Go To The Bank (I)

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I had a difficult time not giggling out loud when the woman?s recorded voice was using phrases like ?the sperm then goes into quarantine for an additional six months? while I was sitting at work at my desk in the middle of an otherwise perfectly normal workday.

I wondered what, if anything, everyone around me was thinking. Just another Scott on the phone moment, probably with a client? Meanwhile, I am hearing, ?payment for semen donors is $60 per specimen, dispensed over time,? and speculating whether the payment is dispensed over time, or if the semen has to be dispensed over time, which could be awkward.

Oh, and yeah, ?collection must be done alone, and no lubricant of any kind can be used in the collection.? I had pretty much been anticipating the alone part ? though really, would that be the nicest girlfriend ever, or what?

But what is up with the lubricants thing? I have never been a major fan of lubricated masturbation (sorry for the information overload there). But if it is popular enough that it has to be prohibited, it makes me start to wonder if I have missed out on whole fertile (haha) realms of masturbatory pleasure?

So, if not abundantly clear by now, I was checking out sperm banks. If you open up the phone book to Sperm Banks, which was the first thing I did, you will find only a single listing for Swedish?s Reproductive Technologies Unit, which did not sound at all encouraging.

The internet was not terribly helpful, either. I finally found a sperm bank in eastern Washington, and there was a Scandinavian sperm importing business here in Seattle.

Well, I sure as heck was not going to fly to Norway to give sperm just to have it exported straight back to Seattle at ridiculously inflated prices. And eastern Washington?!! Scandinavia is more likely.

It had all started on my really long drive down to B~?s house a couple of weeks ago. While driving past what looks like a nuclear reactor tower near the border (and for all I know, it may be a nuclear reactor tower), I suddenly thought, ?I wonder what a sperm bank is like??

It was such a fantastically good question that I had to scrawl it onto a business card, ?find out about sperm banks?.

[Pathetic but true trivia fact: all the idiotic thoughts that flit though all of our heads during the day ? the ones that when you have them, you just roll your eyes at yourself, ?where does the phrase ?soup to nuts? come from? Who gives a rip??, and get on with your day ? I interrupt the flow of my day and jot them down on whatever is at hand. I carry a satchel just so I can carry a notebook just so I can have a place for all the detritus of my mind to collect. And I get sad when I lose a random obscure snippet of thought. ?Darn it! What was I just thinking about? That could have been three paragraphs!?]

Finally I called Swedish and asked if they did an anonymous donor program or if they were just a bank for people stashing sperm away for their own later use. To my surprise, they did have an anonymous donor program, and gave me the number to find out more.

Somehow it was less embarrassing to ask, out loud, in a corral of four desks with coworkers if there was an anonymous donation program, than it was next when I listened to the recorded message. It was just so delightfully blunt. ?At your second screening, you will give sperm and urine specimens, and blood will be drawn.? I loved it. All these words I was hearing that no one else was.

So I listened to the message, and hit the key to talk to the person who would schedule me for my first screening interview.

A lady with an Indian accent picked up and gave me the rundown again (first screening ? sperm sample; second screening ? sperm sample, urine sample, blood sample, family medical history interview; abstain at least 48 hours and no more than 7 days before donating; must be 18-39 years old; minimum of a 3-month commitment of coming in once or twice a week; and so forth), and she asked if I had any questions. So I had her explain the money thing.

You get paid $20 for each specimen (?cup o? sperm? in the proper medical jingo) at the door. Your donations are grouped in 3-month blocks, which go into quarantine for six months. At the end of six months, you are re-tested (blood tests, etc), and if you are still a good donor, you get a block payment of $40/donation for each donation inside the 3-month period. Complicated, but nice to know that such complicated algorithms are being applied to my semen. No cheap hotel room, ?sixty-bucks on the dresser, thanks for your donation, goodbye now? for my little guys. No sir.

Then she asked me a series of profile questions, and again I had to wonder what the conversation would be interpreted as by any coworkers. ?Blond? ?Blue? ?5?11?? ?165? ?Caucasian ? yeah, no surprise, eh?? ?Fair ? right, again no surprise? ?BA ? political science? and so forth. Maybe I was briefing a blind date or something.

And at the end of it, she gave me my donor number and we scheduled a screening for me for Tuesday at 7:30am.

Next: Tuesday

[Soup to nuts: the darned Internet has taken all the fun out of knowing obscure things. All we have left is the little stimulus-response pleasure of curiosity-satisfaction. Milliseconds online yield the ?oh, of course? answer that soup to nuts, meaning ?everything; from beginning to end,? has its origins in the fact that dinner starts with soup, and ends with a dessert course of nuts. Originating back in the day, I suppose, when fruit and nuts were a treat suitable for dessert, and kids would pray that they might get an orange in their stockings at Christmas. And back in the day when dinner had courses.]