Accepting Our Dual Diagnosis

Way back in March I posted that my husband was going in for a sperm analysis and if it came back bad, I wasn't sure I would be able to handle it.  For some reason (maybe because I say the word "sperm) it is my most viewed page on this blog.  And then I never updated after that because I'm a lazy whore.  No, just kidding, I never updated because I wasn't sure what to say.  So, let me tell the story chronologically of what has been happening in the sperm department since that day.

March - get back our sperm analysis and it looks good.  Yay!  Here is what we got and based on our clinic's parameters it looks totally normal:

Volume - 4.0 mL (clinic says 1.5-5 mL is normal)

Concentration - 22 million/mL (clinic says 15 million/mL is normal)

Motility - 38% (clinic says 40% is normal)

Morphology - 15% (clinic says 4% is normal)

So, based on what we were told, this looks totally fine, maybe just a hair shy of normal in the motility department but my husband had just returned from a guy's trip and I chalked that up to travel and hard living.  Just to be safe, however, I had him start taking some of my L-Arginine, which I read can improve motility.

Fast forward a little bit to my first IUI in early April and we were told that my husband's sample was 3.5 mL (good!) but with only 12.5 million sperm per mL (bad!) and 19% motility (real bad!).  Thanks to the high volume and the sperm washing machine we were able to get 6.5 million motile sperm for the IUI.  So of course during my two week window I looked towards Dr. Google and found that many R.E.'s won't even do an IUI with less than 10 million motile sperm. I was confused and disappointed.  My husband was too, but thought that maybe he was sick 72 days ago (the amount of time that it takes to grow sperm) and that explains the discrepancy between the two samples.

Two weeks later we found out that IUI#1 was a BFN.  At this point I guess we should have asked the R.E. what he thought of the sperm situation we had brewing but we figured there was nothing we could do about it before my next ovulation since sperm takes so long to grow so we jumped into another treatment cycle.  I also ordered and began my husband on coQ10 which an actual study by a doctor says should help sperm motility.

Finally, we had our second IUI yesterday and got even worse news.  My husband's sample had a volume of 6.0 mL (good!) but there was only 3.5 million sperm per mL (very bad!) with only 29% motility (really bad!).  Thanks to the large volume and the magic of sperm washing we were able to get 4.5 million motile sperm for the IUI.

To be continued because I actually have a meeting in 45 minutes to talk to my RE about all this.....