Defying all Odds!

This article first appeared in Motivate Magazine April 2019

Well hello you! How is life? No – really – how is life? Are you feeling grateful to be alive and on this planet and able to read my words of wisdom today? How about if I was to tell you that we were about to play an organic game of Russian Roulette with your life and I am going to give you the odds of roughly 1 in 40 duodecillion to be alive (that’s a 4 with 40 zeros – more than all the stars and grains of sand in the world added together). You’d be pretty scared right? How about if I told you that we had already played the game, and guess what? You won! Life may feel a little sweeter today.

With that aim in mind I am about to show you how darned lucky you are, how amazing your luck has been and how you have defied the odds time and time again to be you. You are actually awesome and luckier than any lotto winner who ever walked the planet.

Let’s start with your Mom. She carried half of your genetic information in ovarian follicles in her uterus before she was even born. Yep – the egg that was to become you was forming while your Mom was still a fetus inside your Grandmother. There were 2 million eggs vying to be you. 11,000 a month died off every month until puberty and thereafter only one or two were released each month. So let’s give your li’l egg a one in 2 million chance of being ‘the one’ on conception day.

Men produce a mind boggling 500 billion sperm cells in a lifetime. Let’s just stop there. Imagine every human being alive in the world today and times that by 66. That is how many sperm cells your Dad made in a lifetime. And what were the chances that your Mom and Dad would choose each other out of all the men and women in the world? Around 40 trillion to be exact.

So for your Mom to meet your Dad and your exact egg to meet your exact sperm you had a chance of around 160,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of being here. Feeling lucky now? Oh, and to have the exact genetic information that made you be you, your parents and grandparents also had to go through exactly the same set of chances to be them. Work out those odds and we do not have enough space in this article, or indeed this magazine, to begin to accommodate the zeros.

So let’s just start with the one egg that Mom is going to produce on conception day and the 300 million or so swimmers that Dad produced in the unmentionable act. The range is actually 39 to 928 million but I’m going to give you a better chance as I am feeling generous. As sperm only live for 5-7 days and eggs for 1-2 days at best, your chances throughout the month are about 7/30. Even when you get the dates right the chances of falling pregnant are around 30% for an under 35 year old or just 5% for a 40 year old. So let’s just say that the sperm with your name on is the luckiest of all 300 million sperms and hits that beautiful egg first, the chances of your Mom falling pregnant were just 3.5% When you allow for the chances of miscarriage this is further reduced to 3%. My oh my, how DID you do it? You are freaking awesome!

It was nothing, I hear you say. But no, it really was something. That was no walk in the park. Of the 300 million bad boys who leapt in to action, millions will quickly flow back out of the vagina or die in its acidic environment. Despite the protective film surrounding them, sperm are really not very happy in the low PH of the vaginal tract so even at the first hurdle it is survival of the fittest. To reach the uterus they must then traverse the neck of the vagina called the cervix. This muscular ring is usually closed, with a mucus plug to boot, but it opens slightly and the mucus thins out for the couple of days around ovulation. Millions will die in the thick mucus or be waylaid in the muscular folds of the cervix. During female orgasm the uterine muscle will contract which may assist the journey of the sperm towards the fallopian tubes. Of course timing is not always on the side of the sperm in this matter and they must rely on their own resources. Throughout this journey the woman’s immune system senses the invasion of foreign cells and is on the attack. Many sperm will be consumed by her white blood cells en route. By the time the sperm reach the fallopian tubes only a few thousand remain. Half of these will head for the wrong tube and that is the end of their journey. The other half will already be tiring but now have to navigate the hostile environment of the fallopian tube to reach their prize. The tube contains tiny hair like cilia which are working to push the egg towards the uterus. The sperm have to swim against the current and many will become stuck in the cilia and die. However, the ones who persevere become the equivalent of ‘Super Mario’ sperm. A chemical reaction occurs which puts the sperm in to hyperactive race mode as their tails twitch for the final sprint to life. From the 300 million contenders, only a few dozen reach the egg and only one is able to penetrate the egg membrane and form the new life.

You did it! Had any of the other 299.999 million beaten yours to the egg then there would be someone else walking in your shoes today. As it is the sperm which determines the sex of the baby (Yes, Henry 8th – it is!), that someone might even have been of the opposite sex.

You are truly amazing. You defied the odds. Seriously, if you can achieve something rarer than all of the stars and all of the grains of sand in the world and universe then surely there is nothing that you can’t do on earth today. When you realise how lucky you are to have overcome all odds then surely you owe it to yourself to live this life to the fullest and to continue to defy the odds. To say you are one in a million is not giving you the credit you deserve. You are a freaking rock star!

#childbirth #gettingreadyforchildbirth #defyingtheodds #funfacts