September 28, 2007 01:09 am

Cut and paste version of story Stories Clinic stores sperm for couples' use Photos Abby Tortolini , 2, center, and her twin siblings, Katherine, left, and Cameron, 8 months, play in the living room of their home in Billerica. All children were conceived using in vitro fertilization. Monday, September 24, 2007 Angie Beaulieu/Eagle-Tribune

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Cancer scare sends couple to sperm bank

To protect the Billerica couple’s dream of having children, William banked sperm.

By Julie Kirkwood
CNHI News Service

DANVERS, Mass. — Kristen Tortolini had a hunch something was wrong in 2002 when she wasn’t getting pregnant.
Tests revealed that her husband’s sperm count was low, so William Tortolini went to a urologist. The urologist told him something nobody expected: He might have testicular cancer.
Immediately the couple’s focus changed, Kristen said.
“Our ultimate goal was to make sure he was healthy,” she said.
William faced the prospect of chemotherapy and radiation, treatments that might render him infertile. So in order to protect the Billerica couple’s dream of having children, William banked sperm at the Women’s Center Sperm Bank in Danvers before surgery.
It turned out William didn’t have cancer, so he was spared chemotherapy and radiation. But the couple kept his specimen frozen at the sperm bank even though they didn’t need it immediately for their fertility treatments.
After a miscarriage and several failed in vitro fertilization cycles, Kristen had a healthy baby girl in 2004. Two years later the Tortolinis returned to Dr. Mitchell Rein, their infertility doctor at North Shore Medical Center and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, hoping to have another child.
Kristen had her eggs retrieved on her scheduled date at Brigham and Women’s Hospital last July, and everything looked surprisingly good. All they needed was a good sperm sample from her husband and they could create embryos in the laboratory for implantation. Yet his sperm sample that day was extremely low.
Rein had anticipated that might be a problem and had put the Danvers sperm bank on alert with one of his frozen specimens from four years earlier.
What nobody could predict, though, was that a ceiling panel would fall in a Big Dig tunnel that morning, killing a woman and bringing traffic in the city to a halt. Traffic was bad on the North Shore, too, and it was raining heavily. The Danvers sperm bank’s usual courier was backed up with orders and couldn’t transport the specimen.
Timing was critical, so sperm bank supervisor Lynn Collins picked up the telephone and called taxi companies. She found a cab that had already picked up a woman and her dog in Peabody and was heading to Boston. The driver agreed to swing by and pick up the frozen sperm. Collins and her co-workers at the Women’s Center scrambled to come up with the $60 fare, plus a $10 tip.
The specimen arrived in Boston just in time, and the Tortolinis got a call the next day with the good news: Seven of Kristen’s nine eggs were fertilized and they could come back in three days to have three of them implanted in her womb.
Kristen and William now have twins, a boy and a girl, who celebrate their first birthday in January.
“And to boot, it was sperm that was frozen for four years,” Kristen said. “Technically his sperm was older than my daughter.”

Julie Kirkwood writes for The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, Mass. E-mail her at jkirkwood@eagletribune.com