Kim it is hard! And men do deal with it differently to us!

There's a book called swimming upstream which is absolutely fantastic! It explains to us how the blokes are feeling, and explains to the blokes how we are feeling - I have found it to be wonderful!

There's a thread in general conception which discusses it (but it keeps falling off the front page!). If you google "swimming upstream the struggle to conceive" (the full title), you should find the web site for it as the first link where you can order it online. It's not very expensive, and it seems to be written in such a way that men will find it easy to read (light hearted and funny). I can't recommend it enough, and DH is even reading bits of it now without having to be asked or badgered into doing it.

To be honest, I don't know how the bad sperm is going to effect our IVF/ICSI chances, while we are going to do what we can so that there is better sperm there for them to use, the FS didn't seem too bothered by it.

We see David Knight at Next Generation Fertility which is in Parramatta. It's still a long way to go for us (we are at Windsor), but there really wasn't anything any closer. The great thing about NGF is that they don't charge extra for ICSI. Most other clinics charge an extra $500 on top of the other IVF charges, and there's no rebate for it. Even the Westmead Fertility Centre (public, non-profit IVF clinic) charges extra, and even though their overall charges were much lower, it was going to cost us more to go there with paying extra for ICSI. The other great thing with NGF is that we were in for our first appointment in just over a week - no long wait at all even though we got in just before they closed over Christmas. I don't know whether that was just very lucky or not, though.

Men seem to work things out in their heads by themselves, while women need to talk it through a lot, it does make it harder to deal with it alone as a couple without external support. Kim, think about joining us in one of the buddies threads - I've found that support to be absolutely amazing and helpful.

More big hugs for you, Kim. I'm sorry for the epic post - I seem to be in a very verbose mood today. I hope there's some shred of information in there that you will find useful. Feel free to keep in touch, too.

BW