The Story of You

You had a one in a 1.2 billion chance of being born, making you the lottery ticket that won.

Keep in mind, the diameter of a human egg is about the width of a human hair, and a sperm is one-twentieth that size.

It’s a humbling thing to realize, but by evolutionary standards, failure to produce offspring is … well, failure. Mother Nature doesn’t care what a good person you are. She wouldn’t care if you killed in multiples of ten. Mother Nature simply wants you to mate, often and with gusto, making others of your kind, more and more each year. It’s Milton Friedman economics on steroids—obscene growth being the operating principle, and deadly plagues serving as “market corrections.”

John and I were taking a lovely drive through the countryside yesterday, something I particularly enjoy. Beautiful scenery always stirs my imagination. It’s nice to let my thoughts wander without the constant corralling, sifting, and organizing necessary to work as a writer. And it occurred to me with sudden clarity that the chances of it being John in that car and me in that car are infinitesimally, even ridiculously, small.

We scoff at people who play the lottery (“Fools! Don’t they know the odds are wildly against them?”) without understanding that we’ve already won. We won the minute we, in sperm form, future brigands and belles, wriggled to the warm embrace of the womb. Scientific researchers have yet to agree why a healthy human male ejaculates from between 400 million to 1.2 billion sperm (although 90% of those sperm are seemingly “dead”). This is but the first of many mysteries.

Some sperm have two heads, differently shaped “caps,” surface roughness, spiral tails, and asymmetrical motility, which means that some sperm are better swimmers than others. On average, only three thousand spermatozoa are viable (the right shape, kitted out with a long, vigorous, flagellating tail, bursting with what the poet Dylan Thomas described as “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”) Only three thousand will make it through the dark, twisted gauntlet of the cervix.

You were one of those.

But even as part of that elite squadron, the odds were stacked against you. The great sperm race in which you were an active participant was far from over.

Next, you had to survive the hellscape of the female uterus where you were treated as a foreign invader, hunted for sport by white blood cells called leukocytes that tried to snatch you and others of your kind out of the broth and devour you in much the same way an octopus will lay in wait on the ocean floor for supper to unwittingly float by. Even more astoundingly, you—sperm-you—navigated this strange land by chemical markers and smell, swimming through a sloshing, gurgling fun-house of horrors in search of Oz.

The uterus laid other snares for you. It deceived you with false entrances to the Fallopian tubes, thousands of them, like the dead-end chambers of an underground ant colony. Hundreds of thousands of sperm lost their way, furiously lashing their tails until they could no longer go on. Only you and a few dozen others made it all the way to the Fallopian tubes, leaving the sound of leukocytes gorging on sperm, ripping them apart, behind you.

Only spermatozoa expressing the right molecular signature are allowed into whichever Fallopian tube, right or left, has the ripening egg that month. Those exhibiting a random swimming pattern, for instance, will be excluded. Then and only then will a lucky few make it all the way to sperm heaven, which is the egg.

Unlike the cervix and uterus, the Fallopian tubes are superb hosts. The right Ph level, the right nutrients, are all provided. It is here that some sperm will bind with Fallopian tube cells, which then pass them nutrients and sugar through their membranous walls. These select sperm can hang out for 2-3 days waiting for an egg to be released from its follicle.

The winner, of course, gains potential immortality; the rest are slaughtered.

An egg surrounded by human sperm, more than most, which makes me wonder if this wasn’t an Invitro fertilization photo.

In a process called capacitation, the sperm shed layers of proteins, preparing themselves for their encounter with the goddess of their idolatry: the egg. The minute they find her, these hearty intrepid souls, including you, start drilling through her outer layers, fighting to become the first one in. After capacitation, the sperm have only a few hours to live, so it’s a now-or-never situation—a true Darwinian struggle, spoils to the victor.

Now before the awe-inspiring majesty of the egg, you struggled to deliver your genetic payload.

To do so, you literally had to blow your top.

As part of Nature’s masterwork, you carried a bag of enzymes in the event you made it this far. Here, you ruptured the bag, the contents of which helped you dissolve the outer coating of the egg. Once penetrated, the egg immediately threw up a chemical forcefield that made it nearly impossible for any other spermatozoa to inseminate its sacred yolk.

This is the story of you.

Before you were even born, you survived a journey more harrowing than any video game. You managed to shed hundreds of millions of competitors. You navigated a Alien-esque minefield of leukocytes, and out of thousands of possible doorways, you found the exact right one.

Now in the dark hallway of the Fallopian tube, you bonded with the right cells, drank their elixir, and furiously fought your way to the holy of holies where you burrowed in against competitors—and won a genetic lottery that you stood practically no chance of winning.

In nine months’ time, you became recognizably you.

And that was only the beginning. You then had to survive infancy, a raft of childhood diseases, and random fatality. The fact of you being here is an astonishing improbability.

Back to my earlier epiphany, the fact of John and I existing as individuals and then as a couple riding in that car together at just that moment in just that country at just that point in time—there aren’t enough numbers to quantify how nearly impossible it was.

So where am I going with this? Why drag you through the sausage factory (so to speak) and force you to see how the sausage is made (my kingdom for a better analogy)?

Because you should never ever not do something you feel compelled to do because you think the odds are stacked against you. You already won. You’re here. Everything else is a gravy train with biscuit wheels.

If you’ve already won, what is there to lose? And don’t you feel a certain responsibility to spend your lottery winnings wisely? To dare, to dream, to risk, to move, to make something of your eighty-some-odd trips around the sun rather than just settling for what you can get?

You’re a bloody freaking miracle. You are literally the sperm that won. You were given a meat suit, a brain, a heart, and a human spirit.

Don’t let them rot.

Live.

Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin

Weigh in here! I want to hear what you have to say. There’s a comment section for you to share your thoughts.