It's Official. My life is disturbing.

So, yesterday was the Big Day, news-wise. By the time it all settled down, though, I was too drained to have the energy to write. So today is the day I try to settle down and organise my thoughts to transmit not only the news, but a taste of my life over the past year and a bit.

Of course all of this starts in March 18th, 2006. A lot of things -- basically the meaningful bits of my whole life -- started then. Of course Joan, being Chinese, and me, being a bit of a traditionalist at times, thought the whole point of marriage was to have children. For a variety of reasons, however, we didn't seriously start working on this until July of 2006. Well, OK. October.

Still, by the end of January we started to get a little suspicious. People around us who got married at about the time we did (or, in many cases, long after we did!) were in a family way, but our oven had no bun. February through March heightened all suspicion to the point that in April we decided enough was enough. It was time to bring in medical opinion. (And, of course, by "we" I mean "Joan". I would find it hard to consider anything less appealing to me than going to a doctor for this kind of thing. Even in Canada, where notions like "privacy" aren't just known but actively enforced I'd be antsy. Here in China? Where people discuss their most intimate personal details openly in public with a thousand others around? And where people are endlessly fascinated with even the most minute detail of foreigners' lives? "Antsy" isn't strong enough a word. Remind me to tell you of Joan's first experience with how foreigners are treated here in China sometime.)

A lot of dates are getting branded on my brain around this time of year. March 18th. April 30. May 14. May 19. April 25.

April 30 was our first trip to a hospital specialising in reproductive medicine. It was an abortive attempt (no pun intended) but it really heightened just how uncomfortable I was going to the hospital in China for problems like this. The doctor sat at a desk in an office and people just clustered around competing for her attention. When they got it, they blurted out their problems openly. And, of course, when Joan started talking, everybody was staring at me and listening intently. The result of it, however, was that the doctor suggested that another hospital would be better for this particular problem -- specifically the big one here: Tongji.

We decided to take that doctor's advice and arranged for a trip to Tongji hospital, finally getting there on May 14. There I had my panic attack as the number of people involved was truly incredible to behold. There was just no way in Hell I was going to have this potential problem discussed out in the open with literally hundreds of people in earshot. The visit was cancelled.

Well, almost cancelled.

Joan tried one last time to get actual information from the "Information Desk" and this time actually got it. There was a speciality clinic in a completely different part of the hospital than we had been sent to, you see. And when Joan went to check it out, she found it to be actually civilised. Private consultations, for example, with the top professor. Private. Closed door, even. I jumped at it like a shot.

(Well, actually I didn't. I still wasn't happy with the whole situation, but this I was willing to face at least.)

An hour later, after a strange man had fondled my genitalia and pronounced them structurally sound, I found myself in the lab building in a private room ... How can I put this delicately? Extracting seeds. Yeah. That's the way to word it. I found myself in a private room (or as private as the Chinese can imagine a private room to be -- the glass was frosted) extracting seeds. Into a small plastic cup. Surrounded by classic paintings featuring nudes (since actual pornography is technically illegal here). The cup was handed over to a technician and we waited for the results.

The results, after interpretation by the professor, were not good. Basically a low motile sperm count with a larger-than-average proportion of malformed cells. What we had suspected turned into a true nightmare. This was the low point of the week.

Slowly over the week we recovered from the shock and started investigating things which could be done. The news wasn't exactly encouraging, but neither was it hopeless. I wasn't sterile. I just had reduced fertility. I did a lot of research, as did Joan and we started to plan sort of a reverse of the Catholic "rhythm" method of birth control. Joan was a real trooper as we investigated and planned, proving once again that I had made a very good choice in marriage. (Her choice? We're still debating her taste in that....)

That Friday, however, I noticed a few things that had me curious. First, Joan was late with her period. Way late. As in, by that point, six days late. This is not the first time that's happened, though. In fact it was the third. The record was almost two weeks late, in fact. So missing the period wasn't a strong sign. There were, however, other things that weren't adding up for me. Small subtle changes in Joan that I hadn't seen before. Things that added up to me, on Friday, asking Joan what she thought and us agreeing that on that Sunday we'd go get a home pregnancy test to see what the scoop was.

I'll segue a bit here and describe a minor incident that happened Friday morning. I was shifting some clothing around from storage to use and stumbled across a small plastic bag with what looked like a small box of pills. That evening, before we started to talk about the possibility of Joan being pregnant, I asked Joan -- as a kind of afterthought while doing something else -- what they were, pulling them out and glancing over them quickly. Joan gave some vague thing about "women's stuff" and I dropped them back where they belonged. No alarm bells rang. Later, as we went to bed, I noticed that Joan had left that drawer slightly open, but again no alarms rang.

Fast forward to Saturday morning. That would be the 19th. A day before we agreed to go out and get a pregnancy kit. At 5:30AM I get woken up by a voice saying "Michael? Michael? Wake up." As I clawed my way toward consciousness, that same voice added "You're going to be a father." As I struggled to make sense of my suddenly upside-down world, I realised what had happened. That "box of pills"? Was a home pregnancy check. Joan was already suspicious a couple of days before I started to get suspicious and had picked up the kit. She wanted to test without me knowing in case it would raise false hopes. But the hopes weren't false. The kit showed "pregnant".

So consider the timing. On Monday I was told I was low fertility. That it would be a lot of work and effort (and possibly even require in vitro) to make a child. Quite possibly the lowest point in my life. Then on Saturday of the same week I'm told that I'm about to be a father. Quite possibly the highest point in my life, second only, maybe, to March 18, 2006. The timing of all of this is very disturbing.

Later calculation has us figuring that conception occurred on April 25th, incidentally. Which means that Joan was pregnant already before we visited even the first doctor, not to mention the one who fondled my genitals and pronounced me infertile.

Of course I'm still a cynical bastard, so, although I told a few people about this already, I didn't blog it until today because home pregnancy kits aren't 100% certain. But yesterday Joan and her mother went to that first hospital and had a proper lab check done and it's now official. Joan is pregnant and I'm going to be a father.