Bad sperm

[Anonymous]

I'm 27 and my DH is 35 and recently diagnosed with poor morphology and low motility, our RE has recommended IVF with ICSI, the fertility drugs really scare me, and all my tests have come back good. Is it selfish of me to want my DH to have some intervention prior to me injecting myself with a lot of drugs??

[Anonymous]

What kind of intervention? I'm in the same boat as you so I'm just curious as to what you mean.

[Anonymous]

I was wondering about the type of interventions to which you are referring. I know that an acupuncturist can intervene with treatments and herbal prescriptions that can be effective. Are there traditional Western therapies that are effective? I don't know of any with the exception of wearing boxers and staying out of hot tubs.

Because you are so young, you might want to try the acupuncture/herb route for both of you before you do IVF. Even if you took a year it wouldn't be that big a deal because you are so young.

[Anonymous]

OP here, I don't actually know of any intervention and I was hoping someone could offer a suggestion. I've been reading about variocele repair which my husband has but everything I've read doesn't offer much hope. I'm thinking about natural cycle IVF at New Hope or dominion Fertility, the two clinics are about equal distance from me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm 27 and my DH is 35 and recently diagnosed with poor morphology and low motility, our RE has recommended IVF with ICSI, the fertility drugs really scare me, and all my tests have come back good. Is it selfish of me to want my DH to have some intervention prior to me injecting myself with a lot of drugs??

You are not selfish at all. My husband had so-so morphology and low motility, and it turned out that he had a varicocele. He had the surgery, and I got pregnant via IUI a few months later. Whether the surgery is successful or not in getting you pregnant seems to depend on your husband's numbers. In my case, they were borderline, and six weeks after the surgery, they were vastly improved.

Here's some info:
http://www.advancedfertility.com/varicocele.htm

Also, you can visit Resolve.org, the national infertility foundation, to get more information on its listservs. Lots of women across the country on are that site comparing their husbands' numbers

Good luck to you.

[Anonymous]

i would definitely have your husband go to a urologist who specializes in fertility. it could be that he could have the variococele surgery and then everything would be fine. i think that ivf sounds pretty hard core super fast especially if all of your tests came back OK and of course since you are 27....

good luck.

[Anonymous]

I was thinking actually that natural cycle IVF makes a lot of sense for you. It might take a few cycles, but they'd be essentially medication-free cycles, and much less expensive than normal IVF.

[Anonymous]

Your husband should have his varicocele repaired especially considering you are only 27, you have time. You might get lucky, ie his surgery might work and then you won't have to go through IVF. My husband had his repaired by Paul Shin MD, a urologist on K street and I highly recommend him. When we did our next round of IVF, his numbers were much better and it was successful!

[Anonymous]

My DH has low sperm count and extremely low morphology. When we were ttc #1, we were both in our late 20's. Our RE told us if we were older, he would recommend going straight to IVF/ICSI, but since we were younger, if we wanted, we could have DH see a urologist specializing in IF first. We did that and DH was diagnosed with a varicocele and low FSH. He had variocele repair surgery and was put on a low dose of Clomid, which increased his fsh to normal levels. I want to point out that the urologist told us the results with varicocele repair surgery are mixed and also that when it does help, it helps more with count and that they really don't have any good interventions for improving morphology, but as the urologist said, if you can improve the count, even if the morphology is still bad, you're still better off (i.e. 1% normal morphology out of 20 million motile sperm is much better than 1% normal morphology out of 5 million motile sperm.) In the end, shortly after the surgery, we ended up conceiving on a natural cycle, so I have to assume that the surgery helped.

We thought we were cured, but had a great deal of difficulty in ttc #2 - we went back to the RE and while DH's numbers had improved, they were still in the category considered to be severe male factor infertility. For #2, we had to use IVF/ICSI to conceive.

So I guess my advice is that if you don't mind waiting, it doesn't hurt to try the varicocele repair, but it's not always successful.

[Anonymous]

We loved Paul Shin. Surgery was not an option for my husband, but we got really honest advice and good care from Dr. Shin before we moved ahead with IVF.

[Anonymous]

Posted too fast. Should have said that while surgery was an option, chances of success were less than 5% and we would have had to wait at least 6 months to see if it was successful. We were 34 and 36 at the time, so those facts encouraged us to move ahead with IVF.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like your DH's numbers are not so great if your RE is recommending you go right to IVF. My DH's morphology was borderline low, and he really improved them via natural methods, e.g. stopped drinking (even though he had only been drinking 1-2 glasses of wine a night), a vitamins (look on-line for lists - I think his included Q-10, extra C, fish oil, and few others), and no bike riding or baths. He didn't try acupuncture, but I've seen that recommended (for blood flow). Having his FSH tested and taking clomid or sometime else to address that is also a remedy that I've seen work. Check out the male factor board on IFVconnections and you'll probably get lots of advice.

[Anonymous]

OP here, thank you so much for your advice, we are going to schedule an appt with Dr. Shin in DC, I found a pt on IVFConnections that got pregnant with his help and natural cycle IVF with Dominion Fertility.

[Anonymous]

My husband has (had?) 1% morphology and when he went to the urologist, the dr told him that what the RE said (IVF with ICSI) was a bit extreme, that most people take awhile to get pregnant, etc. In the end we didn't do IVF and lo and behold, did end up getting pregnant (quite accidentally too). Good luck.

[Anonymous]

My husband was diagnosed with severe male factor as well so we went for a second opinion. The new RE prescribed Clomid for him and after 3 months his sperm was normal in every category. However, it does not work for everyone, my friend's husband did the same and his count went down even more after being on Clomid.