I’ll try to use my personal journal to proceed in chronological order — we began knowing little about IVF, and research took some time.

I haven’t made much of it here, but my husband of 15 years is a guy, which I think, unless the PC terminology has changed recently, makes us a gay couple having children. Our new neighborhood of 60 or so houses has two other gay couples with children already in residence, so we’re not unusual. This street has many children already and more on the way since the schools are considered top-notch and we’re within easy commuting distance of San Diego’s high-tech employers.

The first reason we started to think about kids was the experience of raising two puppies. I haven’t had a pet since I was five, and the sense of taking care of and training a young animal is similar enough to raising children that I realized we would enjoy it (after the initial unpleasantness!). We had both had some desire for kids earlier in our lives, but the hurdles then seemed insurmountable and of course we were busy with work.

First entry from my personal journal, June 5, 2019:

I checked again to see if it’s too late for us to have a kid of our own. No *outright* reason not to, except the $150-200K to order up a donor egg, IVF, and surrogate mother, *and* I’d be feeble long before the child left for college. Not that upper class families shrunk from sending their kids to boarding school at 12. If you’re not independent enough by then, you soon will be. 🙂 Kid would get a nice trust fund and of course lots of attention. I can’t get anything done anyway, might as well nurture, no?

As of two years ago, we were both retired from normal full-time work, so it now seemed practical to handle the baby years. Half the stamina, but two people home most of the time!

I found some online sources, and a surrogacy agency supportive of gay couples (and run by two gay dads.) Near enough, in LA, so I talked to them and they referred us to a West LA IVF doctor to get started.

July 2 2019:

I was going to write something about our Skype meeting with the LA baby consultants coming up later, but running out of time. We’re far from designer babies, but the current crude technology and regulation does let you 1) seek out and pay a premium for the egg donor with rare characteristics (it’s a hoot that Ivy League Asian women are the gold standard for certain seekers and so get the highest payments), and 2) you can’t do gene tests of the eggs yet without damaging them, but you can test embryos by removing a few pre-placental cells early, seemingly doing no harm at that stage. By choosing those without gross abnormalities you can reduce miscarriages and select for sex. We might try for twins, actually, for that 1.5x the costs for 1 and the sibling experience….

[Husband] is onboard. Which suddenly changes our plans for later life. Sort of like a Hail Mary pass on your last down, I’m starting to downgrade my expectations for my own work to put effort into the fresh new entrants in the race. They, at least, won’t be crippled by a lack of early support.

We found out later that multi-embryo surrogacy (hoping to improve chances of having one, but often ending up with twins) is no longer considered wise; this is partly because the technology has improved so 50-60% of screened and well-timed implantations result in a healthy birth, just as high as for multi-embryo attempts which risk twins and complications. Our meticulous IVF doctor won’t do multis anymore. This became the consensus in the last five years or so. Other changes in the technology made it just as safe to freeze embryos after 5-7 days of development, which allows the implantation at the perfect time for success. So our process was 1) freeze sperm, 2) have the egg donor provide eggs, and 3) fertilize eggs with sperm via ICSI (which is now standard for late-in-life IVF — ICSI is “intracytoplasmic sperm injection,” where the lucky sperm is injected into the egg by a very fine needle.) The resulting zygotes are cultured and observed for 5-7 days, graded on an A-F scale for viability, and genetically tested to improve likelihood of a successful birth.

In hindsight, the natural process for prime-aged young people is error-prone and hit-or-miss, resulting in early miscarriages and other bad things. Nature’s Way includes Nature’s Punishments. Typically the natural way is to try many times and succeed enough to keep the species going, and the winnowing process sifts out most”tries” — either the egg doesn’t get fertilized, or if fertilized doesn’t implant, or if implanted doesn’t develop properly, and is expelled via silent miscarriage before the mother is even aware of being pregnant, or develops long enough for underlying defects to cause a later miscarriage. The latter feel like tragic losses, but it’s part of the natural process and no one’s fault.

We had both done sperm tests. [Husband] did fine, I did not — my test report was stamped “azoospermia,” which means zero spermatozoa in the sample. Turns out my decade of testosterone supplementation (“exogenous testosterone”) was the cause; complex feedback loops shut down both endogenous production of T and sperm production, which made drug companies run studies of such sufferers hoping to find the male Pill. No such drugs were found, but the cause and recovery are thoroughly documented in medical journals.

So I was hoping I could catch up with time and treatment — younger men in the same boat can have fertility restored in 3-6 months, but as the doctor warned me, that doesn’t mean an old man can recover as quickly, or at all.

[Husband] went ahead and started the process by driving to LA to deposit his contribution.

Aug 8 2019:

Project stall: [Husband] drove all the way to West LA (2+ hours) to make a 10:30 AM appointment to give a sperm sample for freezing. Two hours later, he’s told “we need more than that, could you come back next week?” The legally-required FDA paperwork only lasts 7 days so you can’t wait longer or you have to pay for it again (several hundred dollars?) So he goes back Tuesday leaving here at 6 AM. At least the doc complimented him on his youthful motility.

Meanwhile, I’m just working on producing a gamete or two. Tap tap tap.

[to be continued: “How We Did It,” in installments.]