What I Learned Going to Get My Sperm Tested

Reading time: 8 mins

On the purple line, my train is filled with Tuesday heads, some hunched over their phones, others staring out the window as Chicago's skyscrapers approach. Me, if I took place in this elevated train, it is to masturbate.

No, not to do it right away and risk custody. I have an appointment at the andrology department, on the eighth floor of a building downtown.

Maybe you don't know what andrology is. This was also my case before this trip by train. And my word processor assumes I made a spelling mistake. But andrology is alive and well. It is a derivative of urology. The andrologist is the person in charge of the male aspect of fertility problems. Today in my diary I have reserved a slot for a “semen analysis”.

Mr. Enkoff, the teacher in charge of sex education classes when I was about twelve years old, had never spoken to us about semen analysis. For him, the assessment was self-evident: our sperm was a powerful weapon, capable of automatically making any woman pregnant. By having sex, as all his books and videos rehashed, you was wasting your life because you were going to have to take care of someone else's.

Either a big fat lie. At this point in my life, I am 34 years old and we have tried everything with my wife to start a family. We make love. She pees on pieces of plastic. When blinking smileys pop up, we increase the frequency of our reports. We take dozens of vitamins. Sex is no longer a magical journey to orgasm. It's a job. And we can't even get a salary out of it.

We are far from the only ones to miss our target. Infertility affects up to 15% of couples worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. I can't stop getting lost in a maze of articles with more apocalyptic titles than the other about the drop in sperm count and the end of the human species, which aggravates an already good load of anxiety. heavy in my brain: what if we really couldn't have children? Until then, I hadn't really thought about it. For me, it had always been a natural progression point in life. And then, suddenly, maybe not.

God, the receptionist and me

Friends told us that they were "praying for us". Here's something people do to comfort themselves: When faced with harsh realities, they think of God's plan. Well, if there's a God up there, he or she has planned to give me some alone time at 600 North Lake Shore Drive.

"I have an appointment at 12:30," I tell the receptionist wearing a nose ring. "I'm a little ahead."

This woman has to spend five days a week in this windowless office and smile politely at the men who come and go to have their sperm counted, frozen, tested for diseases, or whatever is medically conceivable with this liquid. viscous.

She leads me to the Chamber, located about two meters from her office. The room looks like a soulless studio without a bed. A fan hums to provide a layer of white noise. There's a sink, a 1983 TV, a chair and an arsenal of back issues of Penthouse, Hustler and Playboy magazines. They look timeworn, as if one mate's older brother passed them on to another mate's younger brother, then to a third, who finally passed them on to you.

The receptionist hands me a cup. “When you are finished, she says, you will have to fill in this form and place the cup in this receptacle”.

It's time to get started. I need assistance. I automatically forget the magazines. They have passed through the hands of a million men and I am quite proud to be mysophobic.

I prefer to rely on my phone. After all, the web was invented to house porn and I'm sure I'm just a few clicks away from images – still or moving – that can teleport me from the Bedroom into the erotic world of endless fantasy. But the information age leaves me stranded: AT&T's network is not designed to send a signal through the walls of this building.

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So I come to look for wifi, but the only poster I find is a list of instructions: "do not use cream", "clean up after finishing" and other instructions that the medical world has to give us on the right way to masturbate. Do I have to open the door to ask for the wifi code? That would be weird, right? Yes. Totally.

Aim for the cup, it doesn't scare me

So I turn to a DVD player and a stack of four boxes. Discs engraved with titles indicated in marker. I remember when I was 12 and Cameron Cooper gave me a VHS with “The Show” marked with Sharpie. At the same time that Mr. Enkoff was showing us educational videos on body parts, Cam had unearthed sequences showing these same parts in action. Twenty-two years later, I still watch pirated adult movies. Time does not pass, no matter what you are told.

I set my sights on Torride construction site. The receptionist is only a few meters behind the door and I fear that the film will open with the surge of moans that constitute the dialogues of this kind of classics. Luckily, someone—a former patient or perhaps the receptionist herself—turned the volume to zero. The title of the film is perfectly chosen. So here I am on a construction site in 1987 with a beautiful blonde woman among the workers. When you're building a house, you need a lot of breaks. And what more natural way to enjoy it than having sex in multiple positions in the trailer of a metallic gray pickup truck?

"Aim directly for the cup," says the poster. I'm thinking of the adage “We always miss those we don't dare”. But what about a dared AND missed shot? What if performance pressure kept me from achieving anything? I don't want to come back here. In all my life, I have never concentrated so hard. The hit is a winner.

If it is possible to leave your cup in a drawer, the andrology service has not made the closure of this visit anonymous. I then open the door to find the receptionist.

“It's all good,” I say, realizing immediately that there are words that are better left unsaid.

The invoice amounts to 255 dollars [approximately 225 euros, editor's note]. By handing him my card, I want to tell him that this step should rather happen at the beginning. That a semen analysis would be better in the prepaid version. I didn't want to touch the magazines, so I really don't see why she would want to deal with my credit card now.

The contact is only part of the strangeness of the transaction. There is also the time that stretches out in bewildering silence as my payment meanders through the financial system to finally be approved.

Less to complain about than my wife

A hilarious malaise that will soon be covered with a tarpaulin of anguish. I will go home. We'll laugh with my wife about my morning, but we'll continue to obsess over the question hanging over every couple embarked on such a process: whose fault is it? A diagnosis of infertility generates a very unfair open secret and we have the impression of having to blame each other for our absence of a baby, as we can puff our noses on forgotten errands.

It is my wife who bears the heaviest part of the burden. She keeps taking blood tests to assess hormone levels. She goes to acupuncture. She listens to a doctor in a bow tie telling her that even if she ends up getting pregnant, it will be a “geriatric pregnancy.” In the meantime, it's been the easiest day I've had in a long time. I didn't go to work. Instead, I just did what I've been pretty good at since I was 12, and it took me about five minutes.

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If the 34-year-old me could talk to the 37-year-old me, I might get a glimpse of our journey ahead. The "journey" is the term many fertility specialists use to refer to the process. Sounds like a fun thing, an introspective trip to California, a Kerouac-style trip to leave it all behind. My wisest self would say:

Your sperm is fine. You will undergo three IUIs (intrauterine inseminations), which is a kind of dartboard where a nurse shoots your sperm with a stick and tries to hit the center of your wife's target. They are doomed to fail. Throwing darts is hard. You'll decide it's time for IVF – in vitro fertilization – and opt for the Holy Grail of Procreation, a clinic south of Denver that has helped more than 50,000 babies become laboratory miracles. You'll hang out with the clinic's director, who might shed his doctor title and simply introduce himself as "the man who whispered vaginas." You will do four cycles of IVF and you will find a new Chamber in the clinic in Colorado. You will be much more impressed by their DVD library. At home, your kitchen will look like a pharmacy, stuffed with boxes of Menopur, Cetrotide, Gonal, and a host of other drugs designed to overcome diminished ovarian reserve—which is marked in my wife's medical records. She will inject herself with huge syringes twice a day. You will try to do some of them to him and you will pass out. Which will remind you that she is an exponentially stronger human being than you will ever be. Some nights you'll both laugh at the absurdity of it all. Others, you will tell each other about friends who got pregnant and you will feel a pang of jealousy. And still other nights, you'll cry, you'll stress, you'll feel like the last shit and you'll want to stop spending thousands of dollars for all the bullshit.

And then one day in the spring of 2021, in the midst of a pandemic and a world falling apart, it will work for real.

But for now, it's just me. The only person I can talk to is the receptionist. I smile. Not her. I can't blame him. I wonder how many other episodes of Torrid construction have become cinema classics. I wonder if Mr. Enkoff is still teaching at Northside College. If so, I would have a few additions to make to the program.