The things we do in the name of fertility

So, I spend an absolute fortune every month chasing that elusive golden egg. And not just on doctor's fees and sperm, but on dietary supplements, herbs, acupuncture visits, massages, yoga. You name it, I've pretty much tried it. My latest kick is...detox foot patches. But what on earth do detox foot patches have to do with fertility you might ask? Well, probably nothing. But hell, I'll fork over some cash just in case.

The concept behind these foot patches is that you stick them on the soles of your feet overnight, and the combination of herbs and minerals in them warms your feet and draws out toxins, which are left as a sticky gooey mess when you take the patch off in the morning. Honestly, I have no idea why this would work. I can get the concept of acupuncture points, that an area on your foot can correspond to your ear because there are little electrical channels running through the body. Even if they haven't been documented by western science, I get the concept. But toxins out of your feet? I mean, the lymph system runs throughout your body so if you were drawing things out of your lymph, why not stick the patches somewhere we know there are a lot of lymph nodes, like your armpit? And why would different areas of the foot correspond to different body parts? I can see why electrical circuits correspond, but the lymph is surely all mixed together.

Anyway, irrespective of the skepticism I have, I am of course a desperate infertile. So I bought some of the patches last year. And lo and behold, sticky, stinky gook appeared on the patches overnight. Aha! The sharp-eyed skeptical reader will think, your feet sweat, there must be something in the patch that just produces gook when it mixes with sweat. Well, after using them for about a week, I pretty much thought the same, and put the rest of the box to one side and didn't think about them again. Then on Saturday night (after I had drunk an entire bottle of red wine), I woke up at 3am with an almost certain hangover coming. Somehow I saw the box of patches, and thought, hey, detoxification, maybe it'll help. Worth a shot anyway. So I stuck some patches on my feet, one on the back of my neck because I was having some neck pain, and one on my lower abdomen just in case it could suck some toxins out of my barren uterus. At 2pm, once I'd already been up for several hours with no hangover (a miracle in itself), and once I'd been back to sleep for a nap, I took the patches off. The ones on my feet - covered in gook. The back of my neck - less gook, but certainly some there. The one on my abdomen? Nothing at all. Nada.

So much for the "sweat mixed with patches = gook" theory. But, being of a good scientific mind, I then spent the rest of the long weekend with various patches all over my body testing this out. And suprisingly, most of the places I stick them don't produce any gook, but my feet are still reliably producing nasty sticky stuff. Now, I have to admit, I haven't been brave enough to stick them in my pits, because, well, my skin there is pretty sensitive, and I don't need to have red scaly armpits that I can't put deodorant on when the temperature outside is 90 degrees. But if I'm admitting embarrassing things, I may as well tell you that my chest can get pretty sweaty, so I stuck a patch there, and nothing.

There you go. Maybe there's something in it. Maybe I can detoxify my body by sticking patches on my feet every night. So, like a good desperate infertile, I just spent $128 dollars on a box of 72. Oy. The things I do in the name of fertility.