The Autobiography of Sperm.
One man’s journey into the eye of fertility.
I don’t mean ‘slow’ as in ‘not very smart’. My sperm are probably whip-smart with an impressively high IQ and sharp wit — if I do say so myself. My sperm are NOT developmentally delayed or slow learners; make no mistake, these are no short-bus sperm. My sperm are just slow. Physically. They swim in slow motion.
Countless doctors have confirmed it. I have changed underwear size, style, fit — and brand — numerous times to accommodate my little swimmers. I’ve slept in odd positions; had sex in even more unconventional positions than I thought possible. I’ve even had surgery to give them a little boost. But no matter what, they seem to have one speed. Slow. They’re not lazy; I like to call them leisurely. My sperm don’t run, they stroll.
The actual medical term is motility. They have ‘low motility’ — that’s what they call it when your sperm are like mine. It’s not an insult, dirty little secret or scarlet letter condition; they are not doomed or damaged and they don’t deserve to be shamed. They number in the millions per drop, so there is no shortage, they are not endangered, but all of them, and each and every one simply likes to take it’s own sweet time. My sperm may not have speed; but they have endurance. Like me. We are in it for the long haul. I am 47 years old. My sperm and I were supposed to be a father by now. But we’re not giving up. Our mantra is this: We may be slow but eventually we’ll get there. When it comes to fertilization, we’ve been at it for a long time and we’re not giving up now.
“Hey Isaac, get in here. You have GOT to see this.”
I was lying on my side, in what most guys of the male species would consider a most ‘vulnerable’ position. The backside of my dime-store hospital gown was gaping wide open as if to say, hi, come on in and have a look around; my smooth, 21-year-old bum faced an open doorway that someone named Isaac or Elijah was about to pass through. The man hollered again, “Hurry up, come take a look.”
I don’t remember the exact names though I’m certain one of them was named Abraham. Nor am I’m sure this is precisely what he said. They spoke Yiddish. Their words muffled beneath shaggy, decade old beards; they wore prayer shawls, colorful yarmulkes — their dark features framed by long, well quaffed ringlets.
Following a routine health exam by my primary care physician in a swank upper east side office — a stones throw from fifth avenue– the WASPY hood where I felt most at home — my insurance company referred me to ‘one of the cities top fertility experts.’ This is how I ended up half-naked on an exam table in a run down lower east side office building, adjacent to a turn of the century synagogue and a famous Jewish delicatessen.
The smell of lox and fresh baked bialys (onion flavored) wafted in through an open window while I jerked off into a plastic cup next to an ancient menorah. I said a prayer to every God I had ever heard of (and a few I made up) as this alleged fertility specialist and his assistant co-examined me; two Orthodox Jewish doctors that seemed more like a team of rubber gloved rabbis rummaging around in my private altar. I guess this is what they mean when they that a prostrate exam can be a religious experience.
If this sounds like something a 22-year old yuppie in training does for fun, as a hobby, or just to kill time on a lazy winter afternoon, you’re dead wrong. I wasn’t doing this for fun or for adventure. I wasn’t even doing for me. I was doing it for my bride.
Molly and I had been married a few days south of one year. This humiliating, humbling and potentially violating exam was an anniversary present of sorts. It may have been my inaugural probe by men of the Jewish faith but this wasn’t my first fertility exam. This had been going on for years. As far as family planning is concerned, we were more premature than, well you know what. The conversation started long before we were married — sometime around our third date.
We were determined to have children.
We were destined to have children.
We were required to have children.
It was a fertile attraction from the beginning.
She was attracted to my sperm. I was attracted to her eggs. Our first date she packed a picnic and we spent hours in the park in the pouring rain sharing our family stories, our childhoods and our pro-creation beliefs including a desire to have a big family of our own. On our second date we went to church and talked to God and about God. And his desire for us to have a big family of our own.
And on the third date — we got naked.
When you have any version of sex without the immediate goal of making babies, the Church calls it ‘wasting the seed.’ After a full evening spilling our baby batter in every room (there were 3) of my collegiate apartment, we rested; that’s when she noticed it. A large mass in my left testicle. She admittedly had never felt a man’s nutsack before (my word — not hers) but she sensed something wasn’t quite right about this one. She grabbed and groped and tugged.
I think you should have that looked at. She said.
I replied, YOU’RE looking at it. Who else did you have in mind?
She paused, dramatically: A professional.
But she wasn’t joking. This was serious.
I had looked at it for years — self examined it. I always been a bit curious about the size and shape, how it felt, how it looked, how it differed from the right one but I was never worried exactly. I was actually quite proud of my rather large left testicle. I held it in high regard. But as she held it in the palm of her hand and swirled it around in her fingers, I got a little concerned. This was not the way I had imagined the evening. Though the date started with me getting lucky; I ended up getting diagnosed.
We were juniors at University. I ran in a social circle where people inquired your GPA and your SAT scores but no one had ever asked about my sperm count until her. I want to get to know your sperm. I think you should too.
I guess you can’t blame her. When you buy a car, you kick the tires, check the engine, you test-drive it. You have mechanic look under the hood. In our relationship, she was the mechanic.
Spring term at the Student Health Center isn’t exactly hopping with 19 year olds concerned about their future of their fertility. Most of the horny undergrads are concerned with NOT having children. When I arrived for my appointment, I noticed condoms in candy dishes, flyers about abortion rights and posters for Planned Parenthood support for unplanned pregnancy. But not a single sign of fertility treatment.
The fair-haired, mild mannered, overly anxious urologist-in-training smiled when his ice-cold hand (no glove) grabbed my balls. I winced. After a bit of groping and a few um hmm-ing, he explained he had seen this before. Not in real life, only in textbooks. He studied the mass with the same enthusiasm as Molly had. But was actually a little gentler; a little more reverence. He was actually in awe.
This is quite a beautiful specimen. He gloated.
Well, thank you, I think. I think I said.
He knew what was going on down there — and seemed more fascinated than concerned. I was relieved. It wasn’t going to kill me. I thought.
It’s not going to kill you. He said.
But it is killing your sperm. Which come to think of it, he said, I’m going to need.
I’m going to need to look at your sperm.
Semen actually. I need to test it. Now.
I explained that my sperm were not prepared for a test.
We may as well do it now. He insisted. You’re here. I’m here. And with a little porn, they’ll be here too in a just a few minutes.
A ‘varicocele’ is an interconnected group of thick, engorged, unwieldy varicose-like veins, hence the name. The veins expand and grow inside the scrotum and wrap themselves like vines around the testicles. To the touch, it feels like a wad of intestines or brains or a spool of squishy yarn. When this network of veins — that circling the semen-manufacturing planet like a sexual solar system — fill with blood the result is a rising temperature, it becomes a microscopic microwave — a global warming of the groin. In other words, it gets really hot in there.
So, my sperm — it turns out — were sweating. They were just plain hot — they were trapped in a little sperm sauna. By the time they got released from their steam room-Jacuzzi and catapulted into the great abyss of her lady sea they are already exhausted and parched. And as a result, slow. So there it was. The sperm are slow because they’re overheated. At least that was the theory.
The novice Doogie Howser like doctor said that the only way to reduce the heat is reduce the blood flow. The thinking was, the lower the temperature, the more mobile the sperm will be. In the best-case scenario, removing the mass of veins and engorged blood tunnels would reverse the heating effect and improve the motility.
The year was 1987, long before advances in fertility treatments and the proliferation of ease and elegance of laser surgery; so at the time, the only way to remove the varicocele was to cut the veins out. To gut the nutsack. Then as in a gastric bypass like surgery– tie off the remaining ones. Strangling them and stopping the blood flow. The surgeon simply removes a large section of the veins. It’s like weeding a garden. Then poof. Fertility. But wait, not so fast.
Here’s the catch. There was no guarantee that this would improve the motility. The odds were 50/50 at best. I could have it cut it out and then test the sperm and hope it made a difference. The other alternative was to wait until we were trying to have children (or at least married) and hope for a miracle — that there was at least one little sperm that could. Hold out for the hero. There was no guarantee that we couldn’t conceive. But there was also the risk of waiting too long, doing irreparable damage and never having the chance.
I never saw the actual blade of the knife pierce my pure white, virgin, Swedish hairless skin but the aftermath suggests a butcher’s at work. Whenever a sharp object goes anywhere near the zip code of your scrotum, balls or penis, you want to be awake for it. You want to be watching carefully. I was knocked out. Drugged. Anesthetized. The incision starts just above my pelvis and heads northwest in a jagged line stopping just before my left testicle. The scar is in the ballpark of 6 inches long. Given the fact that on average, men lie about length in that arena by at least 2 inches — you do the math. But it’s there. Every time I shower, every time I have sex, every time I don’t have sex but want to — it’s there — a tattooed reminder of the first stop in a long train to being a father.
We were so young. We were still virgins. We had yet to have actual intercourse (though we were wasting the seed by the gallons). We weren’t engaged or bethrothed, so there was no hurry to have them cut into my manhood now — certainly not before midterms. But I had insurance and she had enthusiasm. We thought, if I had the operation by senior year, but the time were married my sperm would cool down to normal and speed up to above normal — I imagined a Mario Andretti like speed. Fast and Furious — the way we had sex. I don’t remember discussing it, I don’t remember agreeing to do it.
I remember waking up — praying that the knife hadn’t slipped and transformed me into the future lance Armstrong. I reached down to make sure it was all still there. The next thing I remember is her, Molly, by my side. I remember the next few weeks. I remember her changing my bandages. I remember her loving me, protecting me, nursing me. She changed my bandages, cleaned the incision. We fell in love over this. We healed.
But we didn’t tell anyone. It was our secret. The first of many.
The scar that violates the left side of my groin is a permanent bond. It’s true she was taking care of me; but she was also taking care of what was now clearly HER sperm. The secret surgery in the rear view mirror, we moved forward with the college sweetheart’s script. We got engaged. We graduated. We got married. We honeymooned. We moved to Manhattan. We moved forward quickly.
I never went back to the doctor to check the sperm. We got busy. Besides, we didn’t want to know. We assumed the surgery was a success. We had done the right thing; we waited till we were married to consummate and now we would be rewarded with speedy sperm. That’s how it works. Right?
We were in such a hurry to start our life; we assumed our sperm would have a sense of urgency too. We tried for the first year of our marriage to conceive. As we approached our third anniversary, she decided it was time to check on the little guys again. This how I ended up jerking off into the little cup next to the menorah.
Isaac, I really want you to see this.
Abraham showed Isaac the incision and seemed to be explaining to him the surgery I had undergone years ago. He also seemed quite interested in what remained of the varicocle. Despite the surgery, it was still there — it had never shrunk completely — but it never returned to its original inflated size either.
In the small dingy bathroom facing Houston Street, I stepped into my blue pin striped three-piece suit and added my obligatory red power tie. (It was the 80s). I said a little prayer for all my unborn children.
Abraham and Isaac watched me with great interest — I was as foreign to them as they were to me. I was young, hairless, thin — a Goya for god’s sakes. I stepped into the thick silence of their room. Was I supposed to say something or were they? At the time, it didn’t occur to me that the moment was profound, holy, ordained. In the Old Testament, Abraham is the Father of all of God’s people — so having him as your fertility guy has to be a good omen. I had so many questions for him. About sperm, about Jews, about Jewish sperm, about my nutsack, about the Torah. But the only thing I manage to ask was this: Where can I get a good bagel with creme cheese around here?
They directed me to Katz Deli on the corner. I stood outside the glass windows of the revered kosher deli in the yet to be gentrified lower east side. On that chilly, drizzly afternoon, it seemed like more than a restaurant, it felt like a church or synagogue, a place of passage. Besides, my sperm and I were hungry. So I went inside.
I must have watched over a hundred different people come and go in that long, endless afternoon as I waited for the test results. A woman dragging an army of children. Two young lovers came in holding hands. An angry man with a hairless cat on a leash. Humans. They are everywhere. As they passed in and out of the doorway on their way to life it occurred to me:
We are all just sperm and egg. Each person. There’s one now. Sperm — egg. Sperm — egg. An egg stepping into the subway. Two sperm racing to catch the bus on Houston Street. Sperm holding door for egg.
How did I want my eggs, the waiter asked. Fertile. I said. Did I just say that? He repeated. Yes, you said fertile, I said how do you want your eggs.
Over easy. I corrected myself; I’d like them over easy.
We are all miracles. One in a million. A sperm and egg making another sperm and egg is not mechanical, it not just science or medicine, it was a fucking miracle.
I bought a couple bouquets of flowers from the green grocer on my way home — daisies — her preference. While we made love, I said a prayer to Allah and Muhammad and Jesus while I was coming inside of her. Come one little sperm you can do it.
7 years and 700 orgasm and millions of slow sweaty overheating sperm later, we were still unfertilized. Still unmothered still unfathered. It was not to be. Not that night. Or the next tonight, of the next year or 7 years later. The sperm that had been so attracted to her eggs would never meet. The hope we felt that first date, the first operation. The hope — like the sex — slowed down until it reached a standstill and
Our relationship had slowed down to halt. It ended abruptly. No goodbye. No tearful goodbye — my sperm will miss you. This was the unspoken loss. My sperm was simply not fast enough for her eggs. The thing that brought us together would eventually unravel us. The children we so badly wanted, failed to hold us together.
But she is a resourceful woman; it didn’t take her long to found someone else’s sperm. It’s been 10 years that someone else’s sperm made contact with her eggs. I think I actually felt it her moment of conception; I woke up in the middle of the night after a dream — and I thought — she is fertilized. In the dream, she was on a swing, in a white gown. A wedding dress that looked like a hospital gown. I was pushing her. The closer she came to me, the further away she went. She was pregnant, glowing and beautiful.
The first time I saw a photograph of her baby daughter from another man, I gasped. I swear I felt a sharp pain in my groin, my scar tissue burned.
After all we had been through together it came down to this. She had someone else’s baby. I got sliced and cut and probed and jerked off and turned inside out and upside down and it was all for nothing.
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