Men don’t often like opening up about fertility, other than in embarrassed sniggers.
Men’s role in having children does define them in a lot of ways, especially in Asian society where the pressure to have a male heir to carry on the family name is somewhat overwhelming.
When you can’t have kids, it’s a huge blow, says Navin (not his real name). He and his wife talked about their experience with infertility on condition of anonymity.
When they got married in 2015, he and Kamala (not her real name too) decided not to prevent a pregnancy as both sets of parents were looking forward to a grandchild.
He was 29 and she 27, they were both healthy, and they had no reason to think they’d have any trouble conceiving. 12 months down the road without a pregnancy, they realised there might be a problem.
Initially Navin was reluctant to try assisted fertility. He wanted to exhaust every other avenue first.
They tried charting, which didn’t work, and acupuncture and reflexology, which did, at least, help the couple deal with the stress of infertility.
“Your family and relatives are looking at you with that look, and they don’t realise that they’ve got it on their faces. Or they say ‘Soon it’ll happen for you’, and that’s even worse,” says Kamala.
It reached a stage where the couple dreaded attending family functions and festival gatherings to avoid answering embarrassing questions about not having a child. The question of IVF was still there, hovering in the background.
Kamala wanted to go for it, but Navin didn’t, and it put a huge strain on their relationship.
Everything in their life boiled down to trying to have a baby, even something as simple as whether they should go away for the weekend, or save the money in case they opted for the treatment.
Eventually, one day over his breakfast of idli and Bru coffee, Navin had an epiphany. He thought, “This is it, we have reached the end of the road.”
They carefully chose a clinic and were advised to try intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), a process in which a single sperm is injected directly into an egg.
They were sitting in a cafe when the phone call came to say that the sample Navin had given had no sperm in it. He was offered two options: donor sperm or the more complex procedure of microsurgical testicular sperm extraction (Micro-TESE).
They opted for Micro–TESE and the next year, four years after they had started trying for a baby – Kamala gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.
“My whole late 20s and early 30s was taken up with trying to have a baby. I regret not going for IVF sooner. I strongly recommend that if you’re facing this problem and have the treatment option available, go for it,” Navin says.
4 reasons why your sperm quality gets reduced
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines normal sperm as:
- Having a concentration of below 15 million sperm per millilitre of semen.
- Having the ability to move efficiently (sperm motility) below 40%.
- Having normal shaped sperm (morphology) below 4%.
- Having live sperm (vitality) below 58%.
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