Our Story

Since our story is unique, our friends and family will recognize us by the details. However, to protect our privacy as much as possible. I am going to refer to ourselves as "he/him/his"  and "I/me/my/mine."

We are LDS and live in Utah. We have been married for almost 4 years. We have dogs and a house.

He and I  started dating when I was about 17 and he was about 18. We dated until he left on his mission in January of 2007. I wrote him throughout his mission. In early December of 2008, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He was sent home from his mission about 2 months early. It was all very sudden. He went to the doctor on Monday, learned he had cancer on Tuesday, flew home on Wednesday and had the tumor, and therefore his testicle, removed on Thursday.

After several tests, the doctors determined that they could not see any more cancer, but that there was a 20% chance that there was more cancer that wasn't visible. He was given the following options:

• Monitor for 5 years and watch for more cancer: not recommended because most people don't follow through and the cancer ends up coming back unnoticed.
• Have surgery to remove the surrounding lymph nodes: This was proposed to have a 1 in 3 chance the cancer would return if it was even there and a 10% of causing infertility.
• Chemotherapy: this was proposed as having a small chance of the cancer returning (if it was even there) and a small chance of infertility (I don't remember the exact numbers)

We picked chemo. We were warned that that was a (very small) chance that chemo may leave him with a low sperm count. He store and froze sperm at a storage clinic-just in case.  He had 2 rounds of chemotherapy in January and February of 2009. He lost his hair. His mom and I cried because we were afraid he would be bald in the wedding photos. It was all very dramatic. We got married in May 2009. His hair had grown back enough for respectable wedding photos-Phew!

We did what most engaged couples do. I went to see the female doctor about 4 months before the wedding. The female doctor gave me a prescription for "the pill." I took the pill. My hormones were out of control and everything made me cry. Once I cried for 7 hours straight because I thought my car was broken. The pill made me feel a little nauseous at bed time. I dealt with it, it wasn't that bad.

However, soon after we got married, I stared mysteriously getting sick about once a month. It was around the same time that swine flu was a big risk. I went to the doctor and they tested for swine flu, pregnancy, and about anything else you could think of. Negative, negative, negative. After about 3 months of getting sick every month for 1 week, I figured it out. The "pill" was making me sick, or to be more specific: not taking the "pill" was making me sick. The week I took the placebos and was off the hormones I was fatigued, nauseous, dizzy, and tired. As soon as I started taking the hormones again, I was fine.

We went to 3 medical professionals before we could finally get someone to listen to me. The doctors told me it couldn't be my birth control. One finally told me it could. We tried another kind. That one made me sick every day. We tried a third kind. That one made me sick too.

Messing with my hormones so extensively also gave me secondary problems. At the height of my struggle with birth control, I had dropped out of school and quit my job. I was sick with flu-like symptoms daily for 3 months. Everything culminated and I started having intensive abdominal pain. I was on lortab and bed bound for about 10 days before we could get things straightened out.

We learned that the abdominal pain was due to an excessive amount of progesterone (the hormone that makes birth control work). They gave me some serotonin and an antispasmodic.

Since we were told there was a chance that his sperm count would be effected by the chemotherapy, they ran a semen analysis to make sure I even needed to take the pill. It came back with perfect results. I kept taking the pill.

In the mean time we kept getting bills from the storage clinic to pay for the cost of storing his sperm. We had a semen analysis that was perfect and an empty pocket book. We decided to have the samples destroyed. Why keep something that you can't afford and you don't need, right?

I had started to feel promptings to try and start our family. That seemed like a crazy idea given the position we were in. However, one day I realized I had no job, dropped out of school, took 7 prescriptions, and only felt just ok most of the time.

We decided to follow those promptings. I took my last pill in February of 2010. A few weeks of being off the pill and I started feeling like my old self again. I was just taking one prescription. It was awesome.

Since I had received so many promptings, one that was especially strong, I figured we would get pregnant right away. The idea was kind of freaky since we were so financially unstable, but we had faith we were doing the right thing. We were pretty excited.

I was surprised, but optimistic every month that went by with another negative pregnancy test. About six months in, my doctor gave me some clomid. Still: Negative, negative, negative. About a year in, my doctor decided she had done everything she could for me. She told me to go see a specialist.

We found a specialist that my insurance covered. We called to schedule an appointment. The first appointment she had was 3 months out. Part of us hoped we wouldn't have to go because we'd be pregnant by then.

We saw the specialist. We talked. She asked a lot of questions. She drew my blood and we scheduled a follow up appointment.

We saw her again the first week of June. She went over my lab results and told me that she couldn't see that there was anything wrong with me. She said, "usually in these circumstances when the woman looks fine, we like to check the men." We told her that wasn't necessary because he had a semen analysis done about a year ago and it was perfect. She told us she wanted to see the semen analysis.

We went home, called the clinic that ordered his semen analysis and asked them to send us a copy. A few days later we got the lab sheet in the mail. We opened it up, expecting to see the lab results from a year earlier.

To our horror, the results had been corrected. We destroyed the stored semen based on the initial results. We were never informed of the correction. His semen analysis wasn't perfect, it was the exact opposite. We called our doctor and asked her if the results were as bad as they looked. She said they were.

We had another semen analysis done. Maybe it would be better since a year had passed a year later.

Nope, still bad. We did two more. Nope, all three told the same story. They weren't pretty. He has a very low sperm count and very low motility.

(I'm going to go ahead try to nip this in the bud: we've had dozens of people advise us to take legal action. You're note the first person to think of it. There's no need for you to do so in the comments.) 

In October of 2011, we had a consult with an Andrology specialist. The Dr. showed us the results of his most recent semen analysis. One of the tests they run averages the sperm count and motility and gives you a score. A normal score is above 30 million. The Dr. told us that people who have no infertility problems have about a 20% chance each month of getting pregnant. The Dr. told us that couples who try for a year and do not get pregnant are said to have a 2-3% chance of getting pregnant. We talked a little bit about treatment options. The Dr. told us that couples who have a score of 20 million in that earlier analysis have a 10-12% chance of getting pregnant each time they try artificial insemination (AI). The Dr. said the chances drop significantly with couples who have a score of 10 million or lower. The Dr. said that couples with a score of 5 million or less will probably waste their time and money with AI. My Husband's has a score of 1 million. AI costs between $700 to $1000 a try.  We talked about in-vitro fertilization. IVF costs about $11,000 to $12,000 a try. It's very invasive and involves a lot of risks. The Dr. told us we might have success with IVF.


 The day of that Dr. appointment was probably the worst day of my life. I felt like I couldn't breath. I had no idea I would be so upset. I had always told myself when I was growing up that I would "just adopt" if I couldn't have children. I didn't think I would care about being able to bear children.

I've been even more surprised at how much pain I still feel. We're coming up on 3 years since we first started trying to get pregnant, and two years since we found out that it wasn't just going to happen for us at home.