A couple of months earlier it felt like this moment would never come. I didn’t want to let my wife down and leave her disappointed about what might have been. We did a home Male Fertility Test whereby I had to produce a sample, funnelled into a test tube with a few drops of solution that turned the sample a different colour. If the colour was a shade of pink, it indicated enough motile sperm to make pregnancy likely but if it was a shade of purple, it meant that you were less likely to conceive. We tried the test twice and in each case the sample was purple. The process was very undignified and I couldn’t imagine having to do that at some fertility clinic, the thought of the nurses timing how long it took you to produce a sample or whether you could produce enough on demand like that was something that would have filled me the dread. It was bad enough in my own home.
It wasn’t a nice feeling, it felt emasculating. I didn’t realise it then, but the SSRI antidepressants I was on can have a negative impact on fertility. I happened to stumble across a documentary presented by Welsh comedian Rhod Gilbert on the subject of male infertility and it only made me feel worse.
My wife and I agreed when we first decided to try for a child that it was either going to be a natural conception or nothing at all. I’ve never been a big fan of the idea of IVF, I’d rather people adopt if they can’t conceive naturally as there are already too many children in the world that need the love of good parents. I feel that having a child is a gift not a right, you’re talking about bringing another human being onto this planet after all.
Even without my low fertility score, the odds were against us. My wife is 42 years of age and it really is last chance saloon time for conception at that stage. I knew it was possible as I have an aunty that had her last child at a similar age, but it wasn’t her first.
My wife had irregular periods in her 20s and then went on the pill. During her time on the pill she lost a significant amount of weight. She came off the pill because it became a hassle to get doctors appointments to have her blood pressure checked in order to get a new prescription and at the time, we weren’t having regular sex anyway so there seemed no point in staying on it.
After coming off the pill, her cycle was much more regular, in fact, it a shorter three and a half week cycle so it wasn’t too long to wait before we would find out if we had been successful.
Rant Over 