My Fertility Specialist November-January 2016 | Page 16

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How can the couple be helped to come to
With declining
terms with their diagnosis?
sperm health
and sperm count, Fertility coach Kate Davies from Your Fertility
and more people Journey takes up Zoe and Mike’s story: “Through
fertility coaching, Zoe identified that the most
having fertility
important thing to her was to protect Mike.
They both decided that they would keep this
treatment,
news from family and friends as Mike was really
maybe now is
struggling with his own feelings of masculinity
and not being able to give Zoe what she needed.
a good time for
Mike’s reaction is one that I see so often and in
men to man up
many circumstances, the couple choose for the
and talk
woman to shoulder the ‘blame’ of infertility to

”

protect the man and his feelings of inadequacy.
Zoe found that she had to do everything on
Mike’s timescale and there was no rushing him.
He needed time to get his head around every
appointment, test or result before he could move
on to the next stage.”
Dee Armstrong advises: “I encourage couples to
talk to each other, although some men find that
easier than others. Sometimes support groups
can be helpful as well. I reassure them that what
they’re going through is very common – it does
help men to know that it’s not just them. And
then we talk about practical solutions because
knowing that it is possible to improve things is a
light at the end of the tunnel”.

There are happy endings!
When a couple are told that they have fertility
issues, regardless as to where the issue lays, it is
a tremendous shock and a very worrying time.
Fortunately for many couples they do realise
their dream, one way or another. For Sally,
on their first ICSI cycle, her husband had an

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My Fertility Specialist / Nov-Jan, 2016

operation on his testicles to extract cells to try
and grow sperm. It didn’t work and she says “My
poor husband felt like the biggest failure”. They
now have a gorgeous daughter following donor
sperm Intra-Uterine Insemination.
Russell Davis made a huge lifestyle decision and
retrained as a Hypnotherapist, and he and his
wife conceived naturally after he let go of many
emotional bloc