Column 9 – Test results and the shape of things to come
Originally published by reminagine.me

FOR TWO LONG DAYS during that hot, hot summer of 2012, I paced around my apartment waiting anxiously for the results… of my sperm test.

How did it come to this?

Well, like a lot of over-thinking, overly educated, self-absorbed, mysteriously-depressed-white-people-who-live-on-the-coasts-and-don’t-go-to-church, my wife and I had dithered away our prime reproductive years trying to “self-actualize.”

By that I mean we followed a predictable path of failed relationships, ennui, 12-step programs, therapy, dogs, self-help books, Buddhism-tinged meditation practices, embarrassing gluten-free diets, career disruptions, yoga, and long walks around the Silver Lake Reservoir pondering the meaning of it all/wasting more time.

I’m sure you’ve been there, to one degree or another.

But the biological clock doesn’t care whether or not you think you have your shit together. It keeps its own time. Now that I did have my shit together enough to be engaged to a fantastic woman with whom I wanted to have a family, the window of opportunity to have kids was closing fast. I could count what was left of my 40s on two fingers and Ingrid only had a handful of her 30s to play with.

After we got engaged, we got busy with the baby making. When a year went by and there was still no bun in the oven, the missus sent me to our friendly neighborhood male fertility clinic to get my semen analyzed by a lab tech who spends all day peering at sperm samples under a microscope. (Read about the ensuing hijinks here).

Now, two days after making the sperm deposit, I waited for the results to arrive. But I wasn’t actually anxious. Like any healthy male with a big ego, I was sure my sperm would get a grade S for super.

When the results finally did arrive, I had no idea there would be so many indicators of sperm health. Everything from viscosity to liquefaction to pH levels to color (milky-to-gray is best) is scrutinized under the microscope. But the major benchmarks are total sperm count, concentration, motility and morphology.

So, how did my sperm look when it got its close up?

First the good news: total sperm count. A total sperm count of more than 60 million is the fertility-level threshold (or one of them—when it comes to sperm viability, the science is definitely not settled). My total sperm count was 113 million. Not bad at all. As far as concentration level goes, you want to have greater than 20 million little guys per milliliter. My sample had 47 million. Which meant, so far, this was sperm you’d expect a flower to grow from if it hit the ground.

Motility quantifies whether your sperm is lazy or energetic and if it moves in a generally upstream, egg-seeking direction. Forty percent active sperm is the bar that needs to be met. Fifty percent of my sperm in this sample was raring to go. It also had a slightly better-than-average internal GPS, which is more than can be said for me, who loses his car every time he parks it.

So far, so good. Maybe not quite super sperm, but certainly not junky junk. All in all, my sperm was in pretty good shape, especially for a 48 year old. Except for one thing—its shape.

Which brings us to morphology—the assessment of the form and structure of organisms. In this case, the size and shape of my sperm. Morphology seems to be the most unsettled facet of sperm analytics. There are differing theories about what constitutes acceptably normal and abnormal sperm and analysis is highly variable depending on what lab, criteria and techniques are used. With no standarized methodology, and because it’s not dealing with absolutes, like total number of sperm in the sample, morphology results rely heavily on the eyeballs and judgment of lab technicians.

So, while there is general agreement that morphology is a factor in fertility, there is disagreement on how to accurately measure it and also on how big of a factor it actually is.

Regardless, I flunked the morphology test—badly. Of the 113 million sperm in this sample, only slightly more than 2 million were in good shape. The rest had amorphous or tapering heads, mid-piece defects, two tails. It was a motley crew, the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. The result was also puzzling because it flew in the face of conventional wisdom that good sperm counts and motility go hand in hand with good morphology.

I took these results, good and bad, with a grain of salt. The more you look into it, the less exact of a science these analyses appear to be. Men with terrible morphology often conceive and men with good sperm shape can have difficulty. Same with sperm counts. It only takes one and according to these mixed results there were still millions of willing and able-bodied sperm on hand.

It’s all a matter of chance, probability and time.

We got back to business. After a few more months, though, there was still no bun in the oven and the pressure was mounting. Ingrid wanted to get pregnant before she turned 38, an age after which female egg production can take a dramatic drop.

I had my sperm tested again. Not surprisingly, the results were almost the opposite of the first set—this time I had lower sperm counts, but they were in better shape. I also had a hunch that ten sperm tests would show ten different results.

What really mattered, though, was that we weren’t pregnant. And the most important factor—time—wasn’t a variable. It was running out.

Pressure was building. Along with the imperative to get pregnant, I was trying to figure out what to do with myself. After two years, many accolades and most of my money, I’d finally shut down my beloved print-journal project, Slake. I started scraping away at various freelance-writing gigs, but it was hardly enough to make ends meet, let alone build a strong foundation upon which to start a family.

Throwing a pregnancy into the middle of this seemed like a foolish idea, or a leap of faith.

I thought about this a lot. Sometimes on walks around the Silver Lake Reservoir. In the past, there had always been a reason to not start a family. Wrong time. Wrong person. But now, I was with the right person and there wasn’t any more time. It had to be right.

Besides, isn’t love, marriage, family—life, really—just one big leap of faith?

Ingrid and I decided we definitely wanted to make that leap. But we would call upon science to buttress our faith.