And the Award for Most Improved goes to.....

Brandon! Everybody clap!!!


I guess I should preface this with a story about the first time I called Brandon after we met. It was evening, and he was in the bathtub at his Grandma's. I can maybe imagine that she might have been giving his back a good scrub down, because a man taking a bath is very strange to me. Especially when he tells me he takes one every night. Every woman I know says that a bath is a luxury. We rarely get to take them. But Brandon is a man who takes his bathing seriously.
Anyway, he has always done this. Cameron and Eamon took 9 months to conceive. The last pregnancy only took 6, woo hoo... We didn't know why it took so long, but whatever.... So after I had a miscarriage a year and a half ago, my sister-in-law Sara told me that a hot bath was terrible on a man's fertility. I kind of suspected that already, but this was like the little push I needed to get serious about it. I told him he needed to stop taking his hot baths, and that maybe they were why it took us so long to get pregnant in the first place. Long story short, he would not. And yes, maybe a lot of it was him getting back at me for being a bad wife or housekeeper. Whatever...

But after many times of hearing him say, "Hey, we have 2 kids, it can't be me" or "How do you know it's not you?" and one LONG a$$ year going by, I finally had an exam by my OB-GYN. Brandon then agreed to have a semen analysis, as suggested by my doctor. Can I just tell you the results were DEPRESSING....
His fertility score of 6 was almost the lowest it could be.
25-30=normal, 16-24=moderate, less than 15=low.
So would 6=the lowest of the low?


Can I just tell you that Brandon stopped the baths that day!!?

The test suggested reasons, and one was a varicose vein of the testicle, sometimes incurred through trauma. Could Brandon think of a time when he had experienced trauma to the testicle? YES, at least a couple of occasions skating on rails actually. So here was our probable answer. Brandon isn't too keen on having a surgery to remove this vein, and I can't blame him. His doctor suggested laying off the hot baths for 3 months to rule that out as well, and maybe they were what was exacerbating the problem of the varicose vein. Do you follow? Do you want to follow? Sorry.

So like a good boy (and like most of the human race), Brandon has been taking showers all spring. Every time I hear the shower going, it's like a love letter written just for me.

Fast forward 3 months. I had written us off as a low-fertility couple. I was going to call my doctor to ask what the procedure is for artificial insemination and when could we get started. I had resigned myself. The nurse from his doctor's office calls today and I say, "Oh, you have the test back already? What does it say?"

"He's at a 30 fertility score, which is the highest it goes."

I wanted to ask her if Brandon's test had been switched with someone else's...I didn't. So I called Brandon and let him read the fax of the results before I said anything. He read it and was shocked as well. I said, "How do you feel?"

"Happy."

"And...." (I'm waiting for it)

"Excited," and I can hear the smile on his face.

"And....How else do you feel..." (still waiting)

"Um, proud....?"

"What about guilty?"

"Nope."

Almost conclusive medical proof of him being a selfish bas*&$# and he has nothing to say to me....About me being right all along. About how sorry he is for putting me through H-E-double hockey sticks for a year. About how I'm always right and how he wants nothing more than to apologize with flowers and back rubs and staying away from his car for one night. I'm still waiting...

I think I'm still not excited. I'm still in shock over all of this crap. It's crazy stuff.

(By the way, I received permission to post this)