Are We Doing it Right?

After 4 1/2 years of marriage, Husband and I decided we were ready to start a family. We had just come home very well rested from a heavenly trip to Costa Rica, and I assumed I would be pregnant the next month. I immediately went off the pill and ravaged my husband.

There was a lot of mad, passionate sex to come.

In fact, there was also happy sex, fun sex, boring sex, spontaneous sex, sex to music, sex in the shower, sex on the couch, sex on a chair, sex in tents in the wilderness (various times), and unfortunately the most dreaded type of sex, perfectly timed, exhausted sex after long days of work.

3 months later, I thought, "Wait, are we doing it right?" Sex=Babies! That's one of the certainties in life. It has populated the 6 billion+ people on Earth. So why was it that 6 months later, a year later, a year and half later, and two years later I was not pregnant? Had we been doing it wrong? Did I have a special sex hole we had not aimed in? Irrationally as this sounds, I started to wonder.

In those two years, we sought much medical advice. About a year into "trying," we were pretty sure we had isolated the reason we were not pregnant. My oh-so-manly husband did not have as many swimmers as we thought he had, and some of the ones that did swim were not that well shaped. In fertility world this is called sperm count, motility, and morphology.

It's hard news to take, but H and I both handle things much better when we have lots of information and know what we're up against.

The two years of "trying" to get pregnant, naturally, were filled with life's usual and not so usual ups and downs. They say infertility can split you up, but for us it seemed to do the opposite.

H went to see a urologist and he was told he had a varicocele in both testes. The best way we understood this was that he had a varicose vein running through both testicles. The veins caused the testes to heat up and the heat killed or messed with the function of the sperm. The urologist recommended a varicolectomy--removal of the veins that were "suffocating" his balls.

About 4 months after the diagnosis, he underwent the surgery. He was back home the same day and had a fairly easy recovery.

Sperm analyses were done 3 months after the surgery and then 6 months after the surgery. There was some improvement, but not enough to get pregnant.

By now two years had passed and we were still not pregnant which is when we decided to investigate responsible fertility clinics and undergo treatment.