My Sorry Gonads!
In 2015, my wife and I decided we wanted to try to have a child. Ten years of marriage without children, deliberately, had finally brought us to the next level. And I thought: “how difficult can it be? A blob of semen and an egg at the right time will do the trick”. I got wiser. And now, I am transferring to the next level: no more kids.
I am 45 years old. My oldest daughter is five years, my youngest almost two. Actually, I am now at the same age as my father was, when I was born. But I was my father’s youngest child, while I got my first child at an age of 39 (yes, the math is correct: 39 plus 5 equals 45, give or take 1). And even though it “only” took one year, approximately, since we started “Project Baby” until my wife actually got pregnant, I had to learn a lot about myself. And the world.
Men don’t like to admit, they’ve got a problem with their crown jewels. And I wasn’t any different. No, it was much easier to have a wife with some issues with the reproduction system. But that is also how the medical world is built up.
My wife knew exactly when she was ovulating. And with “exactly”, I really mean “exactly”. Even though her periods were very irregular, we had sex spot on at the moment, she was most fertile. But my wife didn’t get pregnant.
Because my wife much earlier was diagnosed with PCOS, we could get “help” very quickly. My wife was scanned more than a average customs officer scans passports on a busy day at the airport, she brought gallons of urin to the doctor’s office to get examined, if her body wasn’t regenerating blood, she’d be dead now. And finally, some nurse said to me: “Hey Albert, I think it might be a good idea if we’d take a look at your sperm”. No problem. Not that I feel very comfortable with masturbating (guess it’s the result of a silly Christian upbringing, but I simply don’t like it), but I managed to produce a little cup of sperm. Two days later, we knew why my wife couldn’t get pregnant. I mean, my wife knew:
“Albert, you only have a few million sperm cells”. I looked nonplussed. A few million? Cool. Only one is needed to come through that egg. A few equals at least two, so if 1,9999,999 cells die, then no harm is done.
“You don’t get it, do you?”, my wife asked. “I guess not, when you say it in that way”, I replied. “You don’t have enough sperm cells”. I asked how many is normal. “20–150 million”, she said. Okay then!
So I was the problem. Not my wife. Not her history of PCOS. Why wasn’t I asked before, if I could have examined my sperm? That would’ve saved my wife for a lot of visits to the doctor, clinics, hospital and whatnot. But done is done, and we didn’t want to try to fight the system. We went on. I learned not to cross my legs. Even not my ankles (of some reason, I like to sit or lay down with stretched legs and crossed ankles). I only wore wide underpants. I did my daily exercises almost naked, I began to run (now you know the real reason), I began to eat vegan, I took special vitamins — I did everything I did to be able to have more sperm cells. A few months later, I had another test, and the result was much better: 11 million cells. Not really great, but better than it was.
We were cleared to start an official process on help with insemination. Totally free, due to the health care system we have in Denmark. Even though I was not a Danish citizen, then, I had lived in Denmark at that moment in 12 years. And my wife has been a Dane all her life. So we got a free pass. We had an appointment at the hospital in the city of Odense 4th of January, 2016, for our first preliminary consultation with the fertility team. Around two weeks prior to that appointment, my wife ovulated, so she had been testing if she perhaps was pregnant, against all odds. She had tested the day before our first consult, and got a negative result. But only one hour before we should go, she tested again and … BINGO! And nine months later, our daughter was born. Without help. Despite my low sperm quality.
My wife and I agreed very quickly, we didn’t want Irish twins. We’d like to wait a few years, before trying again. And in the meantime, we would ask ourselves if we wanted to have one more child. In 2018, we decided, we’d try again. Due to our medical history, we were cleared to get help right from the start. But this time, it wouldn’t be free. We were able to gather enough money to pay the clinic, the medicine, and everything around it (thank you for all our sponsors!). I was tested a few times if my cell count still was okay. Now that I knew how much was needed, I wasn’t very optimistic: at no test, I got more than 8 million cells.
This time, we were not connected to a hospital in Odense, but a fertility clinic in Aarhus (did you know Aarhus means “Yearhouse”?). We’ve been using many hours in the car, on our way to Yearhouse, and we’d often drive with only a few hours notice, which meant I had to cancel appointments several times. But it is what it is. The first few inseminations failed — no luck. But then, sometime in October 2019, my wife got pregnant. We still don’t know if that was a result of the insemination or our own intimate experience, the day before the insemination. And actually, I don’t care. In July 2020, our youngest daughter was born.
My wife and I agreed: our family is complete, now. We don’t want more children. So now was the time to shut down the warm water. Last week, I got a vasectomy. It should take three months before everything is effective. So that means, I will have zero sperm cells by the end of July 2022. Well, I had very wimpy testicles already, so that wouldn’t make any difference. But I can tell you one thing: my gonads hurt! It feels like somebody kicked me in the nuts a few seconds ago.
