I'm doing 42 things
Some people wake up on Sunday mornings and think, “I should go worship the Lord.” Some people set aside the day to do yard work and various chores around the house. I spent two hours playing Super Nintendo (Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past), then decided that I shouldn’t deny the world my genetic gifts any longer.
I’d never really researched sperm donation. Pretty much everything I know I learned from the seminal scene in Road Trip*—you show up at a fertility clinic; fill out a questionnaire; affirm that you’ve had neither drugs, nor alcohol, nor sex within the past 72 hours; masturbate in a cold room; and collect $50.00. This sounds like a dream and an adventure. In fact, it’s the sort of thing I could do to supplement my income on a regular basis. As long as I’m prostituting my body like this, why not go all out? Donate sperm twice next week, and on my way home stop by the plasma donation center ($25.00 each time I give them my blood). Combined, that would be $150.00 next week. That’s a ping-pong table, just for my blood and sperm. Sign me up.
So I looked online for the nearest fertility clinic that was looking for anonymous sperm donors. And looked. And looked. Normally I pride myself on my information management skills—I generally find what I’m looking for online quickly and efficiently. Not much luck finding clinics in northern Florida, though. (Coincidentally, if you search for “sperm donation tallahassee” on Yahoo.com, the 12th item that comes up is my list of New Year’s resolutions. Weird.).
I finally settle for a rather unofficial-looking webpage that calls itself the National Sperm Bank Directory. They offered a couple of options for my neck of the woods, only one of which (Fertility Institute of Northwest Florida) was looking for new anonymous donors. Sweet music at that website, by the way. I tried calling them, but there’s no live operator on weekends. On the other hand, the automated callbot had a wealth of information for potential donors. Here are a few things I was not expecting:
They require a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution.
You’re expected to make at least a six-month commitment, providing donations 2-3 times each week. Whoa, whoa, whoa… if I were interested in a commitment, I’d just be donating my sperm the old-fashioned way, Doc.
You’ll need to consent to full blood work and a comprehensive physical before your first donation. This one isn’t actually unexpected, but I didn’t think the physical would be done on-site. Despite the Road Trip reference above, I think I’d be less interested in pleasuring myself after a stranger sticks his finger in my Albert.
The first three frothy glasses I’d provide would be for testing purposes only. I wouldn’t get paid until my fourth donation.
I probably wouldn’t even get to the fourth donation—only about 30% of men pass all the tests (sperm count, motility, resistance to the cryogenic process, and morphology*).
And here’s the one that broke my heart: you have to give a detailed medical history going back at least two generations. Men who were adopted are generally contraindicated from donating sperm.
Hmmm. Well, I’m definitely adopted. I mean, I’m in pretty good health right now, but there are a lot of heritable adult onset diseases out there. There’s always the possibility that I have a nasty little genetic timebomb ticking away in my body. So I understand the rule. Nobody wants a sperm donor who might be six months away from Crohn’s disease.
Still, I have a couple of options here. The title of my goal doesn’t specify where I’m donating this sperm. Technically, I could take some of my sperm to Wal-Mart and hand it to one of the Salvation Army bell-ringers. This action, however, might result in my going to jail, where I would most likely become a sperm recipient. I find this inadvisable.
So I think I’ll just mark this one as complete. I mean, I attempted to donate sperm. It just so happens that nobody wants it. It’s interesting that I’ve made all these resolutions, but all signs point to 2008 being much like 2007 (at least on the sperm front).
- = I can’t believe I made it to the third paragraph before I used that pun.
- = If I’d made 44 New Year’s resolutions, the last one would have been to refer to my anus solely as “Albert Pujol” throughout 2008.
- = Remember Demolition Man? Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes both recovered really well from their croygenic state. They’d have made excellent sperm.
- = The automated message made no attempt to explain “morphology,” and I’m too lazy to look it up, so I’ll assume that it’s sort of like Transformers. Except instead of giant robots, these are cars that change into sperm. A nasty trick to play on poor Shia LeBeouf.
- = Remember Demolition Man? Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes both recovered really well from their croygenic state. They’d have made excellent sperm.
- = If I’d made 44 New Year’s resolutions, the last one would have been to refer to my anus solely as “Albert Pujol” throughout 2008.
