It’s going to be a busy first month. About two hours after you had sex, one very lucky sperm will have fertilized the egg, and, voilà, you’ve got yourself a zygote. By the end of the day, the zygote will divide into two cells and is now, technically, an embryo. Your tiny bundle of cells will continue to divide, and four to seven days after conception it will implant itself comfortably into the wall of your partner’s uterus, where it’ll stay until birth. By the end of this month, your little embryo will be about one quarter-inch long—10,000 times bigger than when it was just a zygote—and will have a heart (but no brain), and tiny arm and leg buds.
WHAT’S GOING ON WITH YOU
Thrills
I still have the white bathrobe I was wearing the morning my wife and I found out we were expecting for the first time. I remember standing nervously in the kitchen, the countertop cluttered with vials of colored powders and liquids, droppers, and the small container filled with my wife’s “first morning urine.” (Fortunately, do-it-yourself pregnancy detection kits are a lot less complicated today than they used to be, but I’m not sure they’re anywhere near as much fun.) Feeling like a Nobel Prize–winning chemist on the edge of making a discovery that would alter the course of the entire world, I carefully dropped several drops of the urine into one of the vials of powder. I stirred the mixture with the specially provided swizzle stick, rinsed it, and slowly added the contents of the other vial.
In all honesty, the results we got twenty minutes later weren’t a complete surprise. But that didn’t make it any less thrilling. I’d always wanted to have children, and suddenly it seemed that all my dreams were finally going to come true. It was like hitting the million-dollar jackpot on the nickel slots.
“Young kids today don’t know how good they have it.… I remember the old days before home pregnancy tests.”
Fresh or Frozen
Whether your baby was conceived in a lab or a bed, your future child will develop in the same way. A few days after conception, the embryo—now about eight cells—may be implanted in your partner’s uterus. Some clinics wait a few more days, until the embryo develops into a blastocyst. The reason is that in the wild, fertilization usually takes place in the fallopian tubes and the embryo travels for a few days until arriving in the uterus, where it implants in the wall. Not all embryos, however, develop into blastocysts, so waiting until they do gives your fertility doc a better shot at implanting something that has a strong chance of survival.
If you’re doing IVF, the eggs you use will come either from your partner or another woman. And you can order them in one of two ways: fresh or frozen. Fresh embryos result in somewhat more pregnancies and live births than frozen ones. However, fresh isn’t always a possibility (the eggs may have been fertilized before you or your partner went through a medical procedure—like chemotherapy—that could potentially have damaged either her eggs or your sperm. Or the eggs may have been retrieved from a faraway donor). Interestingly, fresh may not always be better. In independent studies, researchers in Finland, the U.S., and Australia all found that while defrosted embryos result in fewer pregnancies, the babies that are produced that way are less likely to be born prematurely, be born underweight, or die soon after birth. No one has any idea why that is.
Relief … and Pride
The pregnancy test’s positive result filled me with an incredible feeling of relief. Secretly, I’d always been afraid that I was sterile and that I’d have to be satisfied with taking someone else’s kids to the circus or the baseball game. I also felt a surge of pride. After all, I was a man, a fully functional man—all right, a stud, even. And by getting my wife pregnant, I’d somehow lived up to my highest potential.
If you’re not the biological father of your child (your partner conceived using donor sperm), you probably won’t have these feelings. But that in no way means that you’re any less manly—or that you’re going to be any less of a dad—than the rest of us.
Many expectant ART dads feel a different kind of relief: all those months and years of infertility treatment—the emotional ups and downs, the optimism and disappointment—are now a thing of the past. Other dads take longer to get to this point, and some never completely shake the infertility mentality.
Morning Sickness
Somewhere between half and 90 percent of all pregnant women experience “morning sickness.” Despite the catchy name, the nausea, heartburn, and vomiting can strike at any hour of the day. No one’s quite sure what causes morning sickness. Some suggest that it’s the pregnant woman’s reaction to changing hormone levels, in particular human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which is produced by the placenta and is the same stuff that’s picked up by home pregnancy kits. Others, such as researchers Margie Profet, Samuel Flaxman, and Paul Sherman, contend that morning sickness is the body’s natural way of protecting the growing fetus from teratogens (toxins that cause birth defects) and abortifacients (toxins that induce miscarriage). Morning sickness seems to go hand in hand with food aversions, which a lot of pregnant women also have. The most common aversions are to meat, fish, poultry, and eggs—all foods that can spoil quickly and can carry disease.
Whatever the cause, for most women, morning sickness typically starts four to six weeks after conception and disappears by fourteen to fifteen weeks. Until then, here are a few things you can do to help your partner cope:
• Give her some good news. It turns out morning sickness may actually be a good thing. Women who don’t have nausea or vomit are three times more likely to miscarry than those who do have those symptoms, according to researcher Gideon Koren. And women over thirty-five (whose risk of miscarriage is higher) benefited the most. In addition, women with morning sickness are less likely to deliver too early, have very low-birth-weight babies, or have babies with birth defects. Oh, and those babies do have higher IQs. Knowing this probably won’t make your partner feel any better, but it might give her something to smile about as she’s leaning over the toilet bowl.
• Encourage her to drink a lot of fluids (although some women with morning sickness have trouble tolerating milk). You might also want to keep a large water bottle next to the bed. She should avoid caffeine, which tends to be dehydrating, and she might want to start the day with a small amount of nonacidic juice, such as apple or grape, or flat soda; the sweet flavor will probably encourage her to drink a little more than she might otherwise.
• Be sensitive to the sights and smells that make her queasy—and keep them away from her. Fatty or spicy foods are frequent offenders.
• Encourage her to eat a lot of small meals throughout the day—every two or three hours, if possible—and to eat before she starts feeling nauseated. Low blood sugar can make the nausea worse. A high-protein, high-carbohydrate diet may help. And basic, bland foods like rice and yogurt are particularly good because they’re less likely to cause nausea than greasy foods.
• Go for a walk. Some women find that exercise reduces nausea.
• Make sure she takes her prenatal vitamins—with food—if her doctor says to do so. He may also suggest that she take some additional vitamin B and K. For some women, the prenatal vitamins may actually be making the morning sickness worse. OB Lissa Rankin often switches her patients to a chewable vitamin. If that doesn’t work, she takes them off the vitamins altogether for a few months. “It’s more important to stay hydrated and take in some nutrients than to take a vitamin,” she says.
• Put some pretzels, crackers, or rice cakes by the bed—she’ll need something to start and end the day with, and these are low in fat
