The Day I Died

The doctor’s office was a genteel and sophisticated place. It was carpeted with a soft, plush fabric, soothingly colored in blue and green. The walls were pasteled in a subtle yellow. Music from a lite radio station was piped in through the invisible speakers. Soft cushioned couches were spread throughout the reception area, facing a long, blond-wooden reception desk. All in all, it was a very kind waiting area, carefully designed to soothe the worn nerves of the unfortunate people who waited there.

This was my third or fourth visit to the doctor’s office, and the waiting room was definitely my favorite part. Next to Shirley, that is. Shirley was the doctor’s receptionist, a sixty-ish grandmother type, an Australian woman who understood exactly why you had come to the office, and what had brought you to this point in your life. She knew exactly what to say, so that everything did not feel completely hopeless.

Shirley was wearing a pretty blue print dress which stretched from her ankles all the up to her neck, revealing only a portion of the pale skin around her throat. Over the dress, she wore a white cardigan sweater, due to the fact that the office was air-conditioned to a noticeably uncomfortable temperature.

Shirley smiled at me as I signed in. “How are you today, Luis?” she asked in a voice that made me hope she was hiding freshly baked chocolate chip cookies behind the desk.

“Today’s the big day,” I said, crossing my fingers and smiling what was probably a pathetically hopeful smile.

“Have a seat, Luis, and the doctor will see you in a few minutes.”

I removed my coat and hung it on the coat rack in the corner of the reception room. I picked a couch close to the doctor’s office, hoping I could force some hopeful vibrations from reception to his files, changing whatever bad information was in the files to the best possible news.

I pulled a copy of the Daily News out of my briefcase and attacked the crossword. I took some ribbing from my colleagues for not moving up to the Times crossword, but my objection to the Times crossword was simple and reasonable: no one with a life had enough time to read the Times, and the Times had no comics section. I mean, hell, the Washington Post had a comics section, and they broke Watergate. God bless Katherine Graham, a woman who understood, Woodward and Bernstein be damned, people needed to read Doonesbury in order to be fully informed.

I was about to begin the bottom third of the puzzle when I heard Shirley call out to me.

“The doctor will be ready for you in a moment, Luis,” she cheerfully chirped, reassuring me that the next few minutes were going to be the best of my life.

I folded the paper and stuffed it back inside my briefcase. I stood up after sighing audibly and turned to face the place of judgment.

The world famous sperm doctor stood in the doorway, his unblemished white jacket with he RMA monogram above the left breast. He smiled when he saw me, and held the door open for me as I trudged in to hear my fate. I thought I was oddly symbolic that as he held the door to his office open for me, he was also holding open the door to my posterity.

My wife and I started trying to have children about three years after we got married. Until that point, we had been studiously employing birth control, in the form of condoms and birth control pills.

I’m not sure when we made the decision to start trying to get pregnant, but it was probably not long after the birth of our goddaughter, the second child of my wife’s best friend. We both realized that we got this warm feeling from watching our friends and their children, and from the way we felt after spending time with them ourselves. We had been holding off primarily because of our public interest employment provided a relatively meager income that mostly went towards eliminating student loan debt and hanging on to our rent stabilized railroad flat. As my public interest lawyer salary climbed, however, we became able to afford little luxuries like basic cable and a couple of trips to Italy. We agreed that it was time to put a claim on that most exhilarating amusement park ride: parenthood.

We bid farewell to the Trojans, and the pill, and welcomed the calendar and the ovulation predictor. Sex was still fun. The soft, desperate noises my wife made just as she reached her peak brought me tremendous excitement and satisfaction. But the feeling that I was sending my sperm off on a greater mission than my own entertainment also gave me a sense of happiness that made nestling into my wife’s shoulder after my release a deeper kind of communion.

It continued that way for six months, then nine months, then fifteen months. Our monthly visit to pick up the pregnancy test began to take on the tenor of a visit to a Catholic church, where I, being the Christian half of the family would silently light a candle for our as yet unconceived child.

After eighteen months without success neither of us wanted to acknowledge the obvious fact that something was wrong. My wife would sometimes raise the idea of having a sperm count done; I would grunt, agreeing that it was a good idea, without ever actually acting on her request.

We also noticed that my wife’s ovulation seemed to be erratic. Sometimes she when three months without any indication that she was ovulating. Beyond throwing off any sex schedule, it raised the concern that she might not be able to conceive. So she went to her gynecologist, and a series of tests revealed an imbalance in her blood sugar which, in addition to affecting her ovulation, was a possible precursor to diabetes. The good news was that we found this out early, and the medication she was given put her ovulation back on a regular track. With renewed hope, we continued on the road to pregnancy.

Six months later, it was clear that something was still rotten in the state of Denmark. Try as we might, no fruit was springing from our loins, and I had run out of excuses.

The sperm count is one of the more belittling rituals in the existence of the male. My doctor sent me off with a prescription in hand to my HMO’s designated lab, where I was handed the requisite plastic cup and informed that, rather than some adjacent room where I would have the benefit of handy pornography to spur me on to glory, I would have to go home(or at least elsewhere) to produce my semen sample, and then return it to the lab less than 1 hour aster I ejaculated, lest the sperm in the sample die of loneliness.

I retreated home to my bathroom. I didn’t feel right popping a dirty movie in the VCR for the occasion, so I let my imagination do the walking, trying at all times to remember that this time, I was stroking on behalf of science.

Mission accomplished, I sealed the plastic cup and slipped it into my jacket pocket and called a livery cab to take me back to the lab. I spent the fifteen minute ride wishing that the lab’s receptionist wasn’t a woman, and hoping I’d managed a large enough sample. I took the cup out to study the volume of the sample I’d deposited, and telepathically urged the sperm to multiply on the way to the lab.

I did my best to look the receptionist in the eye as I delivered my sample to the lab. I figured the best way to deal with the situation was not to acknowledge what both she and I already knew – that this was an utterly humiliating experience for me, and that if there was anywhere else she could be and get paid for it , she would already be there.

There is an old joke about jumping off buildings that I like; its not the fall that kills you, its the sudden stop. Two days after I dropped my sperm sample off at the lab, my doctor called to tell me I’d forgotten to leave something- sperm. The lab reported that my sample contained precisely zero sperm.

Obviously, there had been a mistake. A couple of masturbation-free days later, I delivered a fresh semen sample to a new lab filled with confidence that whatever the problem had been with the last test would all be set right.

No such luck. This sample was also devoid of sperm. This meant one thing: time to call in the experts. This is how I came to meet the famous sperm doctor. He’d been written up in New York magazine as one of the city’s best doctors. He and his partners ran a midtown practice devoted to bringing fertility- challenged couples together with the offspring they so desperately desired. My wife and I settled in for our first meeting with the famous sperm doctor, I notice two autographed photos on a bookshelf in the corner of his office. The man was an Oscar-winning actor, the woman was his much younger second wife. They were apparently the most famous customers of the famous sperm doctor. And they were certainly successful, as their apple –cheeked progeny attested to the great skill with which this man coaxed sperm to do their duty. I felt a little more comfortable as I settled in the chair in his office. Surely this miracle worker could resolve whatever impasse was keeping my sperm form completing their appointed rounds.

The first order of business was an ultrasound to determine whether any blockages were preventing my sperm form reaching the rendezvous point. An ultrasound of any body part is a slightly amusing procedure, spreading a cold jelly across the offending appendage and pointing a device emitting sound waves to point a picture of your situation. Having this done to one’s testicles is exactly as embarrassing as it sounds.

Now imagine the only thing more embarrassing. That’s right, having to have it done twice. The first ultrasound was done in the soothing confines of the doctors office; it was not clear enough to explain what was going on. So the doctor sent me off to Mount Sinai hospital to a much more sophisticated ultrasound machine. Unfortunately, it was not so sophisticated to spare me the cold clammy jelly being spread across my balls.

A month after our first meeting, the famous sperm doctor presented the first god news /bad news scenario I would face on this journey. Good news: the ultrasound revealed no blockages in the vas deferens that would prevent sperm from being produced in my semen. The bad news: the ultrasound showed some dark masses in one of my testicles. Dark masses on an ultrasound tended to suggest the presence of cancer. Somewhere, I heard the sound of an Acme brand anvil falling from the sky, headed directly for my skull.

The next step, he told us, was surgery. A simple outpatient procedure, he reassured us. He would inspect my testicle to determine whether there was in fact any cancer present, and they would remove a section from the testicle, freezing it so that lab technicians could examine it for the presence of sperm.

At this point, I was ready to scream for the guy running the ride to step on the brake. I figured climbing off the roller coaster from the top was better than waiting for the ninety-degree free fall. My wife however, was a rock. Despite having a plate filled with a master’s thesis, a full-time job, and volunteer commitments, she was with me the whole way through. She told me it was all right when I put the surgery off a couple of weeks. She agreed that we shouldn’t tell any of our family members about the procedure. And she didn’t show a hint of the concern she was feeling, right up to the moment that I was rolled away from the pre-op room for the surgery.

I’d never had surgery before, never had any anesthetic not dispensed by a dentist. The famous sperm doctor gave me a choice between a local anesthetic, which meant I would remain awake throughout the procure, and general anesthesia. I had heard some of the warnings about general anesthesia, and I felt more comfortable having some sense of what was going on while my privates where being opened for the benefits of science.

Once I got to the operating room, the best laid plans of mice and men went right into the toilet. Several minutes after the local anesthesia was administered, it seemed I was not reacting as I should. The doctor and his assistants quickly decided that general anesthetic would have to do. I don’t really remember if I objected at all; I don’t remember a hell of a lot before I woke up in the recovery room. I felt like waking up while you were sick with some kind of bad flu. My head was thick and couldn’t feel my body. A nurse came over to let me know where I was and that the procedure had gone as planned.

Some time later, the famous sperm doctor appeared, bearing glad tidings: my testicles were free of cancer. It was probably the anesthetic that kept me from kissing him. My wife joined me in the recovery room, and we waited until I shook off the anesthetic and proved they had not screwed up my plumbing by going to the bathroom.

The cab ride home from the hospital was a mixture of relief, anticipation and anxiety. I had an appointment in three weeks to hear what the lab had found in the frozen section of testicle my doctor had removed. I spent the next three weeks working, supporting my wife as she completed her master’s thesis, and generally trying to avoid thinking about the prospect of never being able to father a child.

The big day arrived, as all big days do, and as the famous sperm doctor held the door to hi office open for me, I tried to cross my toes inside my wingtips, figuring that I couldn’t shake his hand with crossed fingers. He smiled gently as he sat down behind his desk and opened his file.

“The lab examined the frozen section we sent. They didn’t find any sperm present.”

I swallowed twice, and my eyes narrowed as I processed what he said.

“If there were any sperm being produced by your testes, they would have been present in that section.”

The blood tests had shown no hormonal imbalances, and I hadn’t suffered any illness or injury which would explain why my body wasn’t producing any sperm. “Asymptomatic azzospermia” is the term I had found on the Internet: an unexplained failure of the testes to produce sperm. It affects approximately five per cent of men in the world. After all the lotteries I had entered in my lifetime, this is the one I had to come up a big winner in.

The famous sperm doctor smiled sympathetically as he explained that there was nothing that could be done to generate the production of sperm; you either had the little buggers or you didn’t. As he talked about sperm donation and adoption as alternatives, I looked at the pictures of the famous movie star and his wife. “Bastard,” I said to the picture. If I could have spit on it, I would have.

I collected myself and rose to leave. I shook the famous sperm doctor’s hand and thanked him for his efforts. As I walked to the coat rack, I stopped at the desk and stretched my hand across to touch Shirley’s.

“Thank you,” I said as she smiled her grandmotherly smile at me for the last time. Though I thought I would rather erase the entire place from my mind at that moment, Shirley’s smile, and her sweet, reassuring voice, were memories I will carry with me forever.

It was warm on Madison Avenue as I walked out of the office building. It must have been warm; it was June, so it must have been warm. The only things I really remember about the cab ride home were the heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach, and the desperate feeling of loneliness. My wife and I never really discussed whether she should accompany me to this appointment. In the cab, I realized how stupid and short-sighted I had been. I was sitting there, alone, my eyes starting to sting from tears, and there was no one there for me to collapse on. It would be a little less than two hours before she got home from work and could start helping me mourn. I call it mourning, though no one had died. We mourned the loss of our potential child, the one in whom we could see the same limitless potential that all parents see in those first magical hours after birth.

It has been more than two years since I received that diagnosis, and I don’t think I have achieved closure, In truth, my active form of self-defense has been avoidance. Every six months or so, we talked about it, and considered the possibilities of sperm donation or adoption. Those conversations would last for an hour or so, and then the topic would be tabled for another six months.

I’m not sure its coincidental, but it is about two years ago that I stopped visiting my father’s grave. My father died in 1992, at the age of 81. He only got to meet the first of his four grandchildren. I remember the look of pride in his face as he held my tiny little niece. It isn’t so much that I feel I failed him; I don’t think his life depended on seeing his children having children of their own. I think it is more the feeling of jealousy I have when I think about him. I am jealous that I will never get to experience that feeling he felt four times over. I am jealous of the baseball games and trips to the beach he took us on. I am jealous of the day he took me to his jobsite, and I got to ride on the elevators he operated. I am jealous of all the things fathers get to do with and for their children, things that I don’t think I will ever get to do.

Though I left that office no less healthy a man than I was when I entered it two and one-half years ago, a piece of me died there. I buried it in an unmarked grave.