Some people's husbands do their jabs for them. Others do the cooking from time to time. Mine does neither. He won't even be in the room while I'm mixing my jabs. And I'm the one that always has to think in advance about what he's going to eat, do the shopping, cook it and tell him which of the Tupperware containers in the fridge he's taking for tomorrow's lunch. And sometimes just the fact that I always have to think about it exhausts me a bit.
Anyway, when I started stimming this time, I asked him to do one thing. Research has shown that the optimal amount of time to abstain before giving a sperm sample is something like 2-5 days. More than that, and the sperm aren't fresh. Less, and you might not have time to make enough good new ones (especially if you have a very low count to start with).
So, given that his little problem means that this is something he has to do on his own, I asked him to make sure that for as long as I was stimming, he should make sure that he clears the chaps out every two or three days, so that when I got the go-ahead for egg collection he could then stop and know that we'd be in the 2-5 day window on the day his chaps were needed. Not an unpleasurable task, I would have thought, and not much to ask when I'm doing absolutely everything else.
So last night I asked him when he'd last done the deed, and he said, "Oh, I'm not sure. Some time last week, I think."
I got really cross, pointed out that it was the one thing I'd asked of him, and that we were now definitely not going to be in the 2-5 day window for optimal sperm production.
His response was, "I'm sorry - I've been too tired." (I went out with friends on Sunday - he was at home pottering about the house by himself all day. And was still too tired to do a five minute job which would presumably have given him a certain amount of pleasure? Oh please...)
After organising this whole thing, sticking up to four needles a day into my stomach, having to get up at 5 am to give myself jabs and leave home at 6 am to go and have yet more needles stuck into my arms, spending a day on a drip on Monday, and following all sorts of other instructions so that I'm a tired, achey, bloated pincushion with arms and stomach covered in bruises, is it unreasonable that I got a bit cross with him for being too tired to give himself a little bit of pleasure over the last week?
And I wonder how many other arguments have finished with the wife shouting at the husband to get up the stairs NOW and get on with that particular job...?
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We had similar issues during all our treatment cycles, though PB's excuse was that he forgot. Or he lost track of how many days had passed. You have EVERY right to be frustrated. I was, for sure! We have SO many things we have to do during cycles, and they have only this one responsibility. I found it especially frustrating because MFI was the reason we weren't able to conceive naturally, and he had only this ONE job. It's sad, but it does seem that we have to remind them frequently, even though it seems such an odd thing to have to remind them of.
ReplyDeleteI too would be peed off to the extreme!
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