People' Instinctive Travels Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

Hey Nugget,

Just your old man here, picking up where he left off on the subject of how you came to be. To recap, we tried everything and nothing but buttsex* seemed to work. 

*Not scientifically proven but try telling that to my heart. 

Anyway, we'd had a couple miscarries and it was time for medicinal intervention, and not the wacky tobacky kind. There are these doctors called, well, doctors, and they specialize in making babies out of thin air. The same way David Copperfield makes a card appear in your pocket, Penn & Teller can put a cut-to-all-hell woman back together again, and Jesus was an expert at finding coins behind ears, these saints will McGuyver a baby for you out of two rubber bands, a Zagnut wrapper, and spoiled plums. It's like wizardry. But we'll get to that part later. 

The first questions we needed to answer were 1) Where do we go for help, and 2) How will we pay for it? I'm not rich, as you can probably tell by how I constructed that last sentence. A Harvard man would know how to get that grammathically correct and he wouldn't have to make up words when his vocabulary fails him. 

So, where to go? In our case there were three options. The largest health system in town has a fantastic place that friends and family have used with success. The slightly smaller rival system has a very well respected center as well. We also had friends who used that facility. To make things even more difficult, there's a third option in town where a local guy named Fast Eddie guarantees a baby "within three months of purchase" and "with relatively similar skin color". Price was right, reviews were terrible. 

We picked the first option and couldn't be happier. Well, that's not true. In fact, that's an overused phrase. We could have been way happier for a variety of reasons: Less expensive, quicker, free massages, Mellow Yellow cans in the vending machines. You get my point. 

For our first attempt at making you we pumped your mama full of hormones and whatnot, attempting to make her ovaries take their loafers off and relax. A relaxed ovary is a happy ovary and a happy ovary is going to produce so many eggs you'll be giving extra to friends. Those friends will be like, "Gross! Why did you just dump them in my hands haven't you heard of a container?" but they don't know how expensive containers are these days, and besides, you're saving for a baby!

So with crazy good egg production comes an increased chance one of the sperms can Kool-Aid Man their way into an egg and make a human. Unfortunately it didn't work. 

So then they offered up a few more options to try:

IUI: This is where they place a tiny robot in the vagina and it does this little robot traffic cop dance that shows the sperm where to look for eggs. Works best on nerdy, rule following sperm and we've already decided you'll be a pro athlete so we passed. 

IVF: That's "In Vitro Fertilization". With IVF the doctor will spend lots of time inside the vagina getting to know it, mapping its many tunnels and surprises. Once they have the topography figured out they can properly spelunk an embryo into the correct spot. More on that later. The embryo, not the spelunking. 

ST: With ST (Shake Treatment) they get a double dose of the dad's sperm and after injecting the woman with it they spin her upside down and use a human version of Home Depot's paint shakers to distribute the sperm in "all the right places". The key to this treatment is knowing when to find another doctor if yours follows up "all the right places" with a high five attempt. Which is how we ended up doing IVF. 

The basic gist of IVF is that the doctor will stop letting your bumbling idiot bodies swing and miss at making babies and do the work for you in a lab. Once they create a little lab baby they might put it right into the mama or they may freeze the baby for later, ensuring they get a good seal on the ziplock because freezer burn is how things like Seal's face occur. 

(That was mean of your dad to say, by the way. Always remember that I say many things as jokes and would never hurt someone's feelings on purpose. Unless they deserve it, of course. Seal is probably a good person and I'm no Bradley Pitt in the face department either. But back to the story. I'll make up for this later by holding the door for a broad, or something. Oh wait! I had a gimme in the karma bank from the other day. I told someone with truly ridiculous hair that I liked it because I could tell they worked hard on it and were more than likely quite proud of it. So I'm even!)

((And probably like, a saint or something.))

(((It was a woman and she made her hair into the shape of a hat. It was flawless execution but pretty ridiculous nonetheless.)))

But one reason they might freeze an embryo instead of immediately putting it inside the mama is that sometimes you can have two seemingly healthy people who get pregnant but can't stay pregnant. And in that case they can do an additional test of embryos to determine whether or not they're good or bad. If they don't do that test, and simply dump (medical term) the embryo straight into the mama there's a big risk that the embryo was destined for miscarriage right from the get go. That just leads to another soul crushing moment a few weeks later and delays the chances of a baby yet again.

We were a great example of those types of potential parents, having less of an issue getting pregnant as we had staying pregnant. So we got tested to see if we had any genetic issues hiding in our bodies that would, to quote from the journal Annals of Obstetrics and Gynecology, "cause a Jeff Dunham". It turns out we had no such issues, my own genetic makeup scoring a perfect 100 on the Aryan Scale. Your mama's was pretty good as well.

This all means that we were ready for our first round of IVF. But right now it's probably time you take a break from reading and get back to growing all your important parts. A little advice before I go...

If you don't know the answer on a test, a good strategy is to go with C. If it's not multiple choice, or a question asking you to write down your favorite vitamin, you're screwed and you should write in a hilarious answer you can brag about while everyone else is graduating.

~ Your Dad