Fertility Clinic - The Follow Up

It's always so blooming hot in the clinic. Joey was trying to park the car and I was booking in at reception. We waited to be called, watching all the people that were there when we arrived leave, then the people who arrived after us started to disappear.
We looked around the room and we were the only people left, except for the receptionist. Joey was twitching, as he needed to get back to work. His final foot spasm resulted in him pacing over to the receptionist to ask what the delay was.
Right on cue the consultant popped her head around the wall and called our names.


We sat down and she began to tell us our results; How great it was that my hormones were showing positive signs of a good ovarian reserve, my ultrasound (baseline) scan results were missing, but I told her that the sonographer on the day had kindly advised that there were no problems and that the follicles on each ovary were very good or "Just what we are looking for!".
I felt relieved and Joey smiled at me with positive encouragement.
The consultant then went on to relay the results of the January semen analysis. It was low, too low to perform the additional tests we were hopeful of. My heart sank, Joey's did too. I could tell he was devastated, he didn't talk again, except when I asked him whether he had any further questions before we left. I wanted to make sure we didn't regret not asking key questions when we'd waited so long for this appointment and it was the first time we'd actually seen the consultant.
Her summary was that although there is no reason that we couldn't carry a healthy pregnancy, the pure fact that we haven't conceived so far suggests that Joey's sperm was not reliable in quantity or quality to guarantee a natural conception. It was by no means impossible, and it has happened, but if we wanted to have assisted reproductive therapy (ART) then she could only suggest ICSI at this stage.
ICSI, or Intra-Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection in full, is in simple terms where IVF is used to extract eggs, sperm is carefully selected to be injected into the eggs, monitored into maturity and then transferred via IVF protocol into the uterus. Although the fertilisation rate is considered higher than that of IVF, it comes with additional risks (I would suggest you read up or speak to someone about these) and is obviously much more intrusive to your conception process. 
It holds the same pregnancy success rate as IVF (30%).


We were told that we have 2mths to decide whether this treatment was for us or not, and that if we did the 2mths cut off means that all tests done to date will still be valid.


Time to go home and let this news sink in. We need ICSI to conceive....