My "regular" i.e. "fertile" friends (which isn't a fair description because some of them very well may be subfertile and not even know it and for a whole lot of them, it's just not an issue at all) are giggling behind my back. They see the frenetic pace and focus of my work for the past few weeks as mildly humorous if not odd.
The octuplet story is starting to sound like the occasional news item about great-grandmother-aged women becoming mommies via IVF. It's becoming an oddball tale.
One final note on a positive ripple -- the story has brought out the Deep Thinkers among the repro med crowd and nudged the industry to focus on its true calling.
Evidence: a conversation held with some of the folks I work for at IntegraMed. After early on deciding to steer clear of the Tuplets Mama and her wayward fertility specialist (being quite the aberration), I approached them again this week to ask about simply listing the many IntegraMed affiliated physicians who have been interviewed about the California Eight. Published expert commentary has targeted Nadya Suleman's fertility practitioner, Michael Kamrava (not affiliated with IntegraMed), and the choices he and the babies' mama made seemingly in spite of the children's best interests.
One of my colleagues said that while documenting the coverage that IntegraMed physicians are getting might be interesting to us, the story is "still toxic."
The pièce de résistance, though, was this from another too-shy-to-be-named source in the same discussion:
... this fiasco must be agony for them. The TV appearances are cool for the docs, but so what?
Should we really tell these folks about all the clever things we do to reduce the number of babies they will have - when they've been trying for five years and have none? This whole message is totally out of sync."
Touché.
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