Oh how I love Monty Python! The sheer genius of their comedic talents knew no bounds when it came to breaking social and religious taboos making for hilarious but forceful social commentary. And the surreal stuff, love it! Who can forget the Ministry of Silly Walks or the brilliant fish-slapping dance? And right now, I can't help feeling that every single healthy moving sperm is quite sacred.
I have my husband's permission to write what follows. In fact when he looked at my last post, he complained 'Hey you didn't write about my test results!' Well love, I explained, I didn't think you'd want the wider world to know. 'I don't care about that' he replied, 'what's happened to me is important. There have been changes that we've worked hard for and maybe other people are going through the same thing.' Did I mention before that I love this man?
His relaxed attitude did get me thinking. Men's fertility is a sensitive issue bound up in narrow concepts of masculinity and male pride and this makes it difficult to discuss openly. But why should a man feel ashamed or embarrassed, or less of a man if he has a fertility problem? So before I continue with my husband's story, let's break the ice:
What the hell is that?
It's your very own sperm USB key!
Might raise a few eyebrows at the office.
And this from EuroStar - Oooh la la!
I don't think I'll ever look at baked beans in the same way again.
And this is just plain weird:
These little (cuddly?) creatures are the creation of purpleflavour.com, where you can find quite a mind-boggling variety of sperm toys.
Including this, which I'm sure is what every parent-to-be dreads:
Anyone have the music from The Omen starting to play in their head?
As usual I am getting side-tracked. So here is my husband's (or Mr. T as he shall now be known), story. Five months earlier Mr. T got some bad news. He was diagnosed with a low sperm count, and of his depleted little soldiers 95% were immotile and 96% were malformed.
Well, this wasn't exactly like his problem.
We were informed that there was no way he could get me pregnant. We were immediately offered ICSI (like IVF but they insert a sperm into the egg rather than letting the sperm fertilize the egg on its own). This is where my upbringing, which has drilled into me a healthy distrust of the medical profession kicked in, and I'm glad it did. It seemed so strange to me that no one asked my husband about his lifestyle, his diet or any other general health questions. No one thought to see if he had any major nutritional deficiencies or if he had been exposed to dangerous toxins. The mentality is, if you have this problem, you will probably always have this problem and there is nothing you can do.
So to make a long story much much shorter, we saw a nutritionist, an acupuncturist and a natural fertility expert who gave Mr T. a thorough health work over. He was advised to start exercising, to cut out all caffeine, to go to bed early (no more all-nighters for work), he was given a comprehensive nutritional support programme and was advised never to work with his laptop on his lap (does that make it a desktop now?). The acupuncturist (yes we actually found one in Marrakech!) set to work balancing his Qi, apparently he was much too Yang. I was very impressed with Mr. T's open-minded attitude to all this, especially when the acupuncture needles were inserted in a region close to the family jewels and set on fire! No I'm not making this up.
So if there was ever a test of how much Mr. T wanted to have kids, this was it. Mr. T worked hard at changing his lifestyle - he became an exercise addict, he got nutrition religion, became a disciplined zen-like supplement taker and a proud ex-red bull user. He knows he is a workaholic and needs to slow down, and that's hard when you're ambitious and want to bring home the, erm, halal bacon (yes it exists, it's actually smoked turkey). So he still pulls the all-nighters, though with far less frequency, and you still have to remind him that his laptop should now be functioning as a desktop. Hmmm.... maybe I should get him the sperm USB key to serve as a reminder? But the changes have already been remarkable. Firstly, he looks brighter and says he is feeling much better than ever before. So five months after his wake-up call it was time for a re-test.
Okay so they weren't quite super sperm, not yet anyway. But the results were still very impressive. His sperm count was up significantly (nearly at reference levels), 40% were now moving and 10% were moving fast and in the right direction (apparently they can move backwards & sideways - well you know men they never ask for directions) and only 89% were malformed. You may be thinking 'only? 89%' but the normal reference range for malformed sperm, according to the WHO, is 85%. Only 14-15% of the sperm need to have the correct morphology to be considered fertile.
And morphology is....?
I hope I'm not alone in thinking some of those illustrations are just scary. Please no two-headed babies!
Needless to say Mr. T has had lots of advice from family and friends ranging from the amusing to the insane. Including getting testosterone shots, drinking the spicy Moroccan tea from Djemma Al Fna and talking, yes, talking to his little soldiers to perk them up. Perhaps they are suffering from low-self esteem and just need encouragement?
Or maybe they've just seen too many Woody Allen films.
So to conclude this super-long post, the body is a complex thing and doctors don't know everything. Mr. T and I are keeping up our healthy lifestyle (and our open minds) and hoping for ever more improved test-results in the near future. And that is why every healthy non-mutant moving sperm is sacred!
