Our Story

My husband and I are in our late twenties/early thirties. We have a very lovely house in a wonderful neighborhood in suburbia where we live with our sweet dog, Gatsby, and two cats, Copland and Mozart. At this point, these three "babies" are pretty much our world. It absolutely makes our day to come home from work and have them waiting for us with so much enthusiasm.

We've been married for a little over six years and decided in early 2011 that we really wanted to focus on having a family. We tried with no success for a year and then while my husband was at the doctor for a checkup in February 2012, we learned that he had low testosterone and a very low sperm count (it's important to note, though, that the sperm count isn't zero).

We were pretty crushed and spent several months waiting while my husband took medicine to improve his testosterone levels. There isn't medicine you can take to increase sperm count, but my husband's endocrinologist was hopeful that by increasing the testosterone, it would kickstart sperm production naturally. In April, he returned to the doctor and his testosterone had increased, but they did not do another semen analysis.

Later this week, he'll be returning to our general care provider and his endocrinologist to get more tests done and we're planning to ask our general care provider for a referral out to a fertility specialist.

So, at this point, we're still in a bit of a holding pattern, but both of us are confident that is about to change. We're excited to move forward and see what technology can do for us!

We are also incredibly blessed with an amazing support system. Both sets of parents are amazing and are supportive of what we're going though and the ups and downs. Our siblings are always there to lighten the mood and we have a wonderful group of friends—many of whom live in our neighborhood.

We also attend a Lutheran Church (ELCA) and have an amazing pastor and Bible Study that helps us see how God works through our trials. We have semi-regular meetings with our pastor and our faith helps guide our decisions. We expect that our faith will be especially important as we traverse the murky waters of reproductive technologies and their ethical implications.

So, we have no idea how this will turn out and I think we're slightly nervous to make our journey public, but we both feel strongly that infertility is wrongly stigmatized. (And we're tired of being asked why we don't have kids!)