#firingblanks

[kiranatrix]

L WHAT WERE YOU DOING

[hawaiianmerman]

Saving babies on screen. They call my Officer Cookie Rookie. #hawaiifive0 #hpd #williamroehl #billyroehl #officercookierookie #hawaiianactor #policeofficers #gunbelt #firingblanks #sirens https://www.instagram.com/p/BpvewgZDfpJ/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=wzawx6o86fct

[kiranatrix]

That moment when you wanna tell folks you just posted uh..something on AO3, but don’t wanna run afoul of the tumblr puritanbot by linking to it.

Is there something new? 🤔

[kiranatrix]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Pairing: Lawlight

Rating: E (Adults y’all!)

Summary: L is really flexible and Light is really...amazed.

[kiranatrix]

I'm not gonna say what it is, but your latest fic fulfilled something very specific that I've been waiting to read for years and I feel the need to thank you

You are very welcome! Glad you dug it ^_^

[firingblanksco-blog]

The Story So Far

I'm firing blanks.

Well, mostly blanks.

My last fertility test (taken on December 21st 2016) revealed the following results:

Count: 4 million per ml (anything under 15 million is considered low, so I'm told) Mobility: 35% (40% is ‘normal’) Morphology: 2% (4% is ‘normal’) Period of abstinence prior to 'sample production': 2 days.

I'd had one test prior to this which revealed similar, though slightly better results (5 million per ml). Period of abstinence prior to this first test was 6 (!) days. Turns out, the longer I leave it, the better my guys are. Talk about being kicked when I'm down.

As the doctor put it, I've got not very many, not very good sperm. Double negatives aside, it's not a great start. Natural conception isn't impossible, but it's unlikely.

I've started this blog to document mine and my wife's journey from the discovery of the above to, well, who knows. We're really keen to start a family and although the situation isn't ideal, we're eager to do what we need to do to make it happen. What this will involve, I'm not 100% sure at this stage.

After receiving the above news and having wallowed for a while, I turned to Google for more information. Although there's a lot written about infertility in general, I couldn't find much in the way of personal stories, told from the male perspective. If I've missed a gold mine of this kind of stuff, please let me know. In the meantime, I thought it would be good to document our story and tell it from the male perspective; in the hope that it may help other people who are going through the same kind of thing.

My hopes, goals and pre-cursors for this blog:

I wanted to keep a record of what we go through; whatever that may be - in the hope that other people may find that useful. I should highlight that we're based in the UK; so I guess different people may experience different things elsewhere.

I'm no medical/scientific/infertility expert and I'm not going to make any recommendations of this sort for anyone else. It will simply be my/our experiences.

I'm going to try and be as honest as possible throughout the whole process; and will do my best to be open about how I'm feeling as time goes on.

I'd like to keep my sense of humour - my typical reaction to difficult situations is to make a joke out of it. "If you didn't laugh, you'd cry" kind of thing. I'll be continuing to try to do this throughout.

I'm going to try to stick to it - I'm occasionally guilty of starting things and not finishing them. Please prod me if I don't post for a while. I sometimes get lazy.

Finally, bit of a long shot - but I'd love to raise awareness and open the conversation more around male infertility. For every blog/online article about male infertility, there's about 100 for female infertility. My hunch is that the reason for this is that men who are affected do not want to talk about it - and I totally understand that. However, I would like to talk about it and if I manage to remove any sort of stigma for at least one other person, then that'd be grand.

So there we go. My next post will be a timeline of events so far.

Thanks for reading,

Chris