Baby Fever

This is a story from three months ago that I have been meaning to share on the blog for ages.  File under Kate needs a more soothing hobby -- aka, ridiculous fertility paranoia.

Sometime in the haze that was re-writing and defending my thesis, I came home from work one day to find Hub's car in the driveway.  Fantastic!  I thought.  He's home early!

It was not, in fact, fantastic.  I found Hub in bed, a sweaty, shivering, delirious mess.  I have honed my hand-to-forehead temp-taking over these past two years with Elsie, but Hub was off the charts for this ther-mommy-ter.  105 F. (40.6 C)  That's high.  Scary high!

I called his doctor right away and asked if I had to run the ice bath or get him into the ER.

"How long has he been like this?"  She asked.  I had no idea.  "Has he taken anything yet?"  I suspected not.

She told me to give him 3 ibuprofen right away, and if it didn't bring the fever down within 45 min, to get him to the hospital asap.

The drug brought the fever down within minutes, sparing us ER and brain damage.  Hub hates taking ibuprofen, but it kept him cool and comfortable for the next several days while he slept off his bug.  I cooked him chicken soup and brought him ginger ale and slept in the guest room so as not to disturb him.  I did all the things that a loving wife does for a sick husband.  Let me just say, up front, that Hub's health, safety, and comfort was my top priority until he got better.

And he got better.

And I had lots of energy left for nagging fertility worry.  Of course.

My worry logic went something like this:

Saunas are bad for sperm.  Hot tubs are bad for sperm.  Even briefs and lots of exercise are bad for sperm.  Fevers must be bad for sperm, too!  And this was a high fever.  


Evan must have killed off a whole lot of sperm with that fever, and we were just about ready to start up trying again. 

I wonder how long the sperm count will be low?  


I wonder if there might be other problems with the sperm.  Problems where we could get pregnant, but not have a healthy baby.

Is it irresponsible to try to get pregnant after a fever?  Am I going to make mutant babies if we try now?  OMG OMG OMG OMG!  I'm going to make a mutant baby because I just wasn't patient enough to wait for good sperm!  I'm a monster!

So I headed to the internet.  We already know I'm an internet hypochondriac, so this was a terrible idea that I justified by using PubMed as my search engine instead of google.  It was a scholarly terrible idea!  It was science (and a terrible idea).

Sperm Chromatin Structural Assay (not Hub's). Orange stain indicates fragmented DNA

When hub came home from work that day, he found me a ball of nerves and tears.  I had tracked down a case study on this very subject that showed the effects of fever on sperm count were severe, but relatively short-term (say, a month), but the effects on sperm DNA quality persisted for three months post-fever.  The reason for this is presumably that there are sperm in production when you have the fever that won't be ready for a few months.  Everything all the way down the line gets fried by the fever, and you have to wait a while for later batches to cook up right.


"Three months!  Three months!  Then, month 4, you're going to be away, and so we won't even be able to have a shot at trying until 5 months!"  I lamented.

I know that someone is reading this and thinking, "What kind of a nut is this woman?  Relax!  What's the rush?  Cool it, honey!"  Plenty of well-meaning people have expressed a similar sentiment to me before, and I know they want the best for me.  I know they don't want me tearing my hair out over this.  To explain why this is more than simple neurosis, let me give you some emotional context.

I wanted to space my babies close together.  I wanted to have them young.  I definitely want more than one child.  It's the way I pictured my family and the way I wanted things to be.  Family is the most important thing to me, so while I am happy to change career plans, I am reluctant to change family plans.  I had to change my plans when it took a little while (5 m) to conceive Elsie.  I had to change my plans again with my first miscarriage.  And my second.  And even with my chemical pregnancy.  And now I faced changing them again because of a fever.

Family planning is a dream, and it is a rough one to wake up from.  I have so little control over my fertility compared to what I always assumed when I was dutifully taking my birth control pills.  I can't make a year-of-the-dragon baby any more easily than I can make a spring baby.  I am infinitely lucky that I could make a healthy baby at all.  Not everyone can.

When I freak out about Hub's fever sperm, it's not just about the sperm.  It's about releasing this vice grip on my family plans, raising up my hands, and letting the autumn wind blow it all away with the colorful leaves, the seeds on their sails, and the spiders on their silken parachutes.  It's learning to trust this universe with my heart and my hopes and my children.

That, for me, is no easy task.

In the end, I called my doctors.  They all agreed, I may have trouble getting pregnant the first few months, but it isn't irresponsible to try.  So we try, not by my schedule or the thermometer, but by our whims and the murmurs of our bodies.

I take Elsie for a walk, feel the cold air on my face, and chip away at these anchors of control, self-reliance, and perfectionism so that I might fly on that wind a little bit, too.