Azoospermia

So Daron has 0 sperm in his ejaculate(aka azoospermia). This occurs in only about 5% of infertile men. It has basically been determined that in our case his azoospermia is caused by a blockage. They believe this blockage was caused by inguinal hernia/hydrocele surgery when he was little. He had one surgery done at 5 months old and one surgery done at 4 years old. The good news is this means he is producing those little swimmers they just can't get out. This means we have a very good chance of retrieving some of them for our IVF cycle. However it also means they have to be surgically retrieved, not fun for Daron.

Due to where Daron's blockage is a surgery to repair it does not have a very good chance of success. This surgery has a high chance of success when the blockage is low(closer to the testicles). It has a much lower chance of working the higher the blockage is. Daron's is high therefore they said surgery would probably not be a good option.

Luckily he gets anesthesia for the procedure. If you are male and sensitive about details of surgeries of this sort you may not want to continue reading. The procedure or procedures they will be doing are MESA(microscopic epididymal sperm aspiration) and if they don't find anything with that they will proceed to TESE(microsurgical testicular sperm extraction). For MESA they use a microscope to determine the most likely areas for sperm and a needle to retrieve sperm from the epididymis(where sperm go to wait after they are created). For TESE they use a microscope to determine where sperm may be and then remove multiple tiny biopsies of tissue from the testicles that will be searched for sperm.

Yes I am very proud of Daron for being willing to go through with this. This is how much he wants children. He is going to make such a good daddy :).

Sometimes sperm retrieval is done before an IVF cycle is started and sperm is frozen for use with the cycle. I was told the reason not to do this is that "fresh" sperm is actually more likely to fertilize an egg than sperm that has been frozen. Therefore if we had done a pre-cycle retrieval for Daron they would have still recommended doing another retrieval at the same time as my egg retrieval to hopefully have fresh sperm. This would have postponed our cycle almost 3 months, and really wouldn't have helped anything except the knowledge that we would know 100% that they did or didn't find anything. We will be freezing any extra sperm they find for our future use in case something goes wrong this cycle.

Here are some links if you want to know more on any of this.
http://www.theturekclinic.com/sperm-retrieval.html
http://www.theturekclinic.com/azoospermia.html