What Is Infertility
Now that you’re looking at the whole issue of infertility, you’ve probably heard a bunch of words bandied about and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘What is infertility really?’ It can get quite confusing if you thought you were infertile, and then someone tells you you’re sub-fertile or hypo-fertile and your test results come back with ‘impaired fertility’ written across the top.
Definition
Basically, they all mean the same thing; you and your partner have had problems getting pregnant or carrying a baby to term. You haven’t conceived yet, but, with or without a little extra help, pregnancy is a possibility. It’s not the same as sterility, which is when you can’t get pregnant at all.
Officially, you would be diagnosed as infertile if you have been trying to get pregnant for a year without success. That means really trying – doing the baby dance often at the appropriate times without any protection. Trust the doctors to have a name for everything – you could be told that you have primary infertility if you are battling to get pregnant with you first child, and if you’ve had one already but you’re battling to have a second then you could have something called secondary infertility. I assume there is such a thing as tertiary infertility (and so on) but we’ll leave it there.
Causes of Infertility
In the past infertility has usually been blamed on the woman, probably because the signs of infertility of much more obvious for women. You generally need a microscope to check if a man is infertile. You’re probably thinking that if you need a microscope to check then he probably is infertile, but it’s not like that; the microscope is to check out the sperm, not the equipment.
Apparently about one third of all cases of infertility are the woman’s problem, the other third is generally the man’s problem and the other third is made up of cases in which both the man and the woman have problems or there doesn’t seem to be a reason for the infertility – a condition otherwise known as non-specific infertility. See, the doctors even have names for things they don’t know! We don’t know why they’re infertile so we’ll call it non-specific infertility.
(When you do eventually have your little one you’ll discover another special medical term – colic. It’s another way of saying that the baby cries often, and for long periods, and we don’t know why. But somehow having a name for it just helps; don’t ask me how, it just does.)
You would think that the whole process of getting pregnant was pretty simple – get naked, insert relevant part into relevant receptacle, jiggle about and voila, babies to follow. But the whole process of getting and staying pregnant is quite complex – once you know what it involves you’ll wonder how the human race has managed to survive this long with everything that could go wrong!
Tech Alert – Technical details follow: Women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have and once they reach puberty, over the course of each month the brain will release a hormone to tell the pituitary gland to produce two other hormones, one of which stimulates the follicle to mature so that an egg can be released, and both of which tell the ovaries to release two other hormones, one of which tells the follicle to release the egg – ovulation. Phew! Two of the hormones get together and tell the uterus to build up a thick lining in case the egg is fertilized. If the relevant part is inserted into the relevant opening at the right time, the egg usually meets up with the sperm whilst still in the tube from the ovary to the uterus. The sperm burrows through the lining of the egg and then the fertilized egg implants itself in the lining of the uterus. That is assuming the sperm got there in the first place.
To make sperm the man’s brain releases a hormone, which tells the pituitary gland to make two other hormones, which tell the body to make sperm and regulate how the body makes testosterone. The sperm, made up of a head and tail, take up to three months to mature and can be killed if conditions get too hot. During the baby dance process the sperm get pushed into a tube, and then into another tube where they are mixed with fluid to make semen, and then into another tube, and then during a series of forceful contractions they are deposited into the waiting receptacle. That is if they aren’t deposited into the man’s own bladder by mistake.
At this point, the journey is just beginning. Of the couple of hundred million sperm deposited (on a good day), less than 100 will actually make it to the egg, having swum through the acid and thick mucus to get there, sometimes 5 days later. The head of the winning sperm releases special enzymes to be able to get through the lining of the egg allowing it to burrow in and fertilize the egg.
It’s not over yet! The fertilized egg makes its way down the tube into the uterus where it will hopefully find a good picnic spot where it can settle for a good nine months.
So you can see that if one hormone is lacking, or present when it shouldn’t be, or present in over-abundance, or if one tube is blocked or damaged, or if the eggs or sperm are damaged while maturing, or if the sperm can’t swim properly, or can’t survive the harsh environment, or if the process of getting sperm and egg to meet during the baby dance is hampered by faulty equipment, pregnancy will not happen. As I said, it’s a miracle the human race has survived this long!
Remember, infertility just means you haven’t gotten pregnant yet. It doesn’t mean you won’t get pregnant ever. Even if things aren’t all happening the right way there are drugs and treatments that can help the process along.
