The True Blue!

Ever since I was a child I wanted to go to the University of Michigan, but I dropped out of High School in my senior year after missing 33 straight days in a row. Apparently just “forgetting to go” isn’t an excuse they’re willing to accept. Obviously, I went back and even graduated with honors earning an academic letter from the school I graduated from. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the money to go to college directly after high school like many of my friends did. Being the last of five children growing up in a Detroit suburb, college wasn’t the first thing on my mind. Instead, I went to work in the “salt mines”. To me it seemed like the right thing to do. Being naïve, I didn’t understand what a college education could ultimately offer.

I grew up in a blue collar home. My father went to trade school after he left the military and began his career being a Boiler Technician. He worked for several good companies, that I am aware of, before he found his niche in the Detroit Public School system. My dad knew a great many things about carpentry, plumbing, electrical, building, rebuilding, fixing engines, most everything about cars, bicycle repair, cement work, and etc. My interpretation of my dad was, if he could gain all that knowledge without college then why would I need to go. So, I used that excuse to not go anywhere, but to start my work life.

My first job out of High School was building and loading software onto computer controlled cash registers (the same kind you see in Target, Hudson’s, Macy’s, Talbots, Maurices, and other stores) and loading the software onto the IBM computers themselves as well as installing hardware and upgrading the RAM, where applicable. It was easy work, and we had a blast doing it.

Computers had, basically, just come out for home use only a few years before. This was my opportunity to work with something that I understood but didn’t own. I loved working in a warehouse/shipping environment. To this day I would still be doing this type of work if there were any money in it. It’s good honest work where I got to build something with my hands, install something using my mind, and package and load the equipment up for shipment to a customer who would start up a new store that would help people acquire something they wanted. I was an integral part of the cog.

I worked that job for enough years and learned to build my own computer by understanding what was needed. This position also taught me the basics of troubleshooting computer problems especially when it comes to the software installation process. Alas, that company eventually was sold to a high bidder and closed. Fortunately, thanks be to God, I found another job around the corner doing shipping and receiving. It was nice. Another good, honest job. But by this time, I wanted to learn more. Eventually I became the “crib captain”…not a real title. I took care of all the equipment required to perform kitting jobs on the CNC’s we built at this company. I didn’t order any of it. We used a Kanban system so I would just hand the cards to the Material Coordinator, and she would put the items into her computer along with the customer orders and all that would roll up into EDI information passed on to our customers to acquire more parts that came into the Receiving Department. Well, obviously I wanted her job because it was yet another step higher. I just had no understanding of the software or how to use it.

The manager of Purchasing and Shipping & Receiving took a liking to me and taught me everything I needed to move into that position. And so, I did eventually. All this being done with no college education, which this company offered to help pay for. Of course, this is when I started to reconsider my options again. But I was working and moving into an office position so why would I need college? The clerk they hired into the position I left in S&R had a family, I didn’t at that time, but I had three years on him with this company. I knew three different positions in the company and was becoming an asset. Unfortunately, I found out they hired him in making WAY more money than me and I was pissed. Obviously I confronted my manager, yes, the one who trained me. The money was given to him, he said, “because he had a family” not because he had gone to college, which he didn’t either. Needless to say, I was out of there.

I decided I wanted to work at Ford and applied through many temporary agencies. Eventually I received an interview because I had good extensive experience as a S&R Clerk, a Stockroom Clerk, and a Material Coordinator. The people with whom I had the interview all commented on it. They also commented on the fact I had no education, but even that…still, wasn’t the deciding factor. They told me Ford wouldn’t let me work at any of their offices or plants until I had direct manufacturing experience. Great, one more thing I needed to learn. That’s when I applied, and was accepted to, a plant 2+ hours from my home. Now I had to move.

This position was as a “line dog” but I loved that too. We worked hard that this place. It was a mandatory seven day work week. I worked the night shift, and I was lucky to get that position. Hundreds of people applied to this factory each month. Our schedule was twelve hours Monday through Friday, ten hours on Saturday, and eight on Sunday. It was harrowing to say the least, but I loved the people I worked with. They were fun and we had fun after work sometimes. This was yet another company that offered to pay for part of a college education for me. Needless to say, I still wasn’t smart enough to take them up on the offer, but how could I working those hours. Of course I was only minutes away from Michigan State at this point in my life. I worked there for about a year until I had enough experience, plus a desire to move back to my own neighborhood. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, I ended up quitting my job and applied at Ford again. This time to great success.

Again, no college degree required but now I was in my early thirties. I worked under contract for Ford. They wouldn’t hire me in because I didn’t have a degree. I started as their Material Coordinator but ended up being their Material Manager because I moved everything into a warehouse by the airport and consolidated multiple lots of inventory located in five or six places around the US. Prior to my arrival, they had their Purchasing Manager and team controlling their inventory. If you know anything about the differences between Purchasing and Material Control, then you know they are on opposite sides of the spectrum. They purchased so much material that I had to scrap millions of dollars of old, unusable, material. Regardless, the consolidation provided me an opportunity to do some good for a major company.

The contract company I worked for also offered college; however, the hoops to leap through were extensive and the payout wasn’t that great. Fortunately, I did take them up on their offer…finally. I went to junior college and earned an Associate degree in Business Management. Most of my classes were in Accounting though, which oddly enough I had a knack for and seemed to like it. I graduated Magna Cum Laude and a member of the Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society. I was quite happy when I achieved the degree; however, I didn’t “walk” because I told myself I would walk when I graduated from the University of Michigan, which yes, I still wanted to go to.

I applied to UofM and was accepted based on my previous grades. Fortunately, they also took all my credits. This saved me a ton of money. I took my first, and subsequently only class at the University and then I lost my job. My thinking was if I were to be more involved with Ford’s money, they would have to hire me, so I tried to move into their Purchasing Department. I trained my replacement for just over six months. Once he was up to speed, I moved into a position, still contracted, with their Purchasing team. I figured it would only be days before they hire me in. I was now an analyst working in their Cost Reduction Idea Database system (CRID). It appears the manager of that department was three months away from retirement so their largest cost reduction would be to disband the entire department. They “fired” me and one other contracted employee and moved their two permanent employees to part time.

I was devastated but, again, the good Lord provided for me and got me the position I still hold to this day (19 years and a couple of weeks as I write this). The issue was, after Ford I didn’t go back to college until late 2016. I was now in my late forties. I had a manager at my company who appeared to absolutely hate me. Always riding me, micromanaging everything, yelling about not doing business any other way but his. It was horrible, but one of the things he rode me about was completing my education. The offer was, if I received an “A”, the company would pay for half the tuition. This still didn’t entice me to go back. It wasn’t until a blow came to my wife’s family that changed my mind.

During my time in this career, I had many life-changing experiences and events happen. Of course, they are all stories for another time but one was when my Father-In-Law was let go from his position and no one wanted to hire him because he was a Technical Engineer who only had an associate degree. To this day he only works temporary jobs. Of course, that’s ok now because he finally retired, but they ended up losing their home and most of their savings from the change to their lives. He was over 50 with no degree. It was at that time I made a vow to graduate with a degree in Business before I turned 50. Well, I didn’t make it…exactly.

As I said, the offer from work was fantastic. But my wife is to “blame” for my final decision to go back to school and for the fact I did well. She sacrificed time and money, while allowing me to devote all my spare time to school and all while we were going through matters related to having a baby and eventually the adoption of our daughter. Because of her help I aced every class but one in which I received an A-. I ended up graduating from the University of Michigan in December of 2019. My degree was a tri-major, which is no longer offered as I understand it. I was a Business, Journalism, and Communications major. My class was the last class allowed to “walk” for over a year because Covid-19 hit the country.

Because I didn’t want to walk in junior college this event was something special to me. They recorded the event, but I was told we weren’t allowed to have a copy of it. That was frustrating. I was even asked, “Why is this so important to you?” by the people telling me I couldn’t have a copy. I guess if one doesn’t know the whole story and all the context I left out of this story one wouldn’t understand why it was so important. I now have the video of the commencement, yes, there were a few hoops to jump through because I wanted the raw video and not the YouTube version I found. I only watched the part when I walk across the stage a few times, but it makes me happy that I was fortunate enough to be allowed to do this. I was the first one in my family to achieve a formal college education and what made it more sweet is that it was from my university, the best university, the only choice in universities…the University of Michigan.

When I registered to graduate, I was asked to speak at commencement (which turned out was another competition to do better than the other candidates whose grades were also very high), but it was nice being asked, nonetheless. I graduated with a 3.98 GPA because of that one A-, so that grinds me a little. But like they say on Whose Line is it Anyway?, “The points don’t really matter.” in the end.

In all honesty, I wish I would have gone to school much sooner but I know I wouldn’t have done as well with my grades. I was quite the screwup in my younger years. I also did it at half the cost of the education itself because of the kickback I received from the policy at my company. For anyone who chooses to go to college and graduate, I believe it will pay off in the end and everyone will be a winner at that point. Another kick in the butt is, had I of gone when I was supposed to go, I believe I would be making more money than I do now.

No Guarantees!

People talk about how wonderful it is to experience natural childbirth. How it will change your life. No one really talks about the process of becoming a parent. How much time and effort is actually involved in the process. And no one speaks about the level of persistence and the amount of time required to actually get pregnant. For my wife and I, our journey to becoming parents began ten years ago.

Not unlike other people, we wanted to have children the natural way. We figured one-part her, one-part me, a little flour, and some sugar; put it in “the oven” for nine plus months and pull out an adorable, perfectly baked, chunky little muffin whose toes you just want to soak in butter and eat with a spoon. So we tried for several years from the time we went on our honeymoon in 2010. Unfortunately we just couldn’t quite pull off that blue ribbon recipe.

We discussed our situation with each other and decided to try a more scientific method for having children. At this time I was 41 and she had, well, less years on this planet than me, and we, obviously, weren’t getting any younger. My wife bought an ovulation kit and we started the systematic measuring of time between menstrual cycles. Tick-Tock! Not just days but hours as well. Tick-Tock! There were days when we had to perform multiple times. Had to! Tick-Tick-Tick-Tock! We, well she, tracked her cycles down to the second. Tick-Tock! She knew the exact calculation of days until the best possible time. Tick-Tock! It’s just that over the short amount of days, (Tick), we began to feel very rushed as time moved forward, (Tock).

We tried your typical Western medications and some natural methods that were less expensive than seeing a specialist. But nothing seemed to work. At some point during 2012 my wife scheduled an appointment with Dr. Michael at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Surgery in Bloomfield Hills to get a professional opinion. This, for me, was embarrassing. Not super-embarrassing, but the kind of feeling you get when you get off the elevator on the wrong floor. Sure, you step out with confidence but then it hits you that you’re on the wrong floor and immediately you begin to feel like you are a few clowns short of a circus, so you casually look back and forth until the doors close, in an attempt to hide the fact that apparently you just don’t know what you’re doing. I mean, seeing a doctor to do something our bodies should, by nature, know how to do. Who does that? Well – apparently we do.

First the doctor checked my wife for any “irregularities”. After multiple tests inflicted upon her, he told us she suffers from PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) and was also insulin resistant. PCOS is where multiple non-cancerous cysts form on a woman’s ovaries. It’s actually quite common. Of course I had never heard of this before. Due to these complications, we were informed she would have some difficulty getting pregnant and there could be “complications”, which didn’t exactly explain anything. Seriously, it’s getting pregnant, what is there to it? People do it all the time, and, by accident even. You know, Prom, Tequila, a little wham bam thank you ma’am. Easy right? So why couldn’t we get pregnant?

Dr. Michael spoke to us about other, more expensive, methods stating, several times, there were “no guarantees.” So we continued trying with the fertilization medicines to see if those would work first. One of the methods we tried was where my wife had to give her self injections in her stomach. For me it was disconcerting to watch her jab that needle into her belly each time; however, with some luck, she became pregnant after several sessions.

We were elated and immediately told everybody we knew. We celebrated with our families and boasted about it on Facebook. This was awesome! We were going to be parents! After all our trying and praying and waiting. Woo-hoo! We received tons of congratulations through social media, phone calls, and text messages. Everyone was so nice about our success. It was a great couple of weeks – until her stomach began to ache.

My wife was working nights at the time. While she was at work, she began menstruating and she noticed blood spotting, which is possible in the first months of pregnancy. But, she also felt a sharp pain in her side. She left work around 2:00 a.m. or so, to come home earlier than normal. Once home, she decided to take a bath. While in the bathtub she was stretching and noticed another really sharp pain in her side. At this point she almost passed out from the pain. So she got out of the tub and collapsed on the cold tile floor.

About an hour later she started feeling better and got up to go make something to eat, thinking her blood sugar might have been low. Finally she came to bed around 3:30 a.m. Still sleeping, I was unaware of anything regarding her situation. When she laid on the bed her shoulder began to hurt. Fortunately she knew this was a sign of a possible tubal rupture because she either read about it or was told by the doctor that this was a possibility and what some of the symptoms were. More than likely if it was a tubal rupture, she had internal bleeding. As far as this goes, blood in your veins, good. Blood in your body, not so good.

She woke me up, told me, and I immediately got dressed. I have to admit that I was scared to death because without knowing all of the ramifications I didn’t know how much time we had. It took a bit to get her into the car but, without further hesitation, we rushed to the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor. We lived in White Lake so it took some time to get there and I remember the worry I had on the drive. She was in pain and I couldn’t do anything to help her, so I prayed silently to God, to make sure the love of my life would be ok. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I do remember being selfish and telling Him that if it was between her and the baby, I didn’t care about the baby. My wife is my world. Enough said.

By the time we arrived at the Emergency Room she was in great pain from the blood going into her body and from the slowly exploding fallopian tube. To me, her pain would be like having someone push a knife into your abdomen, slowly, over a long period of time and each bump the car had gone over was like a slight twisting of the handle. She said “it was horrible.” They performed an ultrasound but weren’t able to do anything to help her for several hours. In retrospect I believe they assessed her fairly quickly; however, at the time it wasn’t fast enough. We did explain to them what we thought the situation was so they responded as fast as they could. They gave her morphine for the pain, but they couldn’t do much else because she had eaten and anesthesia could cause nausea during an operation, which would further complicate the situation.

They checked her for the pregnancy right when we arrived but found that her “numbers” were already dropping rapidly. I don’t pretend to know what “numbers” are, but I know based on most scores, higher is better except when it comes to blood pressure or cholesterol readings. For the rest of the hospital experience I remember only bits and pieces because I was there alone. I know that it had been too early for me to wake family up but I also knew she was in good hands so the fear of losing her was pretty much gone at this point. Unfortunately, I stayed the rest of the night there by myself. Alone. I had never felt so alone. It’s ironic that in trying to increase the size of our family we could have quite possibly caused it to become smaller. A reality I didn’t want to face, especially alone in the waiting room. I recall crying to myself in the room and I also recall being angry over the situation and wanting to break something.

By the time the doctor had come out to see me and explain that they had to remove one of my wife’s fallopian tubes I wasn’t thinking straight. Before my wife came home that night I had gone to bed around 11 or 12 so I was only on about four hours of sleep and didn’t quite comprehend what that meant for us overall. Her personal care physician had told her that her tubes were fine. Her PCP performed a test on her involving some type of dye and a balloon. They blew the balloon up inside her uterus and watched the dye flow through the tubes. The pregnancy, however, did not “flow through the tubes.” This pregnancy happened within the tube. The embryo caused the tube too rupture so they removed both the tube and the baby. There was no option to save the fetus.

The medical community calls it an ectopic pregnancy miscarriage. All I knew was that my wife was pregnant and now she wasn’t and it would be even harder to get pregnant again, since the female body switches the side it allows pregnancy to happen in every other month. We finally went home sometime that next day. My wife was a mess and I wasn’t much better. I was always taught that a man holds in their feelings to be strong. That’s how I grew up. But I wasn’t as strong as I needed to be. Again, enough said.

We were together in our shared sorrow and misery and we had just jumped over another roadblock on a journey we never would have imagined being on; although, at this moment we didn’t know where this would eventually lead us. Of course it took more time for us to get over this major setback. We eventually did. Again. For the most part.

In 2013 we started the insemination process with Dr. Michael. This was, by far, my most favorite part because of my contribution to this whole thing. I know you can’t read the sarcasm in that statement, but believe me, it’s there. We had to schedule appointments around my wife’s ovulation schedule again. So my contribution was supposed to be the fun part of this whole operation; however, I’m not sure if it was as much fun as it should’ve been because I had mixed feelings about the whole process.

How would you feel going into your doctor’s office, which was always filled with either the women who worked there or female patients, knowing what you had to do there? I was literally paying a doctor so that I could come into his office and masturbate in one of his rooms. This was something I could actually do in there for free, if I wanted to get arrested. Well, as far as I was concerned, EVERYONE knew what I was about to do. I was going to choke the chicken, flog the dog, bash the bishop, whack the pud, do the dirty deed, you know, go on a date with Rosey Palmer and her five sisters in a little 6 by 8 room. Seriously, as are those statements, this was also slightly disturbing.

Insemination and in vitro fertilization were, for me, the same process. I would go into the office and do “my thing”. The difference between each was in the doctor’s processes and the cost to us. Insemination was just my sample shot into my wife with a turkey baster. That’s how it was explained to me. The process for my sperm was that they had to “wash” it and then check it for viability. In my head I reverted to a two year old and made a few disgusting jokes, to my wife, for how the washing process was done (swish, swish, swish…don’t swallow). I thought they were funny but she didn’t seem to appreciate my humor; however, at $4000.00 a pop for the insemination process, I needed some angry humor to get through this first phase. I found out later this part was actually way more intense than I could have ever imagined. Not as crazy as the in vitro steps were though. Unfortunately the two insemination processes we went through didn’t work so we moved on to the next, more expensive, phase.

The in vitro fertilization process was the most invasive. They gave my wife the means to have a bunch of eggs produced during her ovulation cycle. We could only afford to do this two times. The cost for each cycle was just over $10,000. We had explained to the doctor that we needed to take out a loan since we blew our savings on the first processes we went through and the other “incidentals” that came up with them, not to mention we had just purchased a new house the year before taking the last of the money we had saved. In short, we were broke. From this point, almost literally, all of our eggs were in one basket. The first time she produced 36 eggs and the second time just 11. They took the eggs and the washed sperm and put them together to create multiple embryos. A genetic sampling process happens which will decide who the survivors are and of those survivors who will be used.

All of this really defies the laws of nature and this seems to go against how God intended things to be. Seriously, nothing about this process says “this is normal.” Again, not one bit of this was guaranteed to work. The first time we only had two or three survivors out of 36. After insertion, my wife took a pregnancy test which read positive, but this time we decided to keep it to ourselves. We didn’t want to inform anyone because we didn’t know what would happen and wanted to be sure, unlike last time. Five weeks in she had a miscarriage.

We were devastated, but we had one more opportunity. With the tubal pregnancy she was pregnant for six weeks so this, much more expensive process, didn’t last as long and in my simple mind I thought if you pay more you should get more. However, it appeared that our overall “numbers” were trending in a downward fashion again. When we were ready we went back for our last time. I went in and did “my thing,” but this time her part was different.

The doctor requested to see both of us during my wife’s visit. I had already felt this wasn’t a good thing and my wife had her reservations as well. He greeted us with as much enthusiasm as he typically did. We entered his extremely large office and sat at a small round table as he began explaining to us that none of the sperm, or eggs, survived the processes this time. My wife was already in tears and I became upset because she was upset.

With our backs physically to the wall at the little round table he explained how the process had failed and how we have our “issues” but, and this is the part that almost made me jump over the table and feed him his stethoscope through his sphincter, we “…should come back and keep trying.” He must have said it three or four times. “You need to try again and don’t stop trying.” I could feel my ears turn red yet at the same time my throat was closing up. I could feel the tears welling which made me even more angry.

Sure, in his world $10,000 isn’t a lot of money. But for us, this was it. We had already explained this to him in our initial consultation months before! He should have remembered! I wanted to kill him! My wife was crying, and again, I needed something to break! We just spent you $28,000. We didn’t have any more money to spend on this “no guarantees” quack doctoring! And he made it quite clear. There were “no guarantees”. I put my arm around my sobbing wife and exited his office. We drove home in complete silence. This was going to be harder to recover from than anything we had already been through in the past.

Eventually we did go through an inner healing process to get past this major setback. We have each other to get us through the tough times. We decided to look at our other options so we looked into the invasive and confusing adoption process and eventually settled on foster care. On February 10, 2017 we became foster parents to an adorable little 7 month old baby girl. She just celebrated her third birthday this past July and her smile brightens our lives each and every day. And that is guaranteed!