“…that’s why you’re not pregnant.”

Was he talking to us?

“Yes, zero sperm. That’s why you’re not pregnant, I’m sorry.”

Mr Blondie dropped my hand as if he lost all the hope in the world. My heart dropped into my stomach, at least that was what it felt like.

I don’t think I even said anything, I just looked at Mr Blondie, not being able to hide the sadness on my face. His face dropped, he was looking at the floor wide eyed and his body language went from open and confident, to closed and hopeless.

Great, so we had paid £120 to be told our worst fears.

All of a sudden the doctor goes “Oh! No, wait! I see some! There’s another! Oh and another one! Come and have a look if you like!”

Almost immediately Mr Blondie and I erupted into smiles and leapt to our feet so we could see our future sperm babies on the microscope. It was amazing. It really is like the pictures you see on Google. Little tadpoles with heads and wiggly tails, moving around quicker than the speed of light! Granted, there were about five on the slide that I saw, but I still saw them. With my own eyes! My hope was completely restored and whilst there were few, that was still something!

I honestly do not understand how the doctor did not see any sperm for the first few minutes. That thought has swirled through my mind ever since. He said those words “that’s why you’re not pregnant” so easily, rolled off his tongue as if he told us what we were having for dinner. It was factual to him. To me it was, “my world is ending”, “I want to be a Mother, where are my children actually going to come from?” You can imagine the thoughts I was having in that one minute moment whilst he checked the sperm sample again.

After all of that drama and suspense, I think I had just about sweated right through my roll neck top (In January) and felt a bit gross. However we sat there and listened to the doctor as he told us the facts. (I’ll put this in laymen’s terms, so not to confuse anyone.) What Mr Blondie has is good, the shape and speed of the sperm are normal to very good. The count, the problem, is what is worrying. It’s alarmingly low, under a million per ml to be exact. The average UK male will have over twenty-million sperm per ml. So you can see why this was scary to us. The NHS states that anyone with under fifteen-million sperm would be considered to have a low sperm count. Are you kidding me? If he said that he’d had two-million per ml I would have been overjoyed.

He told Mr Blondie that he needed to cut down on smoking (he was only smoking about 5-7 per day!), start taking conception vitamins, eating better food, stop wearing tight boxers, no hot baths. Oh and only have sex in the fertile period two/three days apart, not the everyday we had been thinking was spot on for the fertile period! He said that having sex too regularly with a low sperm count can effectively cause the man to shoot “blanks” which is what we don’t want! He also told us, devastatingly that because the count is so low, it’s unlikely that any are even making it past my cervix. I’ll show you where the cervix is, so you can understand why that would devastate me so much.

Depending on where you are in your cycle, the cervix is still a fair way up. Luckily Mr Blondie is pretty well endowed so you wouldn’t have thought it was much of a problem. However, now that I knew this, all I could think of was how much time and money I had wasted on pregnancy tests and symptom spotting… all to find out that they more than likely aren’t even going anywhere. *Cue crying emoji here*

He also told us about a treatment called IVF with ICSI (In Vitro Fertilisation with Intra-cytoplasmic Sperm Injection, try and say that three times!) which he considered to be our best option if we were going to go for fertility treatment if all else fails. In my head I was already making budget cuts to our lives so we could skip the whole mind-numbing-NHS-referral-thing and do it ourselves at this clinic!

Before we’d even got home we had stopped by Boots to buy some conception vitamins, for us both! We even stopped by a local vaping shop and got him all set up on an e-cigarette with super low nicotine content. I thought, “sorted!” I’ll be pregnant in three months.

Ha. Our bodies had other ideas.

Love & Baby Dust,

~ Blondie x