New here! MFI and IVF

tnh0413

Hi all! I've been lurking for sometime, and am now able to finally post. My husband & I are both 30, married for 7 years and TTC since beginning of 2016. After a year of trying, he was sent for semen analysis which showed <1 mil total sperm, with almost no motility. He did have a small varicocele that was found when we went to urologist and he suggested surgery to fix this, but there was no guarantee that it would help his numbers. We waited until speaking with our RE before making the decision on having him go through surgery. In her experience, she felt even if my husband had a significant increase from the varicocele repair (which would be unlikely) that we still would not be out of the range of having to do IVF. SO, instead of making him go through something that may not change our overall status, we elected to go straight to IVF. 

I started birth control pills on 7/23 and just had my first Lupron injection two nights ago (8/16). We plan to have PGS and hope for a FET sometime the end of September - early October. We are both very excited, yet nervous about everything. 

Reading these posts have been very information and I thank you all for sharing! We've been very open about this whole process with all of our friends, family, co-workers, etc about everything. It's been cathartic in a way to talk to everyone about it.

We never in a million years thought we would have to go through this to have a child, but since we have started, it almost feels like we were made to go through this (if that makes any sense at all LOL).

tosh24

Welcome! Good luck with stimming and I hope the whole process goes smoothly for you and your stay here is short and sweet. Looks like you and DH have a great outlook. All the best

tnh0413

Thank you very much, all the best to you as well!

ReesaAnne16

Welcome! Our diagnosis is MFI as well, namely low motility and high sperm dna fragmentation. Feel free to jump into the Aug IVF thread, I'm stimming right now as well for our first mini IVF cycle. In some ways, I wish we would have jumped strait to IVF instead of doing many IUI's but hindsight is 20:20 I guess. 

Are you doing ICSI? We are, and I feel like it's generally recommended for couples with MFI.
Good luck! and it's good you are able to stay in good spirits! 

tnh0413

Thank you @ReesaAnne16! We will be doing ICSI as well. I'll have to get in the Aug IVF thread. Yeah, initially we wanted to try IUI first but my RE didnt think we would have any success with that. 

I hope everything goes well during stim for you. I hope we can stay in good spirits but still be realistic as well. gotta find a good balance I guess!! Good luck!!

[Deleted User]

Welcome!  It was a while for us of trying before we finally got our SA and it came back zero. :/ We never in a million years thought we'd be doing ivf, but ivf+ICSI was our only shot; we never had iuis as an option. :/  Anywho!  Just waiting for CD1 to start my stims any minute now!  This will be my first ivf cycle and Im really hoping after my husband's MESA/TESE retrieval, the worst may be behind us.  We shall l see... Come join us on thr july/august thread too! :) Nice to see you jumping in! ❤

slmurphy12

I had the same story as you. DH has tons of varicocele in both sides, we started at a urologist and he did a mesa, which is a mapping and froze sperm but my RE will only use fresh sperm lol so we had my ER in April. They got 10 eggs and he had 11 live sperm in his sample total! We got two PGS normal blast and I'm currently pregnant from a FET in July, I'm almost 8 weeks! Hang in there they can do so much with very little sperm! ❤️

slmurphy12

Also the urologist and RE told him the surgery would've been a waste of money! They have so many studies showing that varicocele only has a short tterm effect on sperm count! So lucky we didn't go through with it and you didn't either! Best of luck with stimming!

tnh0413

@BusinessWife I'm sorry that you all are going through this too! Good luck with stimming, looks like we are all starting around the same time! I'm going to jump over the other thread as well! Best of luck to you and hubby

@simurphy12 Congratulations to you too!!! How wonderful. It's reassuring hearing a similar successful story, thank you for sharing! After you saying your RE didn't recommend surgery either, we feel even more comfortable with the decision! The urologist we saw was VERY VERY eager to jump to surgery of course. I'm so glad we didn't. Best of luck with the rest of your pregnancy!

loverin

Welcome @tnh0413 ! We too have a MFI diagnosis, though ours is from low motility and low morphology (0%). I hear many ladies talking about how they were considering surgery and we were never even given that option! I'm not sure why but I agree, if it won't change the outcome it doesn't seem worth it to subject them to that. We are doing IVF with ICSI in September (been on birth control for over a month now and Lord am I ready for that to be over!) so you'll have to keep us updated! I hope that you have success with your FET!