Sunday, February 25, 2007

Fatherhood

It was Christmas day last year when my wife and I bought a pregnancy test kit.

Days before this, she had been complaining about experiencing excessive salivation at night and nausea. I had jokingly (but hopefully) remarked that she might be pregnant and she tempered our expectations by saying that she might not be -- it was her way of cushioning the blow any disappointment we might face.

We had been on a fertility program designed by Doctor Beth Felipe (UDMC) for two or three months prior. The diagnosis was that my wife was too fat and that her body mass was impeding the production of a number of hormones essential to ovulation. The approach was very conservative, first she was precribed with metformin to get her weight down and we were told to have intercourse on certain days and in a certain way that would maximize the chances of conception. Our first try was not a success and neither was the second try. It was on the third try that my wife was prescribed with Clomid, a drug which was supposed to induce follicle growth in her ovaries and thereby lead to the maturation of egg cells. After taking the precribed dosage of Clomid over a period of five days, she was told to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound to see if Clomid had actually induced follicle growth. The results were disappointing, none of my wife's follicles grew to a point where it would rupture into an egg cell. Nevertheless, we were told to continue with intercourse on the off chance that either the ultrasound just didn't see the egg cell or that the follicle could, in a matter of days, develop and rupture. We did as the doctor told us, expecting nothing to happen again.

Three weeks went by and my wife missed her period. We suspected that she might be pregnant but then my wife also couldn't discount the idea that Clomid might have caused her period to move back a couple of days and rather than rush to the drug store to buy a pregnancy kit, we decided to wait another week to see if her period would come.

Another two weeks had passed and it was Christmas Day. It was sometime in the afternoon when we bought the home pregnancy test kit. I busied myself with cooking Christmas day dinner for her family as she worked the pregnancy kit in the comfort room. I tried not to appear excited but my heart was working overtime as I cut and diced too many onions. It was the longest ten minutes of my life and then came the moment of truth, my wife told me to get the pregnancy kit from the comfort room where she had left it.

I closed my eyes as I fetched the kit from the top of the towel shelf. I opened one eye and then the other. It was POSITIVE.

I tried to hide the result from my wife by putting on a poker face.

"Come on, tell me... tell me... is it positive?" my wife said, in between bouts of jumping up and down like a crazed poodle.

I smiled and she hugged me.

That was the best moment ever.

----

Just last week, during our scheduled prenatal check up, Doctor Felipe told my wife to lie down on the examination bed in her office and without telling us what she was going to do, put some kind of machine on my wife's belly. It was some sort of microphone attached to a speaker. After a few scratchy sounds, a distinct blub blub blub emanated from the speaker of the device. It was our child's heartbeat.

Weeks before this, my wife had a transvaginal ultrasound and we got a picture of our kid. Apart from being very difficult to figure out, it didn't seem as real as hearing our child's heartbeat.

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