I’d Suspected it for a Long Time
by wb
I already knew. I’d suspected it for a long time.
Susan and I had been trying to get pregnant for well over a year. Nothing from her OB-GYN indicated any trouble on her part. So it wasn’t a huge surprise when the report came back from the urologist… along with a request to provide another sample. He just wanted to be sure of the diagnosis. It was highly unusual to find absolutely no sperm present in a semen sample from an otherwise healthy man in his early thirties. But that’s just what I’d given him the first time. This was not a case of extremely low sperm count… nope. There wasn’t a swimmer to be found. So he wanted me to repeat the test – provide another sample. Oh… and this time, I was supposed to send all of it – not just a small sample. Huh?… that wasn’t a small sample, that was the whole wad. Crap.
Somehow, I knew that repeating the test would be an empty formality. There wouldn’t be a greater volume of semen to send. There wouldn’t be a just low count, or poor motility. Nope, there was nothing of reproductive value in the first sample and the second sample wouldn’t any different. I was shooting blanks. I already knew. I’d suspected it for a long time.
Puberty had come right on schedule. All my plumbing seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do… with an adolescent vengeance. I’d had the talk. My father brought me a copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask, which was a hot bestseller at the time. I’d been allowed the nervous freedom to borrow adult magazines from my dad’s substantial collection. My body was changing, just like every other boy about my age. My bedroom door remained closed most of the time I was there alone. Mom and Dad explained how they understood my need for privacy and gave me their word that they would always knock before opening my closed door. They kept their word – even waited for me to open the door from my side on the infrequent occasions they interrupted my pubescent preoccupation. I had privacy, I had Playboy, and I had the the powerful urge to take advantage of both on a regular (normal for my age, I imagine) basis. The only thing was… something wasn’t right.
Don’t ask me how I knew it, or even exactly what it was I knew. I had yet to see the drippingly explicit pornographic images that would have shown me immediately I wasn’t producing anything like the quantity or consistency of a normal ejaculation. I wasn’t yet sharing my intimate moments with anyone real. Just me, Mr. Palmer and a box of Kleenex. But, somehow, I knew something wasn’t right. At one point I remember receiving a microscope as a gift that was supposed to encourage my intellectual curiosity and open the door to a career in science. I figured it’d be a great start to look at a sample of my own sperm. Except, there was nothing to look at. At first, I blamed the microsope for what I wasn’t seeing – it was nothing more than a cheap toy, after all. Then I blamed myself… I must not know how to use it. Nothing to worry about. And I didn’t really want to be a scientist anyway.
So, years later when the doctor asked me to repeat the test, I did as he asked. I repeated the test because, even though I suspected – even though I knew – that the second time would be the same, I desperately wanted it to be different. And let’s be honest – I repeated the test because the act of creating a sample was never a problem. No matter what was or wasn’t swimming in the substance I produced through do-it-yourself stimulation, the act of producing it was never a chore – even when the output was destined for a plastic cup and a urology lab. I repeated the test and I waited.
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Just a few weeks earlier – before the first test – Susan, answered the phone in our tiny rented condo late on a Sunday evening. “It’s your mother,” she said and handed the phone to me. “She doesn’t sound like she’s feeling very well.”
“It’s your father,” my mother said. “He’s not doing very well. He’s had another heart attack and he’s on the way to the hospital. I’m leaving to be with him. The doctor just called told me I should let the family know they need to come soon.”
I was calm as I told Susan that we needed to go. I was calm as we drove for over an hour from our home in Escondido to the hospital in San Clemente where they had taken my father. I was calm as I wondered aloud if he’d survive this one. The first one had almost killed him more than ten years earlier. The second one and the third one were minor by comparison. By now he’d convinced himself that all of them were flukes and… really, that the last two weren’t even heart attacks. He was fine. Never better. He’d been swimming regularly. He’d been losing weight and gaining strength and he was feeling really good. He and my mother were days away from departure for a six-week trip to Europe.
We rode the last half hour in silence. When we arrived, the night-shift nurse greeted us at the door to the emergency room. It was a small hospital with not much action on Sunday nights, or any night for that matter. We were it, and they were looking for us. As Susan and I walked into the long sterile hallway, my mother appeared from a room to the left. She looked old, tired… alone.
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The results of the second test were the same. There still wasn’t much semen (maybe less than the first time), and there still was no sperm. There was something seriously messed up in my reproductive system. I was completely infertile. Incapable of creating life. The only hope I had now was to figure out the root of the problem and hope it was correctable. A diagnosis of infertility didn’t have to be the end of the road, did it?. Whatever was causing this problem was going to turn out to be something treatable anyway; nothing more than an inconvenience on the road to procreation, not a dead end. It was something that I could overcome with the right attitude, the right work ethic, the right timing, the right position or the right medical treatment. I was going to be a father one way or another.
But it didn’t matter that I wasn’t yet ready to accept any other denouement… I already knew. I had suspected it for a long time. I had just lost my father. I had just lost my fatherhood.