Disclaimer: We all have our own journeys, and everyone is impacted in their own way. My story won’t ever belong to someone else, but I hope it can help further the acceptance and willingness to speak about one’s life, mental health, and find a supportive community who listen and care.

Previous: Infertility #12: Urologist

In my last post, I talked about having my first Urologist appointments. One of the main goals for me in that first phone appointment was to ask for a referral to a fertility clinic that we have chosen. Thankfully this was incredibly easy and I didn’t even have to bring it up. He was already aware due to the original referral to him from our family doctor.

Once the referral was placed, we had no idea when we would get the call from them but we knew it would be a few months. Well, just 2 weeks later on July 7 2022, I unexpectedly got a call from the fertility clinic in the middle of my work day.

Thankfully I was able to take the call right away and I just became so ridiculously excited. I didn’t realize how sad or desperate I guess I had been feeling until suddenly my whole body was floating on a cloud, knowing that this is the only path forward and here they were, reaching out to me!

I barely knew how to handle myself while talking to them, I was so excited. But there was one thing that I noticed right away. They barely wanted anything from me, because I am not going to be the main focus during the next steps of the process. It will be all Andrea. They basically asked me for all the contact information for her, and from that moment on, all the communication went through her.

They scheduled some blood work for us to have completed and we got it all done as fast as we could, not wanting to waste time, but then on July 21, We we going for a walk and got a call again from them, with an appointment date that I was not ready for.

You see, I really wanted to have my in-person urology appointment first. I wanted to actually be told what was wrong with me first. I wanted to better understand my situation before moving on. This prompted more discussion with Andrea, telling her that I loved the post she made somewhere online about our situation, but how she was the first person to say certain words like “azoospermia”. I don’t think it’s fair that my wife had to be the one to say this medical term before an actual doctor spoke it to me.

This was a period of a little bit of guilt, knowing that I was once again the one delaying us from moving forward, but this time I knew that I was doing it. Thankfully, Andrea understood and was happy to wait for the urology appointment. We didn’t realize at the time there would be several more tests for me and many more months of waiting.

On September 12 2022, about 3 weeks after my first urologist appointment, we had our first full appointment with the doctor from the fertility clinic. We were surprised to find out it was still all about me and my diagnosis and they would not be ready to discuss anything further until I had visited a more specialized Reproductive Urologist.

We were glad to have waited until after the initial regular urologist appointment to have this discussion, because they were able to get lots of test results from him and move forward to the more specialized things that I needed to be tested for with the new doctor. Turns out I really didn’t need to feel guilty at all for the 3 week delay, because that’s what the doctor needed from us anyway! This highlights a tiny bit of the rollercoaster of emotions that one goes through during this process.

Having a fertility clinic be involved and begin to move us further down the path was a wonderful feeling, but not without it’s own complications.

It’s at this point that I realized that suddenly going forward there will always be more and more people involved in every decision or moment regarding our path towards having a child, and I found that to be a little bit weird. Nothing would ever be just a communication just between my wife and I. It would have to involve emails and phone calls, nurses and doctors, files and appointments, and money. Lots of money.

Next: Infertility Part 14: Money Stress