CHICAGO — Approximately 400 million viable donor sperm cells melted slowly and entirely into the Bombay Sapphire and tonic of 54-year-old senior embryologist Ron Petrowski during the Lakeshore Reproductive Health & Fertility Center’s annual holiday party Friday evening, after Ron, by his own subsequent admission, “grabbed some ice from the freezer in the back.”
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The wrong freezer.
Ron, sources confirmed, had been at the bar for approximately eleven minutes when he discovered that the catering team had run out of ice. Rather than flag this to the event coordinator, or wait, or simply drink his gin warm like an adult, Ron — who had been at the clinic for nineteen years, who knew every inch of the building, who could navigate it in his fucking sleep — walked into the back hallway, opened the door to what he later told investigators he “definitely thought was the staff kitchen,” and pulled a fistful of small frozen cylinders out of what he described as “a really cold-looking drawer.”
The drawer was a Class IV cryogenic storage unit. The cylinders were the entire January donor inventory for sixteen scheduled patient cycles. Ron dropped them into his glass, gave it a swirl, and walked back to the party.
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The straws cracked on contact with the room-temperature gin. The contents began to thaw immediately. Ron, returning to a conversation already in progress with Brenda from billing about her new air fryer, took a long sip and said, with the casual confidence of a man on his third drink, cold as shit, that’s better.
He drank the rest standing under a Christmas tree onto which someone had affixed a small handmade ornament shaped like an embryo.
“It tasted, like, a little off,” Ron said Monday morning, sitting in the windowless break room of the clinic with the door closed and his hands wrapped around a coffee mug he was not drinking from. “But I’d been drinking. I figured Karen brought a different tonic. Karen has, in past years, brought a different tonic. Last year she brought one with elderflower in it. Nobody liked it. I figured she did it again. I figured I was being polite by finishing it.”
He stared at the coffee.
“I was not being polite,” he said. “I was drinking four hundred million sperm. Out of a glass. With my mouth. While telling Brenda her air fryer sounded promising.“
The discovery, which did not occur until Sunday afternoon when a different embryologist arrived at the lab to begin Monday’s prep work and opened the cryo drawer to find sixteen empty slots and what one colleague described as “a wrongness in the room you could feel before you saw it,” has thrown the clinic into what its medical director, Dr. Helena Brzezinski, described in a hastily called all-staff meeting as “a really fucking unique situation, professionally speaking.”
Sixteen patient cycles scheduled for January will need to be rescheduled. Sixteen donor profiles will need to be reactivated. Sixteen donors will need to be contacted and asked, with as much delicacy as is humanly possible, whether they would be willing to come back in and start over.
“We will not be telling them what specifically happened,” Dr. Brzezinski said. “We will be telling them there was a handling incident.”
She paused.
“The handling incident,” she added, “was Ron.”
Ron has been placed on administrative leave, which the clinic and Ron have both agreed to refer to externally as “a few days off after a really busy quarter.” He is not, the clinic stressed, being terminated. He is being given time to “process what occurred.” What Ron has done with this time, sources close to him confirmed, is sit in his garage.
He has, by his wife Linda’s count, been in the garage for approximately thirty-one hours of the past forty-eight, emerging only for meals and one trip to a CVS on Saturday morning during which he purchased, sources said, a single bottle of cranberry juice and a pack of gum.
“He came home Saturday morning and he sat down at the kitchen table,” Linda said. “And he said, Linda, I think I did something at work last night. I said, what did you do. He said, I’d rather not get into it. I said, Ron, you have to tell me what you did. He said, Linda, I drank some sperm. I said, what. He said, I drank some sperm at the holiday party. I said, how much sperm. He said, Linda, I don’t want to put a number on it.“
She paused.
“He has, since, put a number on it,” she said.
The professional consequences for Ron, while not formally disciplinary, are expected to include what one colleague described as “a real period of nobody quite knowing what to say to him.” A planned end-of-year retirement luncheon for a different senior embryologist has been quietly postponed to February, sources said, because the planning committee felt the previously scheduled venue — a downtown cocktail bar called The Cellar — was, in the current moment, “perhaps not the right energy.”
The deeper problem, several coworkers acknowledged off the record, is that Ron is genuinely one of the best embryologists in the city. His thaw protocols are studied. His success rate is the envy of the field. He has been personally responsible, over his career, for an estimated 3,200 successful pregnancies, several of whose resulting children have, over the years, sent him handwritten thank-you notes that he keeps in a folder in his desk drawer labeled, in his own handwriting, the kids.
“He’s a fucking legend in this practice,” said one coworker, who asked not to be named because she was sitting at her desk approximately twelve feet from the break room. “He’s the best of us. He should not have grabbed the sperm out of the cryo tank and put it in his drink. I want to be clear about that. He should not have done that. But also — and I want to say this carefully — the man has poured more thawed gametes into more dishes than anyone in this building. If anyone was going to do what Ron did, statistically speaking, it was always going to be Ron. He’s been around this stuff for nineteen years. He has, in some sense, been training for this moment without knowing it.”
She paused.
“He drank four hundred million sperm out of a Bombay Sapphire and tonic,” she said. “He is a brilliant man. I love him. I cannot look him in the eye anymore.”
The clinic’s holiday party, which had been held at the Lakeshore facility every year since 2009 and was widely considered one of the more enjoyable office parties in the broader medical complex, has been suspended pending review. An internal memo circulated Monday afternoon noted that “future staff celebrations will be held off-site, in venues without active specimen storage, and that under no circumstance is any employee, regardless of seniority, to retrieve ice from any drawer, freezer, refrigeration unit, or vapor tank on the premises, ever, for any purpose.”
The memo did not name Ron. The memo did not need to.
Ron, asked through Linda whether he had any final comment for this article, agreed to come to the kitchen phone Monday evening for what he requested be “a really brief conversation.”
He was asked how he was holding up.
He was silent for a long time.
“Linda’s been great,” he said finally. “Linda made me a sandwich at two p.m. yesterday and she didn’t say anything about it. She just put it on a plate and slid it into the garage. She didn’t even open the door all the way. She just slid it in. That, right there, is love.”
He was asked whether he had any message for the sixteen donors whose samples had been lost.
He thought about it.
“Tell them I’m sorry,” he said. “Tell them I’m sorrier than they can possibly imagine. Tell them I have, in the past forty-eight hours, in the quiet of my own garage, apologized to each of them out loud, by donor ID number, in alphabetical order, in front of a small space heater. Tell them that on Friday afternoon, I was a man who had committed his entire professional life to the careful, sacred handling of human reproductive material. And tell them that on Friday at approximately nine-fifteen p.m., I walked into the back hallway, opened a drawer I have opened ten thousand times in my career, looked directly at the contents of that drawer, and made the conscious decision to put it in my drink.”
He paused.
“Tell them I do not know who I am anymore,” he said. “Tell them I am trying to find out. Tell them I will let them know when I do.”
The line went quiet for a moment.
“Tell them,” he added, “that the air fryer thing was actually pretty interesting. Brenda’s been making chicken thighs in it. I had been planning to ask her for the recipe. I will not, now, be asking her for the recipe. I do not think I can ever speak to Brenda again.”
He hung up. He went back into the garage. The space heater, Linda confirmed, was still running.
The cranberry juice, she noted, had not been touched.