wink     ; )

Infertility: Part 2 (Reactions)

When we first learned of my infertility back in the spring of 2001 (see Infertility, part 0 and part 1), I went into immediate denial. Maybe the sperm count was wrong and the next test would show that everything was OK. Maybe my cluster-headache meds had temporarily suppressed my sperm count. Maybe some lab tech had neglected to add three zeros to the end of my sprem count. Who knows, anything is possible. I had never considered the possiblilty that I could be infertile, so I had no idea how to respond to the news. And I certainly had no contingency plans.

Tree, on the other hand, had already already given the matter plenty of thought. Being one of those worriers who is always convinced that the worst is going to happen gave her a big head start in preparedness over me when disaster actually struck. She had always known that she wanted to be a mother. But the pessimist in her made her ask herself "What if I never get married? What if I'm infertile? What if my husband is infertile?" By the time she was 12(!), she had decided that if she couldn't have biological children for whatever reason, she would simply adopt.

Though she feared the diagnosis of infertility, she had been expecting it. In fact, she suspected it starting from the moment when we had our first negative pregnacy test. So immediately after opening the test results envelope, Tree turned to me and said, "I think that we should adopt."

I balked. No. I hadn't even accepted that the test results weren't just a big typo. I certainly wasn't going to start making plans yet. But Tree had already thought all of this through and was raring to go ahead. I was caught completely flat-footed and Tree, the consummate planner, was launching a contingency plan that she had put into place over a decade earlier.

So within hours of opening the test results, Tree was asking me why I didn't want to adopt. I kept replying that adoption wasn't the issue yet, and that I just wanted to get retested first.

There were a lot of tears that night, and for the next few nights.