As I said with the vitamin supplements and the acupuncture, any potential reponsibility I might have for our fertility issues made me want to find ways of taking control. When you’re dealing with something as small, varied and numerous as sperm count, motility and morphology, it’s easy to feel helpless and unable to affect something that feels so… far away, I guess.

Yes, if you’re a smoker, drug user or heavy drinker, you can eliminate or reduce those things. If you ride a bike every day or wear tight underwear, you can change those behaviors. Obviously, if you have a great amount of stress in your life you can work on reducing that.

So, the bottom line for a fella like me is that there’s nothing I can do that’s recommended by the medical community. While I do consider my life lately as above average on the stress scale, it’s not so bad that I think it would have a major effect and I’ve tried to counter it with exercise. Otherwise, I can research and try new things but it really bothered me that there was no way to see if anything I was doing had a positive effect until I went to IUI and got the cold, hard numbers. It was maddening to have to wait until afterwards on the elevator ride down to find whether I did my part in this bargain, whether I put forth a winning team that might make the goal line.

I researched online for methods of viewing my little swimmers myself. I found that this was not unheard of and entirely possible with just a basic microscope. Not the kind you buy at Toys-R-Us but also not something that had to contain the work “electron.”

Very quickly with some help from Google, I found Kokopelli. Through the information on this site, you can pretty much figure out how to see everything under a microscope but the problem is that you need precise ways of measuring samples, along with a little math to really analyze what you have. Also, I believe the microsopes they sell are calibrated in a certain way to allow for accurate counts. That may be bullshit, but if I wasn’t sure of what I was looking at, there was really no point in doing this. I bought a kit, which included the microscope various slides (with precision depth, a must), cylinders, sterile collection cups, etc. This is the kit I chose, middle of the road I guess. Also, I figured I could look at other cool things under a microscope when this was all over. I haven’t used a microscope since high school.

A side note: In hindsight, I wish I’d opted for the model above, which supposedly has better optics. You have to stare through that lens for a looong time and look around, observe, count. Your eye will get tired quickly if you have to strain.

I don’t have data on what I found and I can’t say for certain whether anything I’ve been doing is helping, but I know this gave me yet one more means of control. I didn’t feel dependent on finding out “how I did” from the doctors at Northwestern. Also, I was now even more convinced that my morphology assessment was overblown. I was able to actually see my individual sperm and compare them to an ideal. There is an incredible amount of variance, I think for anyone, and there are always malformed, slow and dead sperm but everyone has this. It looked to me like I had plenty of very capable soldiers ready to storm Normandy Beach.