Consistently Low Sperm Count with 3695

carose1976carose1976 Posts: 9
in Selecting a Sperm Donor
Posted this on a different part of the board so sorry for the repeat but I'm not clear where exactly to post..

We are on our second round of trying to conceive with this donor (3695). We have a 19 mo old DD from this donor (though we are not sure how this happened considering the following info). Each vial has been substandard in terms of post-thaw sperm count. Our IUI today was 3.9 mil and last time we were TTC we were refunded because 4 vials were below 5 mil!! We kept using this donor because we want our DD to have a full sibling but now are very disappointed that AGAIN we have a low count. Have others had this problem?

Comments

  • TommieWartickTommieWartick Posts: 307
    Eeeek. We have done two IUI's and our sperm counts were 85 million and 70 million.

    That's horrible because I'm sure some of those had no motility! Some were just twitching and some were slow movers. So that leaves .5 million were fast swimmers? Not good.
  • carose1976carose1976 Posts: 9
    Wow. I can't imagine how excited I'd be just to get 10 million. I'm not sure where to go from here. We're very disappointed.
  • TommieWartickTommieWartick Posts: 307
    Get a new donor as sad as it is unless you enjoy wasting your money and dressing yourself out. This is iui vials isn't it?
  • carose1976carose1976 Posts: 9
    Yes, IUI vials. The problem is that the bought 12 vials after our DD was born and have only used 2. 2 more are here at the docs office and 8 are at CC. And the emotional issue of our DD not having a full sibling is upsetting as well. I just can't understand how such poor samples are allowed!
  • geminigirlgeminigirl Posts: 44
    We had a similar issue with lower then the promised 10 mil. The second one was only 4.3. We switched donors and CCB gave us a credit but we are still out a nice chunk of money and two months time. Here's hoping this new donor has better numbers because I too was extremely disappointed. I'm sorry you are running into this issue now.
  • geminigirlgeminigirl Posts: 44
    Oh...and we didn't use donor 3695, it was another donor entirely.
  • carose1976carose1976 Posts: 9
    geminigirl, I saw your posts on the boards and wondered if you had our donor. It's actually more disappointing to know you didn't as that means this is an issue with many donors (and possibly a systemic problem with CC in general). Makes it hard to know what to do! I hope your new donor has great numbers and you/your partner are pregnant asap.
  • thesnowawaythesnowaway Posts: 31
    carose1976 -
    We have twins w/ 3695 and as best I can remember, the numbers were all between 30 - 50 million. Then again, we couldn't get pg w/ IUIs (had to do ivf). Hard to say if the issue was on our end or the donor's. Good luck! Hope the rest of your vials are better.
  • carose1976carose1976 Posts: 9
    wow thesnowaway. 30-50 million! we did another iui today and the count was 4.4 million. i wonder why our results are so different than yours! it's such a huge disappointment.
  • geminigirlgeminigirl Posts: 44
    Carose... I think the issue is that we're not all looking at the same numbers. 30-50 million doesn't take a whole lot of things into account. Here's a breakdown of our last cycle and the sperm count numbers:

    Pre wash (when counted by CCB):

    Started out at 51 million (per mL) with 63% motility. This means at a .5 ml sample, you'll have 25.5 million sperm and 63% motility makes it 16.065 million MOTILE sperm per VIAL. (Motility is key here. There is a big difference between 25 and 16 mil)

    Then it's frozen...

    Thawed:

    Concentration counted at 46.9 M/mL. It was a .5 mL sample so we take half the concentration to get 23.45 million. Motility was counted at 60% (which seems fairly high seeing as it started out at 63% motility but whatever) which brings us to 14.07 total motile sperm in our vial.

    This is how our sperm sample went from 51 million to 14 million. The numbers can be very misleading. Our friends who are going through the process and using fresh sperm because they think it's going to be a huge advantage actually have a lower count then we do using frozen.

    In an average man, 22 million per mL is normal. We're only getting .45 to .5 mL samples (brings it down to 11 mil) and taking into account the motility and the freeze and thaw, anything over 10 mil per vial is pretty amazing and definitely above average.

    4.5 million total motile sperm per vial is subpar however and reduces your odds of pregnancy. Though you still can get pregnant with over 1 mil. CCB will give you a credit if you submit all the proper paperwork. It actually wasn't too bad a process actually.

    So...take all the numbers you hear with a grain of salt. The number you are interested in is Total Motile Count per VIAL as I understand it (and believe me, I've done a lot of reading on it because we've had two less than ideal samples).

    Best wishes to you,

    Erin
  • carose1976carose1976 Posts: 9
    Erin,
    Thanks for this awesome explanation of the counts. I hadn't calculated it so carefully, but looking at our paperwork the samples (as you said) are still consistently pretty crappy. We have been refunded for 6 vials so far, so CCB must concur. And it's great to get the refunds but as you know, it doesn't come close to covering what the costs are with shipping (which seems like it should also be refunded to me), ultrasounds, doctor's visit fees and the insemination fees. We have no insurance coverage for this so it's really added up. It's just frustrating and it feels hard enough to get pregnant from frozen sperm without also having to deal with low counts.
    Who knows, maybe with B2B IUI this month (the second in an hour or two) we'll get lucky even with such low numbers.
    Thanks for writing.
    Carose
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