Thursday, June 14, 2012

Infertility, the male kind.

I didn't elaborate really when I mentioned Jason had the infertility issue, what the abnormalities were...so here is a quick recap for those of you going through something similar, and you want to compare numbers....

For his sample of a volume of 5.2ml:
Concentration: 6 Million (Normal 30-40 million)
Rapid Motility 12% Slow Motility 18% (Normal Rapid ≤ 30%)
Total Motility 30% (Normal Total ≤ 40%)
Viscosity Slight (Normal Viscosity Normal to Slight)
Round cells < 1 (Normal < 5/ml)
Normal Morphology 0%
Total Normal Progressive Sperm 0.00 Million

And the notes state:
Sperm had mostly amorphous and tapered heads.

So basically, the jest is ..... he has a very very low sperm count, out of those sperm, about 12% are actually moving normally, and out of those, less than 1% are shaped correctly.

So on May 29th we went to the Urologist.....
Jason hated it.
The male doctor did things to Jason that he would much rather forget! ha.
But with that said, we have a few answers to some questions that were building....

What is male infertility, and what does it mean to us?
Apparently we are facing "bilateral varicoceles" and low testosterone.
Basically like you and I can get varicose veins in our legs, he had developed the same kind of veins in his testes, and with that, it causes a pool of blood to sit there, heating the region and causing damage to the sperm as well as the amount of it. With this, as well as him being overweight, and working in a sitting position, as well as close to a laptop that produces heat, there is a ton of extra heat killing off and damaging the sperm...boo.
So the doctor said there is a way to fix it. Once Jason loses 100 pounds, he is able to get a surgery and have the veins corrected. And from there, after about 6-9 months there would be an increase of viable and properly shaped sperm.

It was assumed that because Jason had a kid before, that there was nothing wrong with him. In fact the doctor said that the varicose veins Jason has developed had been around since probably he was a teenager, and that he might have been super fertile 15 years ago, but this is a progressive issue and your fertility decreases over time...again boo.
The low testosterone is also complicating the amount of sperm, and with that the doctor put Jason on Clomid, to make his body feel like it has more estrogen, and thus causing his body to produce more testosterone and also to prevent major estrogen spike he is off setting it with an estrogen cutter of sorts, ha.....called Arimidex. Jason had a hard time at first taking these medicines especially because they are directed towards women..I took Clomid during my fertility treatments. He has since gotten over his issues and accepted it.
But what is basically happening, is that he is making his body feel like it needs to step it up in testosterone production....this is a safer way of doing this, because the only other real option was to put him on testosterone gel, and the side effects with that were a decrease in sperm production, which would be counterproductive in our baby having journey.
Jason will be having another appointment on June 26th to get another blood test, Semen Analysis and another visit to the doctor to see how this medicine regiment is working for the "boys"...yay!

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