Newsletter: 2022-01-13

January 13, 2022

Update

It’s been some time since I managed to get a newsletter out. I was enjoying the every-other week pacing, but then life threw a bunch of concerns for us at the end of the year that just pulled my attention away. As such this is a big update.

Momentous Personal Updates

Let’s get the big update out of the way, Lauren and I have been trying to use science to create life. This is a long story so if you’re going to find it boring and want pretty pictures, feel free to skip to the holiday wrap but below.

After we (finally) got married, Lauren and I thought, “Well, let’s see if Nature has any plans for us about kids.” A year or so later, we realized she didn’t.

While we had originally promised each other a laissez-faire attitude, we are both engineer-y enough to want to find out what was afoot. After jumping through many hoops with medicine and insurance (“you’re technically not need in help until after one year of trying”), we found an amazing doctor at Columbia who said that she could help us.

Let me step back a moment, when I say “many hoops” above, let me expand a second. We started this process almost 3 years ago with a different set of practitioners, a different insurance, etc. While we were, as they politely say, “older” then, by the time we got into this doctors hands we were uhm, even older. So for anyone reading this, it’s great to have kids in your late 30’s; however, if you have any issues along the way, you really don’t have a lot of wiggle room. So if you’re delaying recognize that your delay is predicated on everything going perfectly.

In any case, our doctor’s primary concern was that there was damage to Lauren’s organs, likely related to her appendicitis many years ago, that meant things were going to be harder. In short, without science’s intervention, she rated our chance of natural success as being “harder.” By “harder,” I believe she meant “statistically unlikely.”

Just about the time we got that assessment, the pandemic broke out and delayed everything again. Somehow, after weeks of preparation, the doctor found operatory time and space in Westchester (Bronxville, NY) and slated Lauren for surgery to remove a damaged fallopian tube. This is called a salpingectomy. In addition, it wound up, the doctor also found some surprise endometriosis during surgery that she removed.

With that damaged organ no longer functional for purposes of routing gametes and our ages, IVF was going to be a decided odds booster.

Digression: On Supporting Women Having Children

And let me get that on the table. Egg quality falls off drastically in the 30’s. That’s just biological reality. But we as a society have done a garbage job of taking care of women and reassuring them that they are going to be supported.

If a woman is the first of her family to step out of poverty and is bearing the punitive rates of student loans…how can she feel OK about interrupting her career to have kids
If a woman’s partner leaves/dies/proves himself unworthy of parenthood, a woman loses valuable years
If a woman finds she needs medical care, if she can pay for it she can get it to maybe get healed enough to get pregnant and or pay for infertility solutions

I don’t recall any of our conversations about “culture of life” talking about the all-too cold realities of keeping our capital-oriented society whizzing along and what that means for child-bearing outcomes.

And our society says to these women: “tough.” I think it’s one of the worst lies that gets sold to American women: they can have it all.

“You can have a career and college and a husband and a family. You can have it all. People on “People” have babies in their 40’s and 50’s so can you.

That’s a damn lie that covers up this truth: “People whose level of net worth is statistically uncommon have options like that. For everyone else, you’re best advised to procreate in your 20’s.”

And, given that, what do we, as a society do to make it possible for women to be fully-realized as we promised them (y’know “career and college and a husband and a family?”).

Nothing.

We don’t offer the lengthy maternity or paternity leaves (like the Scandinavian countries); we don’t have stellar-quality universal day care or pre-K (like the Scandinavian countries); and we have a financially-punitive medical system (unlike the Scandinavian countries).

I feel sorry for women in the cases I described above. American financial, medical, insurance, and work culture hates them, and it will beat them real hard as often as possible until they get that message and give up, take off their shoes, get in the kitchen, and go along with the program.

End Digression

Anyway, after months of healing, the IVF process was started in earnest. For anyone who’s ever done it or seen it done, there’s, just. so. many. shots. Amazingly, Lauren, like Nike, Just Did It ™.

We got a big old box of shots, a sharps box, and links to videos on how to inject yourself and Lauren did it. The results, we were warned, were not what we wanted.

Round one, no viable candidates…and the clock was ticking

Round two, no viable candidates…and the clock was ticking

Now we had been very lucky that my employer provides robust infertility benefits. But that was running out at this point. We were going to have to kick in more this time and any additional times were going to be 100% out of pocket.

Facing this, we sat back a second to lick our wounds. As we approached the end of the year, thanks to FSA savings, special COVID-related FSA rollovers, timing, etc. we faced, financially, a “now or never” kind of moment. I know it’s hard to talk about money and pregnancy and infertility, but it’s everyone not doing that that lead us, in part to some complacency here. Lauren’s been open about the whole process on Twitter, so here’s my equivalent effort for the rest of the world. The cost of treatment and the cost of the kid are real things and the blind assumption “we’ll figure it out” is hallmark human (in a bad way). As my Dad said: “Hope is not an effective strategy.”

We were laying back after a long day of visiting Paris and we had the “one last try” conversation. I’ll recall that it was at our hotel on Place Vendôme in Paris that we decided to make the call when we got back home to try it one last time.

This meant that our family, whom we’d hoped to see for the holidays had to be uninvited. We would spend another holiday in New York alone.

So starting pretty much at the last newsletter (mid-November), that’s where we started the process of the final round. Lauren endured 10 days of shots, multiple days of doctor visits, pain, bloating, shuffling everywhere, and the general hormonal head-screw. By the time those 10 days were up we were into December and barreling toward Christmas.

Also, the Omicron COVID variant started making travel even more fraught. It may have been a blessing that we didn’t have our family coming to visit as New York, as usual, was first in line to face the surge.

Last week, we got work on our final round. Out of benefits, out of money, out of a dozen cells taken, one little clump of cells made it and has tested “Normal.” It was sent for analysis and came back free of any genetic abnormalities (which usually causes the woman’s body to reject it). So, here we are with one last chance to change our world utterly. “Little Frosty” was put in cryogenic storage and we’re going to meet with the doctor on the 18^th to see what the next step is. The plan, roughly, would be to take a bunch of drugs to try to, uh, optimize the environment for receptivity, implant, and then hope for another statistically-unlikely roll of the dice.

Until then, we will live somewhere between dread and hope, tempered realism and wild-eyed optimism. We tell ourselves that “If it doesn’t work out, we’ll get another poodle and buy a place in the country where we can hang out. Or maybe I’ll try to get a job in our engineering offices in Prague or London. We’ll take some more go-for-broke vacations with élan.” But there’s the other voice that says that maybe one of the big experiences of life will be missed.

To temper our expectations, we keep saying to family that we’ve “failed to fail.” It keeps the odds in perspective and helps create some emotional cover the meantime.

So while that’s the big story that’s animated the last few months, I did want to share a bit about the holidays.

Thanksgiving

The most immediate action after my last newsletter was Thanksgiving. We decided to celebrate it here, alone, in New York. This was, in part, occasioned by our timing for one final stab (get it?) at human engineering. While we had hoped to see some of our loved ones here (or we there), our need to be near the Columbia medical establishment meant we were here, for a second year in a row, just a duo (or counting Byron, a trio).

…And then COVID-19 omicron really got going here in NY. While the infections are high, the hospitalizations are thankfully low (in part due to the exceedingly high vaccination rates in NYC). But would I have wanted my parents to have come here through the far-less uniformly disciplined airports and planes? As much as I would have like to have seen them, no. Not really.

Because we suspected Lauren might be starting a pretty taxing drug regime, we worked very hard to have most of the preparation taken care of before the big day. By the night before, we prepared potatoes, green beans, corn bread, a pumpkin pie, a Dutch apple streusel pie, and stuffing.

A few weeks prior, we had ordered the turkey from Whole Foods and were set to pick it up, cook it, and celebrate the holiday.

We put this plan into effect the next morning, I was at Whole Foods at Columbus Circle at 0830, got our bird, and then headed home. I fired up the oven and went about setting the bird on its roasting pan. With the task complete, Lauren opened the oven and said: “The oven’s still cold.”

Yes, Virginia, our oven had failed on Thanksgiving day. I cringed as I called our super. He came up (fairly good-naturedly under the circumstances) and verified that it was indeed, “not hot at all.” As the repair later would prove, our oven had broken on Thanksgiving day.

Yet we bravely made the most of it. We read that our instant pot could hold up to 7 pounds and our bird was 9 pounds. We cut away two pounds and skillet seared it. The rest we put in the instant pot with the broth.

It wound up looking like this:

You’ll see

Jalapño cornbread
Turkey
Potatoes
Green Beans
Stuffing
Pumpkin Pie
Apple Strusel Pie
Salad

As per tradition, the day after Thanksgiving we bought our tree:

Christmas

After Thanksgiving, the Christmas season was upon us. My work put a giant tree up in the middle of our building’s drive:

We were doing some days in the office and enjoying the holiday season at work. Thanks to vaccinations and the relaxing of restrictions, we even got to see a shorter (due to COVID) performance of Handel.

The week after this performance we went back to full remote work out of the spiking cases in NYC. This was really hard. We’d been so good for so long and had just had a taste of where things could be, and Omicron sent us all back to March 2020 again. I watched in horror as the infection rate numbers moved from 7% to 100% increase to 200% increase. Until we could get our boosters, we were going back into hermit mode.

This meant that we made plenty of cookies:

On Christmas Eve, we made my Aunt Nancy’s Green Chile Stew. I was even able to find Ro-Tel tomatoes and Hatch green chiles on the Upper West Side!

And Santa came to visit me:

I really was excited about this book because it teaches some cooking theory and general principles for combining food. Very exciting!

Santa was also vexed that I was wearing Chuck Taylor’s in winter. So he got me some awesome lined Doc Martens and some fleecy Cons too!

The Jolly Old Elf brought Lauren a new Macbook Pro laptop and some shearling-lined Ugg gloves in tan (for earth tone days), and Mel Brooks' autobiography (which is hilarious from what she’s read to me).

New Year’s

We stayed in an watched When Harry Met Sally. As it was filmed in and around our neighborhood (Nora Ephron loved the UWS), we enjoyed the “Oh, look that’s on 96^th street!” and pointing at the various locations. And at some point I felt it in my heart as I watched her smile and her warmth, man I miss Carrie Fisher.

The night involved roasting a chicken with help from my new book!

At midnight we saw fireworks reflected in the windows of our neighbors and wished for two miracles: the end of a pandemic and a statistical lucky seven.

January

We got our boosters days after New Years and have been keeping a low profile while we waited for their potency to cure. We’ve been killing time doing jigsaw puzzles. There’s an adorable toy shop on 72^nd street that we can walk to that has a good selection and is a classic local small business.

We also recently had a snowy day:

Closing

It’s been a rough two years and our medical trials have not been small either. Yet we’re thankful for what we have. We get to live in an amazing place with people who care and the world’s most amazing dog. We have food and bicycles and parks. Cherish every good thing you have in 2022.

Today our super came by and he mentioned that one of the staff who work in the building contracted COVID last week and, contrary to the billing, “mild” COVID can be life threatening. He’s in a particularly bad place. Even if you’re not concerned about getting sick, think of those whose bodies can’t bear a “mild” strain and do what’s right for your fellow man.