Pilot Post

So here we go. My wife is The Haywire Heart. At her gentle encouragement, I've started this blog to help me vent my own thoughts. Like virtually every guy out there, I don't spend much time or energy talking about my feelings. I don't wear my heart on my sleeve. I'm an introvert and a quiet person and I only share past the surface of myself with a very select, trusted few. So while I know that probably no one will read this, or only stray, anonymous visitors, that's really better for me. The point of the exercise, at least for me, is to release these thoughts out into the void.

My wife and I just celebrated our third anniversary last month. For the first two years of our marriage, we agreed that we wanted to have time to ourselves, to be just ourselves, so she was on birth control to prevent possible pregnancy. We both agreed before we got married, however, that we eventually wanted to have kids, so just shy of our second anniversary, the birth control was stopped.

Then another year passed. And things stayed the same as they were on the birth control. Still no pregnancy, but now it wasn't actively being prevented, and it certainly wasn't from any lack of trying. So we went to see our family doctor, who referred us to an OB/GYN for my wife. So the OB wanted to run some preliminary tests on the both of us to see if anything was amiss. Then came the bombshell that no aspiring parents-to-be ever want to hear - we're infertile.

Infertility is a couples problem - it takes two to make a baby, so it likewise takes two to combat the problem when something gets in the way of that goal. But it's impossible for me to talk about my feelings in this situation without talking about the specific medical issues behind it. I'm thrilled to be able to say that all of my wife's tests so far have come back 100% clean and normal - that is incredibly good news to me. But I feel many different things when I say that our infertility problem - the underlying medical issues - lie 100% with me.

The first test the OB wanted to do with me was a semen analysis. So, rather uncomfortably, I submitted a semen sample one Friday morning last month, then we waited. Then the nurse called my wife on Monday afternoon, and the news was not good - low sperm count, and poor sperm morphology. That was a huge stab through the heart of our hopes, but we were forced to wait until Friday again before the OB could talk to us. Then we went that Friday, and the OB told us some very encouraging things about success rates for couples in our situation. Our chances were much better than we had feared, and my wife left feeling much better after that appointment. I left feeling better about the overall situation, too... but feeling even worse about myself.

The OB gave us the exact numbers from my test, and my count isn't just low - it's VERY low. 4.25 million, and the LOW end of normal is 20 million, so that's only about 20% of the LOW end. The high end of normal is 150 million, so I'm at less than 3% of that. And my sperm morphology isn't just poor - it's at the absolute bottom end. A rating of 0, meaning that ALL of my sperm are abnormally shaped; a rating of 8 is acceptable, and a rating of 14 is normal, but 0 is still 0% of any number. It was pretty damn hard for me to walk out of there feeling better after learning that.

The OB then referred us to a fertility specialist, so another week passed, and again on a Friday morning, we were in a new doctor's office. The fertility specialist wanted to do some additional tests on my wife, which again all came back 100% clean and normal, and I was extremely relieved to hear that. Then he reviewed the numbers from my previous semen analysis, declared that this was "male factor infertility," and referred us (again) to a urologist. He also asked for some hormone testing on me, which he expected to be normal, but it's a matter of ruling out every possibility, so the test needed to be done.

That test was done on Monday of last week, then the urologist appointment was scheduled for Monday of this week, in the hope that those lab results would be back in time to take them with me to see doctor #4. It took until Monday morning, but come back they did... and not as "normal" as doc #3 had hoped. Not badly abnormal this time, as my LH and FSH levels were both fine and comfortably within the normal range. But total testosterone is low. I didn't have much time to process this before it was time to head off to the urologist, so I just let the wave carry us along and showed my test results to doc #4. It turns out that the "low T" could actually be a result of what he believed my underlying issue to be, so that could be more symptom than cause, plus the treatments for "low T" can actually LOWER the sperm count. So for now, we're leaving that one alone.

Then came the exam from the urologist, and the ultrasound from his nurse. I'm 31 now and hadn't been naked in front of a doctor since I was about 3, so I left feeling rather like I had been hung on display in a meat shoppe window. Here, let's let EVERYBODY I don't know come and take a look at my balls! But the exams, while they did find a problem, at least ruled out the scariest of the possible diagnoses - cancer, et. al. - and the problem diagnosed is what we suspected it to be. I'd rather know my opponent than try to fight in the dark.

So I have a varicocele - basically like a varicose vein, just in a very unfortunate and sensitive area. These are actually really common (up to 20% of men may have them), and generally don't cause any issues for most guys when they do occur. But, like everything else medical, there's a range of severity, and mine appears to be rather large. This is a problem for sperm production because it raises the temperature in the region, and temperature control is the whole reason a guy's balls are outside his body in the first place. But it's also a problem because the purpose of veins is to carry toxins away from their region to be purged from the body, but if the blood doesn't flow properly, those toxins can linger and have the chance to get back into where they shouldn't be. A varicocele can furthermore leech testosterone from your system, which could lead to the hormone test result I mentioned earlier. The obvious solution, then, is to have it fixed.

Surgery. I got the call this morning, and I'm scheduled now for varicocele surgery on the morning of November 16. I'm glad that we don't have to wait too long, because waiting is the hardest part. But that's also a lot sooner than I expected, so I'm not sure I'm ready for this yet. The urologist told me that it's rather like hernia surgery, not too terribly invasive, with really low risks of any complications. But it's still surgery - and surgery on a very private area, too - so it's still honestly scary to me. I've never had surgery before, never been in a hospital for anything, so this is all uncharted territory for me. I feel like I'm flying blind.

How DO I feel? Hell yeah, I'm scared. My mind is rational enough to know that the surgery shouldn't really be a big deal, but emotions are not rational, and no less real. It's difficult at the moment for me to focus on anything else besides the surgery in this situation, especially knowing that its only about a week away, but I've already felt much more and I'm sure I will again soon, once I've had more time to process all that's happened in such a short period.

Most of this is rambling, I fear, but I guess that's sort of the point. The other point is that my wife has been an INCREDIBLE support in all of this, and there's no way that I could do this without her. More to come in coming days, no doubt...