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Infertility: Part 3 (Treatment Options)

(For background info, see Infertility, part 0, 1, and 2.)

We found out about my infertility a few weeks before we moved across the country. There wasn't time to go back to the doctor and get more testing done, and there was a lot of packing and tying up of loose ends to do. This fit in nicely with my denial; I figured I could just deal with this stuff after we moved.

During those final distractible days at work, we did a lot of internet research on infertility treatment. Here's the rough summary of the various treatment methods:

1. Drugs. Give Tree drugs that will make her produce lots of eggs. This treatment was obviously inappropriate for us--the problem wasn't lack of eggs, it was lack of sperm.
2. Artificial Insemination (AI). Collect sperm. Wait until Tree ovulates. Use the medical equivalent of a turkey baster to squirt the sperm into her womb. This sounded promising at first. But that first step was a problem. You need a decent sperm sample in order to do this. Sure we could collect multiple samples and combine them together, but with a sperm count less than 1% of normal and a storage procedure that includes a freeze/thaw cycle which kills 50% of the sperm, I would need to provide over a hundred samples over the course of a year or so just for one shot. Not as promising as it first sounded.
3. In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Give Tree drugs that will make her produce lots of eggs. Suck out the eggs via a scary needle. Drop them into a petri dish. Flood the petri dish with sperm. Implant the healthiest embryos into Tree. Sounds promising...and ridiculously expensive. And there remained the problem with the "flood the petri dish with sperm" step. We wouldn't need as much sperm as AI required, but we still needed more than I could reasonably produce.

None of this looked like it was going to work out. Maybe we could do IVF, but maybe not. And IVF is terribly expensive...not something you want to experiment with. We'd be paying a lot of money for no guaranteed results.

After this discouraging round of research, we moved across the country. My hopes were still pinned on botched test results--maybe my next test would show that the picture was not so bleak after all.