Everyone knows what men in general are going through now a days. We are automatically the villain in a hero story. Many people don’t know we men actually have honest feelings about a wide variety of issues, but there is one issue the masses have forgotten about.
That issue is called being the man during Infertility. Everyone forgets that we men are the other half of a pregnancy. We men, that are man enough to stand strong with the women they love, the woman that we want to build a family with, the women that creates our legacy.
Before I get into the whole reason why I am writing this, I’d like to give you a bit of back story of the type of man I am. I am a very hard-headed person that’s ultimately protective of my family. Well, my wife, 2 dogs and future baby birds. I had a very difficult experience than most growing up, as in being through 2 divorces by the time I graduated high school and also everyone in the two generations before me all divorced. So, when I decide to settle down and get married to a beautiful woman I met in 9th grade, I told myself that if I ever have kids, I’ll never put them or my wife through what I went through. Side note I happened to marry a girl who had a similar up bringing to me.
That’s just a bit of a back story now on to the real reason you’re reading this.
Myself and the wife started trying to have kids almost immediately after getting married. We were both at the age of 27 (she’s older though…..by two weeks) but at that age, we both were under the pressure from everything around us, whether it’s friends having kids, family hinting at it all the time, or just how society has this idea you must have kids by 30.
So we began our journey. The wife hit a bump when she didn’t get a period for 3 months after getting off birth control and not being pregnant. So when that came about, we decided to go to the doctor to see what’s going on, then we found out she has PCOS.
If you don’t know what PCOS (Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome) is, it’s a hormonal disorder that may cause irregular periods, excess male hormone levels, multiple cysts on the ovary, weight gain and about 10 or so other symptoms.
At this point the real stress began. She almost instantly turned to feeling broken and that she felt like she failed me. She probably thought that since I’m such a hard-headed man, that I’d get annoyed with her issues. Little did she know, I didn’t care about what we found out. I flipped the whole script on her and showed her that no matter what we go through, she’s my person she’s my best friend and the love of my life. But at the same time, I myself reverted back to my old ways of accepting the worse case scenario and honestly, with thinking that there is a high possibility that I will not have kids, it actually helped me early in the journey.
So, after a few more attempts over the first year without any medical assistance, we said fuck it, let’s go to the fertility specialist and see what they can do to help. The specialist gave her multiple medications to take and shots to help trigger the eggs to drop. This went on for months. A lot of money spent for a lot of failed attempts. This is when I started to really get frustrated with the whole process.
I grew up poor and never had money. I try to bust my ass for everything I’ve built for my wife to be comfortable in life and to see our money go to something with small chances of success was draining and I internally started to freak out.
But, life continues right? All of this, on top of me working a high stress job, the kind of job that once you walk out the door, it’s a instant anxiety attack. I try to keep everything outside my home outside and when I walk in I erase everything. When the wife asks, “how was your day”, my response is, “just another day” and she would know to leave it at that. At this point I started to think there is something wrong on my side.
So, we decided to check out all my levels and come to find out, I had Low T( low testosterone). If you don’t know what that means to a man, it in my eyes, is the equivalent to PCOS for a woman but opposite. Symptoms ranges from low to no sex drive, weight gain because estrogen levels skyrocket, low sperm counts and a few other symptoms.
So, with all this the male infertility, the doctor suggested that I get on the same exact medication as my wife and that medicine is called clomid, a pill that has the complete opposite effect in men than women, but the doctor misdiagnosed me and gave me the wrong dosage. Granted my T levels did go up, but my estrogen levels skyrocketed more than before so that canceled out the Testosterone effects. I also started going to other specialists for other issues I’m dealing with such as sleep apnea and bad ADHD.
My doctor for my ADHD, Dr. Bright, turned in to my therapist. I opened up to the point where he let me cry it out. I joke around with my wife saying he just opened my blow off valve. He just let me get it out, which was everything I needed. Some of the best ways of keeping my mind off things were to listen to podcasts in between the times I saw him , such as : The Joe Rogan Experience, Jocko Wilink, Ted talks etc. Podcasts are a great way to keep your mind off things and makes the days go by faster especially when you work 2 full years in one year at a highly stressful job.
But back to Dr.Bright. He started to see my anger get worse and said it was like I had a hair-trigger temper and requested I see a real therapist. I only saw the guy twice and was like, fuck this, it’s a waste of time ,I know what is wrong. Little did I know, I actually needed to hear what he said and after I quit seeing him, it clicked. What he said was that I have anxiety, which is weird because many would say I’m the life of the party, but he said that my childhood groomed me in to being a master at hiding my feelings.
See, the one thing many don’t take into account what all this infertility does to a man’s mind is, We don’t really have anyone to talk to about what we feel that’s not a woman, so we just resort to holding it in and then we explode. Which, like I said up top, that I’m hard headed and grew up differently, I just tried to figure it out on my own, but I had a blindfold on I had no direction.
But our journey kept on rolling, so we decided to attend an 8 hr infertility clinic. **Side note, we only attended to try to win a contest for $5000 towards an IVF treatment.*** This was where I really kicked into gear. Halfway through the clinic, it became very apparent that this was aimed 99% towards the women and not the couple and honestly, I got pissed because we are a team and this is not just all about the woman.
This is all at the same time in the real world when the women’s movement was ramping up and it was all focused on the “My body My choice”. Up until our issues with infertility I could have honestly given two shits what women do with their body.
This is where I might lose some readers but if you haven’t gone through infertility or trying to have kids, I think it’s bullshit that infertility is more shunned upon than abortions. The biggest problem I have as a man, is it costs less to kill a baby than it is to try to have a kid.
I’ll break it down a bit more for you to help you see where my mind is. It costs on average, $300-$800 to get and abortions, while infertility treatments (IVF on the higher side) plus meds and monitoring, range all the way up to $28,000 for a less than 50% chance of getting pregnant for one try. Oh, keep in mind, a males insurance doesn’t cover shit for infertility and also when going for IVF treatments, that ranges from $6k-$28k you have to pay for that UP FRONT (at least in our case we would have had to pay it upfront). I mean, who the hell really has that kind of money to spend at a drop of a dime and for a shitty percentage of successful pregnancy? With the treatments the Wife did, she was still having to pay around $500 or more per round and that’s only because her insurance is amazing and covered a good portion of things, but there’s so many out there that get ZERO coverage. So when you think about it, how is it fair that it costs less to terminate a pregnancy than to help someone get pregnant?
I digress, so after we attended the stupid infertility workshop, and didn’t win the $5000 towards IVF, we had to have a very real conversation about what we wanted to do. We finally agreed that it was time to take a good long break from all of this. We decided this in December 2017 and had been trying for over 2 years at this point to give you a time reference. As much as I knew how much my wife was hurting and that she felt like she was giving up her dream of having kids, we both knew that we needed the break emotionally, mentally and financially. With making this decision, we also decided to give it one more try starting in April 2018, right before her insurance would start over in July.
We did our last round of treatment in the beginning of April 2018, which consisted of oral ovulation medication, 5 days of injectible medications, a trigger shot and IUI (intrauterine insemination). At this time, I was personally already completely checked out. We had several friends and family that were pregnant at this time, so we had plenty more pressure of having kids in our face. (Please don’t get me wrong, I was happy they were all having little ones coming soon.) A couple of weeks after we did the final treatment, we went up to NOVA for a our friends, Chris and Kelly’s baby shower. I don’t usually attend these things, but the Wife and I made them a custom baby changing table and it was way to big for the Wife to carry herself. All while we were in NOVA being around a majority of our family and friends, we didn’t tell anyone of our plan, because at this time, we felt like it’s almost like a crying wolf type of conversation and felt like no one really wanted to hear about it or cared that we were going to give up. We were the only ones who knew we did this last treatment.
The next week after that baby shower, my Wife’s sister had her baby and our friends, Mike and Erin had their baby the same day, one of which came a month early. That was a scary thing for me because no one I was close with ever had an issue with their birth. That made me wonder, that with all our issues, would we have to go through a similar situation. So that day, my head was numb from work and my mind was running, hoping both of the babies were going to be ok.
So after a long stressful day, I got home and my beautiful Wife had some balloons hanging above the kitchen entrance that read, “OH BABY”. In my head, I’m like, “why the hell is she doing this?”. To my surprise, after looking around the house dumbfounded, I started to put two and two together. The same day our family and friends both had their babies, I found out I WAS GOING TO BE A DADDY.
I was shocked and extremely happy all at the same time. She recorded my reaction and once I realized what was happening and she was crying, I grabbed her and gave her a huge hug and kiss. Grabbed both of our dogs yelling, “y’all are going to be sisters!!!!”. At this time is when I started to really think of my future and got very protective over my wife’s body. All to make sure nothing goes wrong with our pregnancy, mostly because of my wife’s fear of losing the child, which seems to be more common with those that struggles with infertility. But finally, after 3 years of stuggling and hoping, we were pregnant with our first baby. So just when I thought all of the stress was done because we were finally pregnant, I realized, it’s only just beginning………
To Be Continued
The Mind of Rick 