New Direction

After our first appointment yielded no real cause for our infertility, Dr. Doody suggested some more labs. This time they were going to do further testing on Justin. In case you might not know a lot about infertility, many physicians start out trying to find a problem with the female. I don't know why this is the case because male factor infertility is just as prevalent as female infertility. I can't help but wonder if it has anything to do with the lasting effects of sexism from centuries ago when women were expected to produce a male heir for their husbands. Anyway, I was glad to see that we were doing some more investigating.

One of the tests that they performed on Justin was a test for ASA (antisperm antibodies). We had never heard of this test before, and we honestly expected to run into another dead end. However, he tested positive for this. Basically, this means that his body produces an immune response to his own sperm that damage or kill them. This makes it impossible for the sperm to ever reach my eggs because his body attacks them like they are a disease that he is having to fight off. It is actually a very rare condition that is usually seen in patients with vasectomy reversals.

Upon this discovery, our restlessness about which procedure to go forward with was put at ease. With the condition that Justin has, it would be useless to try IUI. With IUI, they are just injecting the sperm directly into your uterus so that it doesn't have to travel so far. This would not work with ASA. That leaves us with only one option...IVF.

With IVF, there is another procedure that this facility can do in addition to the IVF procedure. It is called ICSI (Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection). With ICSI, the embryologist can actually pick out the "healthy-looking" sperm from underneath a microscope and manually inject them into my eggs so that the sperm has to do absolutely no work. It completely bypasses the issue that we have with ASA. We were so relieved to finally find a missing piece to the puzzle.