July 2007: For the Sake of Reproductive Analysis

I’d really wanted this whole pregnancy thing to happen naturally, but I’d pretty much surrendered that by July. So next I decided to try acupuncture. Not exactly intervention-free, but it seemed a lot less invasive than Western fertility meds, or the surgery Dr. J was suggesting I might need. (My initial blood work came back normal.) And from the beginning, I really liked my acupuncturist, who is a doctor of oriental medicine but lets you call her by her first name. Finally! A health care professional who asked me about my cervical mucus! Cared about my temperature! And her office was very relaxing, very zen. Totally what you think an acupuncturist’s office should be like, with shoji screens and Asian-looking murals on the wall and relaxing music and Good Earth tea.

The best thing about her was that the first time we met and she evaluated me, she said, “I think you’ll get pregnant naturally.” Man, I don’t know if she uses that line all the time, but it’s a best seller. It sealed my deal. She said it, I believe it, that settles it.

But news later in the month suggested my acupuncturist was wrong, that I probably wasn’t going to get pregnant naturally. Dr. J recommended my husband get a sperm analysis, with a sympathetic mime frown for my husband this time. Apparently she felt badly for him, because he was going to have to have an orgasm for the sake of reproductive analysis. As you can imagine, I was feeling a little less sorry about that.

But I did feel bad for him afterward, and for me. Because the results weren’t good. I guess we should have known when the doctor kept calling and leaving messages, kept insisting she speak with DH before dropping the results in the mail. Usually they just send you that stuff, and it’s up to you to figure out whether you're completely normal or deathly ill.

There are three important factors in sperm analysis—count, motility, and morphology—and every single one of our factors was way below average. The poor doctor who had to tell DH this was a 20-something resident, probably not used to talking to strange men about sperm quality. She was nice about it, but she admitted pretty freely that she didn’t really know anything. She recommended we set up an appointment with a urologist, which we did for the next month.

Thank goodness for acupuncture, though. It never did what I was hoping it would—I still spot—but it’s very relaxing. Snort yourself awake from a dead sleep kind of relaxing. And as time passed and we were becoming one of those couples who had (always whispered) “trouble,” I was having a hard time relaxing.