First signs

Our conception project, if you will, began in March 2010. At first it was a casual endeavor, not taken too seriously. After several months of no magic, I decided to buy a Clear Blue Easy monitor to see if and when I was actually ovulating. I was elated to see that, at 38, I was still ovulating every month. I had renewed hope.

August creeped upon us with no change in the story, so I decided to get checked out by a fertility specialist. Typically infertility is a diagnosis attached to those who have been trying for one year without success, but being 38, I knew we needed to be checked out at the 6 month mark. What a relief it was to find out everything was completely normal with me and I had heaps of antral follicles on my ovaries (meaning I had good ovarian reserve as we women are born with a finite amount of eggs and as we age this number drastically decreases).

With this encouraging news, we went back to the drawing board and doubled our efforts. We tried everything we read or heard about from friends and family. I tried Vitex agnus-castus, we tried using pre-seed lubricant (which a same age couple swore by), I drank fertili-tea, we both went to acupuncture and took Chinese herbs and I even did Sirasana (headstands) and meditation after intercourse to use gravity and mind power to will those little sperms to meet the egg.

Nothing worked.

In the meantime, we moved and life carried us away with busyness. We finally found a reproductive endocrinologist in our new city that we really liked and we both went in for a full exam. Our results came in and lo' and behold, my husband has a very low sperm count as well as low morphology, low motility and 47% dead sperm. It was bad news. When the doctor said I would only have a 1.8% chance of ever conceiving naturally, I cried.

My dear husband then doubled his efforts with the herbs and acupuncture. He already eats very healthfully and is in ultimate physical health, so he was not sure what else to improve upon. He saw a fertility urologist during this time, but left without any explanation as to the cause of his low counts. A repeat test in a month's time showed the same results.

That brought us to our only option - to undergo assisted fertility treatments. Our chances for pregnancy with Clomid + IUI (intrauterine insemination) increases from a 1.8% per month chance to a whopping 26% (average 15-20%). So we are giving it a go. We had hoped we could have done everything naturally, but no such luck.

We are now starting our first cycle. Fingers crossed for a sticky outcome!