Me and my husband have been trying to concieve for a year next month and have recently had some news that has shown us that all our efforts have essentially been pointless this whole time. I wanted to pop a post on here just in case our experience might chime with someone and encourage them them investigate sooner if they're struggling too, as time wasted is such a hard thing when TTC, especially if you're nearing 35 like me.
Because we were really targeting ovulation well, I was getting worried that we'd not had a snifter of a pink line on a pregnancy test yet, and looked at myself first as the possible cause, getting trans-vaginal ultrasound and blood tests done. They all came back perfectly so although it hadn't been a year we decided to get my husband a semen analysis.
Turns out he has a severely low count, concentration, motility and morphology, making the chance of us getting pregnant naturally almost 0%. All that focus and hope each month, hundreds of pounds on opks, sperm friendly lube, pregnancy tests, vitamins and not to mention the mental toll of the two week wait and disappointment of AF suddenly seemed so utterly pointless, but we pulled ourselves together and began looking into the next steps.
One possible cause is physiological like a varicocele, and my husband had actually gone to the GP about ten years ago early in our relationship to check if he had a varicocele because one side of his testicle was bigger and there was a feeling of something else in there. The GP said he definitely doesn't have them so we didn't give it another moments thought.
Cut to ten years later and we paid for a private urology consultation (£160) and it turns out he does have a varicocele. A big one, grade 3 that is visible never mind only being diagnosable by a physical examination. I'm trying not to be too furiously resentful at that first GP for misdiagnosing him and essentially making us infertile while we try for our first baby ten years later as its not helpful to have in my head, but at least now we know. We'll be pushing for a fast varicocele embolization and hope that improves things but his results were so low even a 100% improvement won't take us to the lowest baseline of 'normal' sperm, so it may just even delay us further from possible IVF/ICSI.
Hope this isn't too long a post or seemingly irrelevant, I just wanted to share so that perhaps someone else might push for an investigation sooner and not buy into the whole 'it can take a year', just in case it's something more serious as if we had waited we just would have added more months with 0% chance to our journey to concieve.
Xx