need advice...please!!!

[moorebaby]

ok....here's a brief history.

me: no fertility issues at all.

dh: had 1 undescended testicle when he was younger, which wasn't caught until he was about 6 years old. it was then surgically descended. his younger brother had the same issue, but according to my dh it was both testicles in his brother. based on this it was explained to them by their mother that my dh wouldn't have as bad of fertility problems as his brother since he only had it in 1 testicle. well mu dh's brother did in fact have issues & underwent ivf with icsi at the same clinic as my dh & i did. they put 2 embbies in & both ferilized with 1 splitting, giving them triplets. this all worked the 1st try & now they have 6 year old triplet boys.

my dh & i did our 1st ivf with icsi treatment this past september....it didn't work. i stimmed perfect....25 eggs were retrieved, 20 were mature, but only 4 fertilized. we did a 3dt with 2 embbies, of which 1 was a near perfect 8-cell embbie & the other was an average 8-cell embbie. i got preggo with my 1st beta being 116. my 2nd beta increased by 69% & by the time the 3rd beta was done i increased only 33%. this is when they told me it was either ectopic or a chemical pregnancy. long story short, it ended up being a miscarrige...

our re & the other re's at the clinic reviewed our plan. the nurse called me thursday & said that the fact that only 4 fertilized out of 20 & i miscarried is all due to the low sperm count & poor sperm quality. i felt so bad telling my dh because i don't want him to feel like it's all his fault. his undescended testicle is what caused him to have the sperm issues. anyways they also said that our chances of getting pregnant would be higher if we used donor sperm in addition to his sperm on our next ivf/icsi cycle. that is not something either of us feels comfortable doing. my dh was referred to a urologist who specializes in fertility issues in males. he couldn't get an appointment until december 1st so we won't have any info for a while unless an appointment opens up before then. i'm assuming the donor sperm thing is an option & if we choose not to do that, we can still do the ivf/icsi cycle.

my question is....has anyone had any experience with a similar situation? any info would be appreciated! good luck to all of you ladies....wishing you nothing but bfp's!

[DillysGirl]

Moorebaby- I guess my situation is kinda similar to yours...Long story short...
After trying to have a baby naturally with no success went to a fertility Dr. Concluded that I was fine. Tested Dh sperm and got a call from the Dr. on New Years Eve 2008 that his sperm count was 0! I had to deliver this information to my DH and it was definitely the hardest thing I have ever had to tell him. I am getting teary eyed now just thinking about it! Crappy way to start off a year! After meeting with a urologist specializing in male fertility he was able to perform MESA on my DH and retrieve sperm surgically. We also had ICSI/IVF and after a failed fresh cycle we are now almost 6 weeks pregnant after a Frozen cycle!!

I still make a point to tell my DH that we have both made sacrifices to get to this point and have both been poked and prodded and it's no ones fault. From the beginning I have said that I choose to be with him forever over having a baby if it ever came to that.

Moral of the story is to keep your head up, especially until you see the urologist! They found sperm where we thought we had none!

Good luck on this journey and I know it will end with a healthy baby for you!

[Warren Dew]

I doubt that it's all due to one undescended testicle. They found 20 sperm for the ICSI; did they all happen to come from the undescended testicle? It might be that the 4 fertilizations all came from the normal testicle, though.

Also ectopics cannot be the result of the sperm in IVF, since the embryos are put in the uterus, not the fallopian tube. That's just drift within the uterus.

Here's the thing: there's a lot of luck in IVF. You roll the dice each time you try it. Your brother's husband got lucky the first time, but most people have to try several times before they succeed. Most people do not even get a positive beta the first time around, so you're ahead of the game there.

Donor sperm might be marginally better for the clinic's success rate statistics, but I don't think there's any reason for your husband to give up on his own sperm yet.

[souris]

Hello there,
i agree with Warren,
I find that your clinic ask very quickly about sperm donor. One try at IVF is not much (well it is 1 time too many if you ask me !)

We had to retrieve Dh sperm through TESA (needle that goes into the testis to get the sperm). His sperm was not great quality, quantity always enough to fertilise my 15/20 eggs.
I got pregnant 2 times and miscarried 2 times. Doc said it was because of poor sperm quality. we decided that DH would take vitamins for 3 months before trying again, stop alcohol for 3 months and try to be as healthy as possible. I did not get pregnant... how frustrating! a month later, we started our last (number7) cycle.
I went to see an acupuncturist for stress, he also regulated my blood flow, and when i told him about Dh sperm, he gave me some chinese herbs (he is chinese and studied there). SO I cant remember the name (because chinese) but I can find it if you are interested.
DH took 1 month of those vits, then he had TESA again. The doc said the sperm were top quality ! it never happen before! I dont know if it was the herbs or not, but it worked for us as i am 20 weeks pregnant with triplets!

good luck,
i hope it will work out soon

[moorebaby]

DillysGirl- wow...how awful to get the news on new year's eve! i really hope that this procedure, whichever TESA, TESE, or MESA works. i had a dream last night we had a baby boy. your words were so inspiring...i shared them with my dh & it put a smile on his face...thank you from the bottom of my heart!

Warren Dew- the 20 sperm came from his regular ejacualte. the problem that they're saying is that they're poor quality & that is what probably caused only 4 to fertilize & for me to miscarry. we ended up NOT having an ectopic pregnancy. i agree with you...i never really thought about the clinic's success rate #s....that makes sense as to why they'd recommend sonor sperm. that's kind of sad if that's the reason.

souris- that is such wonderful news for you! i would love to know more info about the herbs. how expensive were the herbs & the acupuncturist visits? good luck with your pregnancy...how exciting, triplets! do you know what you're having?

[to_have_fun08]

moorebaby - I agree with previous post, there are other things that they can do to have a better cycle. i wouldn't give up on DH's sperm yet. Also, the protocol they used might not have been the best, possibly causing egg quality issues. I don't see how they can be blaming it all on your DH's sperm. I would look into a change of protocol and see what the urologist suggest before looking at donor.

[souris]

moorebaby,

for the acupuncturist I can tell you the price ( 60 USD per session) but I was living abroad (UAE DUBAI) so you cant really compare. I was going once a week (started 1.5 months before the cycle) and went the day before EC and the day of ET.
I cannot find the name of the herbs dh took (I kept the box because the name was in chinese in case I needed it again but we moved country and It must be in a box still)
but I will send an email to the clinic in dubai I was going to and ask the doc what it was ok! give me a few days and i will get back to you


xxx

[me2009]

hi moorbaby & sorry to hear about your DH swimmy woes

i do agree w/ the others on jumping the gun on going to donor after just one try.... humm... something doesnt sound right there? But im no ivf expert!

also, you did mention that you didn't have any* issues & i know that they got like 20 eggs from ya! But did your clinic truely work you up fully 100%

I mean yes they can do all the fertility stuff, but did they work you up for all the auto-immun stuff?? do the pregn loss work up?

only reason i ask, because there are alot of different reason's with the auto-immun, ie. lupus, all the thromb/anti-phoshpholip antibodies, all the blood -clotting issues that are auto im related.

its just some food for though... if you have had all the big auto-imm /preg loss work up and you were in the clear, then i would be OK,

BUT if you haven't had the work up (and yes these tests are $$), i would make sure your RE gets all the facts

Hope this helps?

[jaydentd]

Moorbaby- I have a similar story. Dh also had a undescended testicle which needed to be removed. He has low sperm count of 4ml now and we just went through our first cycle of ivf and icsi and now I'm pregnant. I had 18 eggs and only 8 fertilize. I hope everything works out for your you and dh.

[CT_Michele]

Moorebaby- You are in CT, right? Who were you referred to for a urologist? My husband and I are also male factor and his urologist is Stanton Honig in New Haven. He is awesome, he has performed TESE twice for dh, probably a third coming up. Maybe he has a sooner appt.

Don't lose hope just yet. Did you do icsi this past time? I am surprised with only 20 sperm in the ejaculate that they wouldn't do icsi. If my dh had any sperm in the ejaculate, my RE would have had him give multiple samples so they could freeze sperm and do icsi, but unfortunately, dh did not have any. When he went through TESE the first time, they were able to get just barely enough sperm to fertilize all of my eggs, and with that cycle we had success. For his second TESE, they also got just enough. Unfortunately that cycle did not work out, but a lot of our eggs fertilized.

Just know that there is hope. We are working with extremely low numbers, not even moving, just twitching. The lab tech said it took her over an hour to find 8 sperm, and that was from a large TESE tissue sample. I would imagine that if your hubby had 20 in the ejaculate, then you will have no problem getting sperm from a TESA, TESE or MESA, and hopefully you will have better fertilization with icsi.

If you need more info, feel free to pm me.

[vicky1707]

Hi,

Me and DH have a similar situation. My DH had a descended testicle when he was younger, and had the operation. Unfortunately his mum never thought to tell us this, even after we'd been trying for a baby for almost a year with no success!! To say I was slightly annoyed is an understatment!! Anyway, when she eventually told us I made us an appt with our family doctor straight away. I had the usual tests, and DH had a sperm count, and it came back extremeley low, which we were very upset and disappointed. DH's doctor said that we'd need IVF and we were referred to our local hospital. I went on Clomid for 6 months - no success and then we were put on the waiting list for IVF.

It was recommended we have IVF with ICSI because of DH's sperm count. We had 2 IVF/ICSI cycles, and also a FET all unsuccessful. We found out after the 3rd failed cycle that DH's sperm count was descreasing a lot and the last count it had gone from 20million (very first count) to 2.5million!! We were so upset.

we had a little break and after DH turned 30 in January we went into a serious health kick - no drinking, healthy eating and taking vitamins. We had our 4th cycle in June/July - it was unsuccessful, but DH's sperm count had jumped to 46.8million! More than the normal sperm count! Plus DH's sperm was good in all aspects of the sperm count, good quality, motality etc.. We were SO happy, even though the cycle hadn't worked, we felt positive that we had managed to make a difference to DH's sperm count. Also we IVF instead of ICSI. Because I'd got so many eggs they fertilised half IVF and half ICSI. DH's sperm fertilised ALL the IVF eggs! They were doing better than the ICSI eggs! We had 1 blastocyst egg transfered.

At our follow up appointment the consultant was just as shocked as me and DH were that it hadn't worked, he said he hadn't seen someone proceed 10 blastocyst eggs (in our area anyway) and really couldn't understand why it hadnt worked! Turns out it could be some sort of embedding problem with me and they will look into that when we decide to go for our next cycle. It'll be a FET this time, with us having 10 blastcyst eggs left to use.

We are now having a break from the whole baby IVF rollcoaster, but after xmas if nothing has happened naturally then I am going onto Clomid again to regulate my periods (have irregular periods) and hopefully with the no drinking, healthy eating and us both taking the vitamins we may have a miracle and conceive naturally - seeing as the embryologist did say when she told us about how the eggs were progressing during the cycle!

There is a bit of hope at times. Moorebaby - I dont think you shoudl jump straight to donor sperm, like Warren said - sometimes it's luck with IVF! And maybe the clinic is just thinking of their success rate!!

I think it's best to try doing the no alcohol, healthy eating and vitamins for a good few months, anything is worth a try!

Good luck to everyone x x x

[baylorbear33]

moorebaby - wow, I can't begin to tell you how similar your story is to ours. My DH also had undescended testicles and had surgery at the age of 3 to correct the situation. Prior to doing the actual IVF procedure, we had his sperm tested twice to determine count, motility, morphology, etc. Both tests had very poor results. Since we were paying for the IVF out of pocket, we had agreed that we were only going to try it once; therefore, after many discussions, we decided to do the IVF-ICSI with my DH's sperm, but we had also picked out a donor and had the donor sample waiting at the clinic as backup just in case my DH's sperm was unusable. We chose a donor with very similar physical characteristics, but also similar personaility traits as my DH. This turned out to be a very good decision for us. I had 33 mature eggs at retrieval and they simply could not find enough "good" sperm of my DH's to attempt fertilization of all 33 eggs. They ended up using both. We had 20 fertilize (about half-n-half), but by day 5 we only had 2 quality blasts (both donor) and one poor quality blast (DH). We made the decision to transfer one of each to up our chances of pregnancy but still give my DH's embryo a chance. We had decided that we did not ever want to know which one took, etc. as that it would be "our" child no matter what. Long story short, one of the embryos took, split twice resulting in identical triplets. We lost one baby at 7 weeks and the other two at 19 weeks due to complications of a multiple pregnancy. I can't begin to tell you how devasting this was.) Fortunately for us, we had 3 embryos frozen. (One DH and Two Donor) We attempted a FET with my DH's embryo this past April, got pregnant, but miscarried at 5 1/2 weeks. We went for our last FET attempt in June, transferred both donor embryos, and I am currently 22 weeks pregnant with one healthy little boy. While the situation is not ideal, I would love nothing more than to be carrying my DH's baby, we are both very excited and just happy to have a baby on the way. I am very fortunate in that my husband recognized the steps we would have to take to have a baby, and was not against donor sperm. We had also made the decision that if the IVF was unsuccessful, we would take the road towards adoption. For us, we simply wanted a child in our lives, regardless of how it came to be. I know this is not the decision that everyone would make, but it worked for us. I hope our story helps you in some way. Best of luck to you!