We wanted to have a baby. We weren’t expecting this.
Embarrassed doesn’t even begin to explain how my husband felt.
We’d been married for nearly a year, his younger sister had just had a baby and his older sister had just fallen pregnant.
We were ready to be parents too, and it was time to bunker down and start trying for a baby.
It didn’t happen instantly and everyone told us that was normal, so we kept trying, and trying, and trying. But a year later nothing had happened.
Related: Fertility. And why everything you thought you knew is wrong.
There was something wrong with me – there had to be. I just knew something was wrong.
So I got tested, but all the results came back ‘normal’ – there was nothing wrong with my fertility. But my GP was concerned that we’d been trying for so long with no luck, and he suggested that I bring my husband in to have his sperm tested. I nearly fell off my chair; it had never really occurred to me that men could be infertile. Naïve, I know.
When I got home, I took a deep breath, sat my husband down, and asked if he could get his fertility tested. I explained that I wasn’t suggesting there was anything wrong with his manhood, but that it was just worth knowing to put our minds at ease.
Related: MIA: For every woman struggling with infertility who feels like a failure right now.