable for the procedure, a semen sample has to be delivered to the lab within EXACTLY thirty minutes. We’ll circle back to that in a few minutes, but first we must also note this - the sample must remain warm - body temperature or as close to it as possible.
“There is a Need in Certain Fields for Soft-Sided Thermally Insulated Carrying Cases”
You’d think that the doctor would provide a tool to achieve semen warmth maintenance. After all, the modern pizza-warming sleeve was invented in 1984. I can buy phone-warming sleeves at TJ Maxx for under ten bucks. But, alas, American medical science has not kept apace of smartphone and fast-food pizza technology. No fancy 1980’s tech for us - we must keep our fluids warm by sticking our samples under our shirts or down our pants and hoping that traffic* or weather isn’t bad going over the mountain pass to the hospital.
*We must also hope there is no road construction which completely shuts down the windy two-lane mountain blacktop, as happened to us on one of the three occasions we’ve tried an IUI procedure.
And so it’s in this state - five minutes over a thirty-minute time-limit, with a rapidly cooling semen sample lodged in my armpit, that I routinely burst, sweating and anxious, through the doors of our little hospital. And it’s at that moment that I run face first into the wall of paperwork, procedure, and Sudoku puzzles that is that establishment’s Rhonda.
Behold, I Stand at the Door and Knock
Let’s backtrack slightly. At every doctor’s visit (of which there have been at least ten) Rachael and I have been told that the time sensitive nature of the semen sample is extremely important. We’ve been advised, time and again, to tell the front desk folks at the lab that the sample needs to go back immediately - the better to safely ensconce my little swimmers once again in a welcoming environment.
Rhonda has not gotten this message. Rhonda, in three different incarnations, has stonewalled us with a labyrinth of paperwork - despite our protests that we were following procedure given to us by our doctors.* It was on our third IUI attempt that I finally realized I could utilize my sweaty anxiety, increasingly high voice, and vial of bodily fluid as a kind of passkey to the oft sought but rarely found promised land of “the lab.”
“This is time sensitive,” I shrilled, dripping forehead flop sweat all over Rhonda’s nearly-complete Sudoku* puzzle.
“I understand, sir,” said Rhonda, with admirable calm in the face of the deluge. “But you have to sign in. Just take this clipboard-”
“This is time sensitive,” I shrieked again, this time sloshing my vial in her general direction. “Time sensitive!” Having found all my previous arguments untenable in the face of Rhonda’s capable professionalism, I was determined to die on the hill of time sensitivity.
“Sir-”
“TIME. SENSITIVE. SEMEN,” I crowed, causing a passing eight-year-old girl to burst into tears. Rhonda eyed the child(and her scowling mother) with weary resignation and then pressed the intercom button on her desk. Within a few seconds I was in the lab, where the technicians thoroughly berated me for my tardiness.
*Rhonda is just doing her job, and doing it well. I don’t fault Rhonda. I understand that there is some concern that the correct semen is placed into the correct cervix. This insistence on identification is perfectly reasonable. But it does seem to be a case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing. This phenomenon will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time navigating the American healthcare system lately.
**Rhonda does the extra-hard versions. Because Rhonda is almost certainly smarter that you, and definitely smarter than her boss.
All’s Well That Ends in Failure
I try to move through the world as gracefully as possible. I don’t believe that the customer is always right, I don’t believe in berating minimum wage fast-food employees for incomplete orders, and I don’t believe in asking for the manager. But sometimes you just have to shriek incoherently about semen to get things accomplished in this world.
As it turns out, my efforts were wasted. My sample ended up having to be scrapped - not because it cooled or because I missed the time window - but because I’d had a terrible cold the week before and certain chemical things failed to happen.*
I don’t believe in karma, per say. But maybe next time I’ll just take a clipboard and a camera, and tell Rhonda I’m there to film a new hospital commercial.
Just in case.
*You thought you’d get away without an overly-gross medical description, huh? No dice. The liquid parts of my semen failed to separate from the solid parts - something that needs to happen in order for the sample to go into the machines.
This blog post is part of an ongoing series about fertility, adoption, and the trails and tribulations therein. If you’ve experienced anything like this, or you found this post helpful (even if it gave you a chuckle in a dark time) please share with your friends or let me know in the comments! -A-