Male infertility: I felt so guilty that I couldn't 'come up with the goods'
My wife Terri and I began trying for a baby after we got married. I was 34 and she was 29; we were both healthy, non-smokers, fit and rarely drank. We didn’t expect to have any problems, but we couldn’t fall pregnant. After a year and a half of trying, we went to the doctor to see if there were any underlying issues. It didn’t take long for the results to come back.
I was told I had poor motility, which means the sperm don’t always move forward freely; poor morphology (shape); and a low sperm count.
New research shows I am not alone in this. Sperm counts from men across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand have halved in less than 40 years, with much of it linked to our lifestyles, from stress and diet to pesticides and plastics.
For me, the news came as a total shock. I had no idea that I had any issues in that area – especially as I’d always been fit and healthy – and I felt absolutely awful when we were told that it was highly unlikely we’d ever be able to conceive naturally. I felt so guilty that I couldn’t “come up with the goods”, as it were, and I had to try and deal with that while helping my wife. I focused entirely on her, and completely closed off to the idea of talking to people who had no personal experience of infertility about how I felt.
We were advised to try IVF, but due to ongoing funding cuts in Bedfordshire, where we live, we were told only one cycle would be available to us on the NHS. We tried everything to make it work. I started running more, virtually stopped drinking alcohol, and began including seeds, nuts, alfalfa sprouts and fish oil supplements in my diet. But after a year, the cycle didn’t work.
That failure took its toll emotionally, because the world around us didn’t stop; everyone seemed to be getting pregnant. Some were nice and subtle, and others weren’t. I had to deal with people joking about firing blanks, and one whose partner who fell pregnant and said: “Ah, at least I know it still works.”
Most of them didn’t know what I was going through, but one man did. I congratulated him when his partner fell pregnant, and he said: “I’m just relieved to know I’m fully functional.” It didn’t even cross his mind that it wouldn’t be particularly well-received, but it actually haunted me. When we finished the cycle last year, and did a pregnancy test on Mother’s Day that was negative, all I could think about were his words, and how I wasn’t “fully functional”. I thought about it during that awkward moment when I had to fill my cup with a sample on collection day, and every time I felt like I’d failed.
I used to break down at 7.15am on my way to work, as a marketing manager. I’d be pushing the steering wheel and crying and making noises I’d never heard myself make. It deeply affected both Terri and myself on an emotional level, but I was lucky because it never affected our relationship. At no point did she ever feel resentment towards me. She saw the infertility as our problem, as something we had to deal with together. The cause of it was totally irrelevant to her.
But I couldn’t move past the stigma. I barely told anyone about it. The only reason I can now speak openly about it is because I chose to open up last year, when there was talk in Bedfordshire of removing IVF treatments on the NHS altogether. I felt that the only reason Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) could make such a damaging decision was because of the taboo surrounding infertility, so I chose to share my story – and will continue to do so at The Fertility Show in November this year.
I hope that my decision to speak out, and the subsequent campaigning, contributed to the CCG changing its mind and continuing to provide NHS-funded IVF treatment in Bedfordshire, albeit still just one cycle. But sharing my story also had the unforeseen bonus of removing the shame I felt around my infertility. I felt like a burden had been lifted from my shoulders just by speaking about it, and I now hope that other men will find the same relief in sharing their stories – particularly as awareness is being raised about low sperm counts and the damaging effect of unhealthy lifestyle choices.
For me and Terri, our infertility journey resulted in a happy ending. After the failed NHS cycle, we went private, and had one more attempt at a cost of around £6,200. This time, the cycle worked. Terri fell pregnant last year, and our son James was born in April this year.
There will be people reading this who are going through what we went through, and they won’t always want to hear about happy stories and elation. I know how that feels. So the only way I can articulate how it felt to get that positive pregnancy result is that, in that one moment, all the dark and emotionally tough moments were a small price to pay. When I look at James today, I know that everything we’ve been through has been worth it.
As told to Radhika Sanghani
