Greg Bales

Diagnosis

In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb

In short, my testicles do not work well. Hormones they make just fine, though testosterone in slightly lower levels (but still within the normal range) than expected; their capacity to create spermatozoa, however, is much diminished.

There is no way to know how my testicles came to be this way. Mom swears I had the mumps when I was seven or eight years old (a claim I cannot verify, since she never took me to the doctor for it), and even though mumps is unlikely to have affected my reproductive system when I was that young (it is known to cause sterility in adolescence, particularly if it affects the testicles), we cannot entirely rule it out, either. Perhaps it can be attributable to something earlier—too much estrogen in the womb, for example—but it can’t be definitively verified.

In one sense, the diagnosis is good news. True, we are stuck with IVF because there is no known hormone therapy that would increase my sperm count to anywhere near normal ranges. Because of it, we are also stuck with trying to figure out how to pay for IVF or, at least, to acquire insurance to cover it. Nevertheless, we now know that my infertility is not due to a genetic mutation, so we are spared the the ethical dilemma of choosing to pass on some unexpressed genetic disease to our children. Likewise, we are not looking at the particular Y-chromosome microdeletion that would cause my sperm to completely disappear over time, a mutation that K was particularly worried about for much of December. Finally, some relief comes in knowing.