Surgery’s Small Success Plenty for Once-Childless Couple
A new procedure designed to enable infertile men to father children wasn’t as successful as doctors had hoped, but for Jeanie Gruetzemacher it was just right.
After years of believing that she could never have children by her husband, the 37-year-old administrative assistant, who underwent the new procedure at a Garden Grove hospital in February, is finally pregnant.
“I am thrilled to death, elated, tickled beyond belief,” Gruetzemacher said in a phone interview from her home in Jefferson City, Mo. In March she found out about her pregnancy, and since then her husband, Ed, “hasn’t stopped grinning,” she said.
Jeanie and Ed Gruetzemacher, an aviation officer for Missouri’s Army National Guard, were one of the 20 couples from around the country who underwent the procedure designed and executed by Dr. Ricardo Asch of the UC Irvine Center for Reproductive Health and Dr. Sherman J. Silber of St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis. Because the two doctors are usually in different states, they performed all 20 operations in Garden Grove during one week in February.
Of the 20, only two were impregnated.
Asch, who joined the medical faculty at UC Irvine in September, is nationally known for his work in the development of another alternative form of test-tube fertilization called GIFT (Gamete Intra-Fallopian). Silber, who began confering with Asch about a year ago, is prominent in work with infertile men.
The procedure, which so far has no formal name, involves surgically removing sperm and combining it with the wife’s eggs. The resultant in vitro, or test tube, fertilization is then implanted either in one of the wife’s Fallopian tubes, where it travels to the uterus, or directly in the uterus, where normal birth may proceed.
Like most of the men who participated in the operation, Ed Gruetzemacher was born without vas deferens, ducts that carry sperm from the testicles where it is manufactured. Such men can have a normal sex life but cannot impregnate.
According to Silber, these men produce sperm, but in a low quantity, which makes the success of regular fertilization unlikely. Thus, Silber said, the solution is to surgically remove sperm from the male and unite it in greater concentrations with female eggs outside the body to increase the likelihood of fertilization.
This procedure differs from other in vitro fertilizations in that, in addition to the egg, the sperm is also surgically removed.
Asch said he was a bit disappointed in the success rate.
“It was a little lower than I expected,” he said. “But I still think it is very good because some of these people would never have been able to get pregnant and this procedure allowed them to.
“We are going to try again and see if we can improve on what we’ve done. But this is very encouraging,” Asch said, noting that improvements would include new ways in which to handle the sperm.
Asch could not provide the name of the other couple on which the operation was a success.
Jeanie Gruetzemacher said that Silber, who has been her husband’s doctor for eight years, told her years ago that because her husband is infertile, the only way she could have children was to adopt. Then in March, 1987, Silber called and said there was a new procedure that could help them. In August they underwent the procedure but were disappointed when Jeanie’s pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.
But now Jeanie is sure she will finally be a mother. She said that after her doctor in St. Louis took a ultrasound check, he told her, “This kid is (holding) on with both feet and both hands.”
The baby, which is expected to arrive near Nov. 17, has already been named. “If it is a girl, her name will be Eve Christine; if it is a boy we will name him after his father, Edward Charles,” Jeanie said.
Although she is worried that there are no more males in her family to carry on the Gruetzemacher name, Jeanie is not concerned about whether her baby will be a boy or a girl. “When you have tried to get pregnant as hard as I have, the sex of the baby is your last worry,” she said.
