Today, at our pre IVF paperwork session we found out that our new RE had run a new test with the banked sperm. It turns out that Dh has antisperm antibodies...with 96% of his sperm...and i am struggling to comprehend it.
We have had 3 previous tests...and they never tested for it..just tested morph, motility and numbers...With each IUI...they never tested for it....and they should have.
So, we've wasted 3 rounds of IUI...and $2000 on naturopath tonics....not to mention the last 6 months hoping it would happen naturally with the naturopath
and...had I not insisted on freezing sperm pre IVF...it would never have been tested....meaning IVF day would have ended up a mess.
I am so confused....how could they not have tesetd this earlier? I think of all the heartbreak over the last 14 months since we started treatments that could have been avoided by a simple test.
I am glad they still have 4% to work with...but seriously this could have stuffed us as the plan was to do 3/4 eggs in trad IVF...and only 1/4 ICSI....now we are doing all ICSI...
I can't wait to start next week...but this has thrown me for a loop....i feel let down by the system. Antisperm antibodies is nothing to do with health...its about there being some sort of accident in Mark's past that meant sperm got into his blood stream and blood got into the sperm production ducts...some thing we have never been asked about.
Nothing we can do about it now...except move forward and get out baby the IVF way.
Hanna's 11th Birthday
5 years ago
I've had time to think about this a lot. Sperm antibodies are quite common in men that have had vasectomies. The other most common way was though injury to the groin.
ReplyDeleteIt may be a manufactured memory but one of the fertility doctors asked me if I've had any serious injury to the groin when I was younger, to which I do not remember any. This is not some childhood injury that I was too young to remember because sperm production doesn't start until puberty, thus the bodies natural reaction is to create antibodies because the immune system is trained in the womb before it ever sees sperm. (from Andrology Australia website)
It did surprise the other doctors after seeing the results, that I had no knowledge of a groin injury as I would certainly remember the sort of injury needed to cause this.
Maybe it was ruled out early on because I did not know of any injury. Maybe if I had said, yeah I got a great whack to my testes when I was playing soccer at high school, the doctor might've said, we'll do a test for antibodies.
Living on the outliers of the normal curve seems to be common for me. It's rare to see sperm antibodies in non vasectomy and non groinal injured men. Rare that's me!