Making babies at SIU
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Since they’re on call 24/7 and work long hours, they joke that they can read each other’s minds.
“Jim and I spend more time together than we do with our spouses,” Gindlesperger says. “I feel like his mom. Or grandma.” The pair even discovered that they share a patient, who had one baby with Kontio’s program in Akron and another baby with Gindlesperger’s program in Cleveland.
The embryologists begin each day around 7:30 a.m. They put on their navy blue polyester scrubs and protective hats, masks and shoe covers. They walk across a thin, sticky mat that pulls dirt off their shoes and enter the sterile, near-clean lab (ranked cleaner than hospital operating rooms).
At the top of the to-do list: more cleaning. The embryologists check the lab and instruments, plastic-ware and dishes daily for contaminants.
They evaluate equipment to ensure that it’s functioning properly and yielding the same environment for every one of their cases.
They monitor the temperature and humidity in the incubators, refrigerators and freezers, as well as the temperature and humidity of the air-handling system, for the same reason.
“Out in the real world, being obsessivecompulsive is looked on as a neurosis,” Gindlesperger says. “But in the world of IVF, it’s a positive.”
In many IVF programs, laboratory personnel aren’t allowed to work directly with patients. Kontio explains that some management thinks it’s inefficient, that personal investment takes too much time and energy from embryologists.
He and Gindlesperger disagree. They each signed on at SIU because, among other incentives like state-of-the-art equipment, it offered patient interaction. They can come to work, Kontio says, and act as a positive force in other people’s lives.
“It’s half art, half science,” Gindlesperger explains. “We all have oldest child syndrome. We’re trying to take care of the world.”
Fertility treatment usually begins with medication to stimulate ovulation and development. The fertility team then pairs the medication with intrauterine insemination, the procedure that deposits sperm inside the female patient’s uterus. If the couple doesn’t conceive, staff move on to IVF or to intracytoplasmic sperm injection, the procedure in which embryologists inject a single sperm into an individual egg retrieved from the female patient’s ovaries.
Embryologists assist physicians with female patients by measuring the level of human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone produced during pregnancy that can be detected in blood or urine samples. They use hCG levels as an estimate: levels increase as the pregnancy progresses.
The lab works with male patients by performing semen analyses. They determine if the male produces sperm at normal concentrations by evaluating their number, motility and shape in samples under a microscope. If the patient has poor quality or very few sperm, staff decide to use intracytoplasmic sperm injection or sperm aspiration, the procedure that obtains sperm directly from the testicle using a needle, as treatment.
At noon each day, the entire SIU fertility and IVF team convenes. They discuss each patient and their progress, successes and failures. Once a month, they conduct in-depth reviews of each patient and decide how successes can be applied across the board. Kontio, who says he transferred from a practice where physicians made all of the decisions, calls this a unique exchange that benefits patients, physicians and lab personnel.
Kontio shares the story of the first baby that he helped “foster” in Ohio. He grew close to the parents and kept in touch with them after they conceived. When the mother went into labor, she called Kontio and demanded that he make the 45-minute drive to her hospital to witness her son’s birth. She told him, Kontio recalls, that since he was the first person to see him, he should be the first person to hold him. “As soon as that baby was born, he was placed in my arms,” Kontio says. “I got to say, ‘I saw you when you were just a little, tiny speck.’ That’s the kind of connection that you make.” Kontio and Gindlesperger continually receive letters, e-mails and pictures from the babies and families that they’ve helped.
Kontio’s first baby, Donald, is now 23 years old. Gindlesperger, whose first baby is also 23, says she can’t even count the number of grandparents, aunts and uncles that she’s met who are grateful for their grandchildren, nieces and nephews.
“They call this a roller coaster ride for the
