The day I received that letter where they told me about the appointment with the assisted reproduction team
I mentally review the list of questions that I will ask the doctor and imagine the ones she will ask me. We’ve been having unprotected sex for thirty-one months now, with normal periods since my adolescence, every twenty-eight days (“twenty-nine in holiday months!”, I’ll blurt out to her to lighten things up), no family problems, and also my siblings have two children each, my mother has had three and my grandmother six! No, I’m sure she’ll send me back home. Maybe I’ll have to take progesterone ovules at the end of each cycle, like my friend Susana, and she will prescribe vitamins for my partner, and everything will be sorted out in a few months.
Well, okay, it’s true that I’ve smoked a bit in my time, but I gave it up several years ago. How long ago was it, in fact? I rewind the movie of my life and I realize that it was seven years ago! I’ve had a few excesses, but you also have to have a little fun before getting into real life, having serious responsibilities, such as having a baby. And also, if the excesses that I’ve committed make you sterile, then half the planet would be waiting in a room just like this one. You have to make the most of it before being parents and having responsibilities. And well, if I compare my lifestyle with that of others, mine is not all that bad! There are worse … much worse! And they, as far as I know, have had no problems. Quite the contrary! They didn’t want kids! They had an abortion…
And all my tests are fine. The hormonal analysis is perfect, apart from that progesterone, which is a tad low. My tubes were subjected to a hysterosalpingographic inspection (what a bad memory!), And in the end everything was fine. They’re permeable. The Hühner test has also gone well. And then there’s my partner: healthy, young, who’s never smoked … the only thing that this man abuses is sport! His seminogram was so so, but the one in the lab told us that it was enough to be up to it between the sheets and that, in any case, nowadays all men were the same. Stress, the mobile, pollution: this is the curse of the 21st century, the middling seminogram result! She also explained that every year since the Second World War, the concentration of sperm in semen has gone down by 1%. Yes, this obviously didn’t encourage me much, but since you only need one to achieve it, I’m optimistic!
I also brought the temperature curves that I started doing four months ago, following the advice of my gynaecologist: “This could help you,” she assured me. Then, seeing that the cycles passed and nothing came, my curiosity awoke; I began to document and even to observe myself in a more intimate way, indicating in the same daily temperature sheet the state of the secretions. I was even about to enter the neck observation phase to try to understand the situation even better, when I received that letter where they told me about the appointment with the assisted reproduction team at my city hospital and I decided to leave these observations until later…
