This article is from WeChat official account:Doctor DingXiang (ID: DingXiangYiSheng) , author: Hsiao Chiu, head of FIG from: IC photo
“To be honest, as a man, I really want to wear a skirt.”
“I now wear extra-large underwear, so I can be looser if I can.”
These chats come from a group of men in China who are perhaps most concerned about sperm.
They are all in a patient group-“Jing Hou Jia Yin”, the group is full of male infertility patients and their families. Because of “azoospermia”, “asthenospermia”, “varicocele” and other sperm-related problems, they cannot have their own children.
In China, such cases are not rare.
In clinical diagnosis, infertility refers to a couple who still fails to get pregnant after one year of normal sexual life. Although there is no precise ratio yet, the basic medical consensus is: Regarding infertility, the probability of the main cause of the male and the female is almost the same, and some of them are caused by both men and women.
At the same time, the sperm quality of Chinese men is also declining year by year.
The Chinese Society of Reproductive Medicine analyzed the semen quality of donors in 7 sperm banks in various regions of China from 2008 to 2018, and concluded that the semen quality of Chinese healthy men has shown a downward trend in the past decade. This conclusion is consistent with other large sample studies.
However, in real life, infertile men seem to be “invisible”, and “bred or not” are naturally linked to women.
When a man finds himself infertile, what is he, and his family, going through?
Unacceptable reality
Li Meng found out that he had no sperm a year after getting married. It was originally just a precautionary pregnancy test. In order to have a healthy child, Li Meng and his wife went for an examination together.
Everything is fine, except for the andrology semen examination report.
“The people who checked in front of me all left with the report, but mine won’t come out.” Li Meng felt a little uneasy in his heart, so he could only comfort himself: “I am the foundation of an athlete, so there should be nothing wrong.”
Finally, the doctor called his name.
“Are you Li Meng?”
The doctor repeated the information three times before finally giving him a semen examination report.
Everything that catches the eye is “0”.
At that time, he was dumbfounded. The doctor’s words and a series of unintelligible keywords were constantly pouring into his ears. He could only turn on the phone and search over and over again, trying to find a turning point.
“After 30 years of life, this is the first time I feel at a loss.” He was thinking about whether he would be misdiagnosed and how to explain to his family.
When I got home and saw his wife, Li Meng broke down. For the first time, he couldn’t breathe crying in front of his wife.
“Let’s get a divorce. You are still young, you can find someone, and you can take away all the property.” Li Meng exploded all the thoughts in his head.
“I love your person. Anyway, we will face it together.” The comfort of his wife became Li Meng’s reassurance and stabilized his emotions to a certain extent.
Unable to face parents
Li Meng’s treatment has been going on for more than a year, and he and his wife still choose to hide the truth from their parents.
It’s not that he never thought about telling his parents about this situation. But in a traditional Chinese family where “everything is for the sake of the next generation”, he really can’t bear to say it.
“My father is still working hard in his sixties. Every time I persuade him to rest earlier, he always says to make more money so that I will have less pressure to raise children in the future. In this case, how can I tell Him?”
Every time a parent asks, he can only prevaricate it on the grounds of “want to have a child later”. There were more prevarications, and the parents realized that something was wrong, and asked him privately, is it because his wife has a problem that can’t give birth to a child?
At this moment, he can’t say anything, can’t do anything, just feel that the guilt for his wife is deeper. Among the patients, Brother Tong is one of the few who inform his parents of his illness.
He told his parents frankly that there were two main reasons. One is that I am too anxious, and it is not good to hide it from my parents; the other is that the cost of seeing a doctor is too large and requires some support from parents.
After learning of the condition, the attitude of the parents placed a greater psychological burden on the couple.
The mother’s attitude was relatively stable, and soon after she got out of the shock, she began to act as a “lubricant” for the family, encouraging him to actively treat and calm down.
And my father’s attitude was unexpected. Father can’t accept that he may not have a next generation. The father, who has always been a leader, began to try to solve the problem with his work thinking, thinking that something must have gone wrong that caused no infertility.
However, the treatment of male infertility is not a repair machine and cannot be corrected immediately. Many patients may not be able to obtain qualified sperm after several years of treatment.
When the problem cannot be solved immediately, the father with strong self-esteem begins to exhibit a lot of extreme behaviors. Anxious and irritable, at the most extreme, I even want to change the property, move to a place where I don’t know myself at all, and completely escape all the questions that may come from relatives and friends.
The father’s reaction alone made Brother Tong feel unbearable. He discussed with his wife and decided not to tell his father-in-law and his mother-in-law, and let his wife communicate with them.
“To be honest, telling our parents makes us more stressed.” Even after treatment, Brother Tong has achieved self-arrangement and everything is improving, he still can only sum up like this helplessly.
The pressure is still on the wife
“Compared to my daughter-in-law who finally took the risk, went to do test tubes and gave birth. I don’t think my treatment is much.”
Li Meng’s treatment continues. He gradually realized that “the relationship between husband and wife is the first, and this disease requires two people to face it together.” Now it is very hard for him to get injections, but once there is improvement, his wife will have to get more injections and experience greater physical and mental pressure.
In a family with male infertility, there are not many husbands who truly understand each other with their wives.
Li Meng is the group leader of “Jing Hou Good News”. When processing applications from all over the country, he found that most of the time it was the woman who applied to join the patient group actively, actively seeking medical advice, and the husband Often very passive.
Xiao Zi is a woman in such a difficult situation.
One year after the marriage, the two had an examination when they were about to become pregnant, and the husband found “azoospermia”. Although she was very depressed, her first thought at the time was: “The time has come to test our feelings. I want to treat him better and let him feel the warmth of family.”
However, I did not expect that my husband’s thoughts were different from his own, and a nightmare about fertility began.
In the four months since I was found to be infertile, my husband still actively cooperated. However, when the treatment was delayed, the husband began to show various perfunctory actions, insisting that the drugs made him uncomfortable and bad for his health.
In the beginning, Xiao Zi always persuaded him, comforted him, and pulled her husband into the group of patients, hoping to use the examples of other patients’ active treatment to rekindle his confidence and work hard together to have children.
But her husband quickly went to extremes and his attitude took a turn for the worse. From the beginning of “I want a child, work hard” to “It’s not good at all to have a child”, completely reject all topics related to childbirth.
The husband not only ignored Xiao Zi’s love, but also began a series of verbal violence, trying to blame Xiao Zi for the “fertility problem” they faced.
“Even if you can do IVF, the child will be particularly ugly, I don’t recognize it.”
“Giving birth is to satisfy you.”
Xiao Zi doesn’t understand. She is willing to bear the physical pain to be an IVF. Why is her husband not considerate of herself? He is not even willing to go to the hospital for a monthly review and injection, and even trample on her efforts like this?
In consideration of her husband’s face, Xiao Zi did not mention her husband’s infertility issue with her parents. But her husband directly criticized Xiao Zi’s mother in front of her and asked for an early divorce.
The attitude of the mother-in-law made her even more chilling. The mother-in-law, who accidentally turned over to her husband’s inspection report, appeared to help Xiao Zi persuade her husband together, but in private she directly persuaded Xiao Zi to find a sperm bank for sperm, “When a child is born, he can also raise it if he doesn’t.”
Xiao Zi knows that there is no point in insisting on her own. Even when it comes to the divorce, she still thinks about her husband’s goodness, thinking that her husband may have filed for a divorce not to drag her down.
Until her husband started to care about property with her.
Little Zi is not alone.
It is the husband who is infertile and the wife who seeks medical treatment. This was also observed by counselor Fang Yuying of the Department of Psychology at the Reproductive Hospital of Shandong University. In her experience, 98% of people who come to the psychology department for consultation with infertility pressure are women, and there are almost no men who come for fertility pressure.
“Infertility is best to check for men first.” This is a clear-cut proposal by Director Ji Yazhong of the Department of Reproductive Medicine of Shanghai Tongji Hospital affiliated to Tongji University.
From a medical point of view, the examination for male infertility is relatively simple. Generally, only the semen examination of the man is required, which is cheap and painless. The reasons for the woman’s infertility are relatively complicated and need to be investigated item by item. Not only is the cost of the examination high, but invasive items such as tubal radiography in the project will cause certain pain to the subject, and there are also some risks of infection.
However, in his clinical experience, many couples who come to see a doctor are “the woman has checked it all times before coming to check the man.”
Because of the physiological structure, fertility is naturally regarded as a “female responsibility”. Even under the premise of male infertility, women still bear the ultimate pressure of “giving birth”.
This also constitutes the ultimate problem for male infertile families: when will treatment stop?
In the past, “azoospermia” was a medical problem that was difficult to solve. Nowadays, due to the development of microscopic sperm extraction, depending on the cause of the patient, if the treatment is successful, there is still a certain chance of obtaining sperm.
Li Meng knew in his heart that if conditions permit, he could even be treated to 80 years old, but his wife’s age and physical condition could not wait. Must set a time, if still