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At Mary’s birthday party on Saturday, a woman walked by who looked familiar. The feeling must have been mutual, for a few minutes later she tapped Sarah on the shoulder. After a minute of semi-awkward brainstorming, they came to the much more awkward truth: she’s a nurse at the fertility clinic.
In truth, she was very sweet and congenial, just as she had been at the clinic. Not awkward at all. We smiled about the good news, and shared some laughs about all the quirky things that go on in the halls of that place. Still, it had that same kind of inappropriateness that overcomes you when you run into your teacher at the grocery store — these people exist in real life? This is a woman who we’ve consulted about our sex life and who’s very likely handled cups of my sperm.
She came to say goodbye as she was leaving, and maybe it was the wine slushies speaking, but I had something I had to get off my chest. “Listen,” I said, “between you and me, those videos are terrible.” She knew what I meant, and while she didn’t have first-hand experience to draw on, she knew. For a female nurse, The Room must have a air of foul mystique to it. Or maybe it’s a mystique of foul air. She promised to look into it.
I am so incredibly thankful that I’ll never get to know if she succeeded.
sarah
— Feb 2 / 11:26A related story that got edited out of an earlier blog post, but that I enjoyed telling the nurse at Mary’s party:
When I came in for our second IUI, I had brought Sandy’s sample with me, but left some of the paperwork at home so I had to fill it out when I got there. The andrologist, a very awkward sort of person, sighed in irritation about the forgotten forms and then walked me across the hall saying, “you can fill out those forms in here so you can have some privacy and a comfortable chair.” I didn’t see where she was taking me until it was too late. The Room.
I declined to sit on the chair because, oh my god, ew. (She actually repeated, “there’s a really comfortable chair in here! Why don’t you have a seat?”)
Meanwhile, it was 8 am on a Saturday morning, and there were chairs EVERYWHERE. Empty waiting rooms FULL OF CHAIRS.
Perhaps she was just oblivious to how bizarre and gross this was. But I prefer to think this was actually some kind of elaborate scared-straight program she had developed for women who forget their paperwork.
star
— Feb 2 / 11:50I’m going to have to inquire further as to the terribleness of said videos. But I can wait until next month.
Ryan
— Feb 5 / 13:21The videos in our clinic were also really, really bad. And the room was laughably small.