From: goddess@crystal.palace.net (Louise R. Howard) Newsgroups: talk.bizarre Subject: FTSD: IVF Organization: A poorly-installed InterNetNews site Lines: 77 Message-ID: <74008h$qft@crystal.palace.net> Summary: What I did for Christmas Date: 1 Dec 1998 00:53:21 -0500 X-Complaints-To: news@nac.net X-Trace: nntp1.nac.net 912491620 205.231.120.1 (Tue, 01 Dec 1998 00:53:40 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 00:53:40 EDT The Dream: He's kissing me. He's biting me. He's holding me. He's wrapped around me. He's inside me. He can see into the depths of me. He fills me. It feels so good, it hurts. The Reality: Many venopunctures (blood tests) to check hormone levels. A sonogram with dildo implement to check my ovaries. A test that forced iodine through my uterus and fallopian tubes (pictures pending) which left me feeling raw. Another intravaginal sonogram to determine the lay of the land of my uterine wall and to do a mock-implantation and endometrial depth check with an optic fiber dip-stick. The Dream: My husband driving very fast. His car is white. The road is dark and the trees lattice the moonlit sky. He is winding though back roads and he is being reckless. His face is blank in cold concentration but there is a thrill belied by the movement of his hands on the wheel and on the manual transmission. The Reality: He has given two sperm samples so far. The first was in a low-rent facility that only had Playboy and tissues in a bathroom. The second was in an upscale facility that had a wider selection of porn, warm towels and a soft, plushy chair. Both places had you leave out the back after providing a sample. He will need to provide one more sample for the fertilization. The Dream: I am a tree in the Appalachian forest. I am a Douglas Fir. I am alive with bristles and spines and bark and cones. I am shedding spikes that carpet the ground beneath me. Touch me and you'll bleed. The Reality: One subcutanious injection of Lupron in the morning. One subcutanious injection of Follistim (generated by gentically engineered, recombinant DNA nurtured in Chinese mice) in the evening. Eventually, my husband will have to give me an intramuscular injection of Profasi (derived from the urine of post-menopausal women who have never been pregnant) thirty six hours before They will harvest all the eggs I can muster. The Dream: I am being held by an old lover. We are clinging together in the cold. I can feel the smooth skin of his side against my tummy. I can feel his strong hands on my back. He is rubbing me and abraiding my skin trying to get to the warm core of me. I want him to because the air is so very cold. The Reality: They will inject Lee's sperm directly into my eggs. After three days (like Christ's ressurection) They will evaluate how many embryos are at the six or eight stage of cell division. Only the four strongest blastulae will be used. The others will be kept on ice. The In-Vitro Fertilization FAQ calls them Totcicles. The Dream: I am being fed a bagel with vege-creamcheese by my doctor. The lumps of vegetables are onion purple, celery green and bell-pepper red. It makes the hunger pangs go away. The Reality: They will place four multi-celled oocytes on the tip of an optic fiber, move them transcervically, and then place them gently onto my endometrial wall. Then I will be sent home to lie in bed with my feet up for 24 hours. Each blastula has less than a 30% chance of implantation. The entire procedure has about a 25% chance of resulting in the delivery of at least one healthy baby. I should know by the turn of they year if all my dreams will come true. Keep the Faith, Louise using sufficiently advanced technology