Dusting off the Infertility Thoughts

The last 3 months have gone by quickly.  Don't the summers always go by quick?   I've been in a pretty good place mentally.  Beyond the 3-day-a-week reminder via HCG shots for my husband (who calls them 'testosterone' shots to everyone else), I've been able to 'forget' that we struggle with infertility.  There hasn't been anything we can DO about it and we're DOing everything we can.  No tests to take.  No treatments.  No stirrups.  No drugs (for me anyway).  No doctors or nurses.  No one asking how things are going in the baby-making department.  No bad news.  It's been heaven.
As much as we have been looking forward to the long awaited semen analysis results to see if the HCG treatment is making super-swimmers like it should, it is the start of more decision making and more discussions about our infertility.  It's been so easy to pretend that we are baby-less by choice, and it's been so easy to pretend that I don't feel a little pang of jealousy at every pregnant woman I see (and they are everywhere!).  I have compartamentalized the infertility part of my life in the way back of my brain and have effectively ignored it for 3 glorious months.  Until this week.

This week I dusted off the infertility-thinking part of my brain.  DH had his SA on Monday and the nurse called him back with the results on Tuesday.  Good news and Bad news.  Isn't that always the case?  The good news was that between March and August, his morphology (shape) went from 1% to 3% (they want at least 5% to do IUI).  Improvement is good and could have been largly attributed to not smoking.  The bad news was that his total count went from 41 million (they want > 40) to 1 million.  Yikes.  Also, the immaturity level went from 3% to 17%.  What the heck?  The nurse didn't think the HCG was doing to the swimmers what they wanted it to.  To me, this news was not what I expected.  My expectations were much higher.  We're not devastated, but highly disappointed.

The nurse suggested DH continue HCG for another month and repeat the SA in case it was a flukey test.  She also suggested DH quit drinking liquor (he likes his whiskey) to see if that improves his numbers too.  Her opinion was that IVF would be the next step considering these numbers.  In any event, we've scheduled a phone consult with the doctor for Aug. 29th to see what he thinks we should do.  De ja vu.