Urologist Result

I almost forgot to blog about this today.

Well, it looks like the roller-coaster has leveled off for now. According to the urologist I'm healthy. No sign of abnormality or disease, and believe me he searched every nook and cranny. He also said there's an off chance that my sperm may improve if whatever is making them abnormal - still an unknown, as is often the case with this problem - is a temporary condition. I guess we'll see if that's the case when they check it for the IVF in a couple months. I'm not holding my breath.

They're supposed to be doing a genetic screening to see if there are any known bad genes or some such thing. They plan to check the Y chromosome especially. If they do find something on that one I'm thinking I'll inquire about the possibility, and price, of selecting only female sperm to fertilize the eggs for the IVF. No sense in passing this on if it can be sidestepped. And I'm hoping a bit for a daughter anyway.

I completely forgot to mention something to the urologist when we were exploring possible causes from my history: the fact that for the past five years or so I've typically gotten only three to five hours of sleep a night, except some weekends when I may sleep in and get seven or eight. You might notice that in the times on some of these blog entries. I looked it up and did find one or two mentions of sleep deprivation and other stress reducing sperm counts, but couldn't find any numbers to see how significant the effect was. I'm now trying to shift my sleep patterns. It's not something easy to do cold turkey, but I'm trying to keep it shifting in the right direction. Hopefully that, combined with switching to boxers and taking my vitamins more regularly will improve things a little. If nothing else, maybe I'll be able to generate a few normal sperm to make the selection for ICSI more obvious.