MED DIET AND EXERCISE PUT ME ON THE RIGHT ROAD

Tony Suckling, 39 (pictured), a car salesman, lives with Melanie, his wife of seven years, in north-West london. FINDING out I had poor sperm quality destroyed me. We first started trying to conceive in 2015, but after a year nothing had happened so the GP arranged a semen analysis test.

Normal sperm count is 15 million to more than 200 million; mine was just 0.5 million and they were an abnormal shape. I felt less of a man and I’m still deeply upset now.

I decided to get healthier to see if that helped. I gave up alcohol, takeaways and processed food, started exercising three times a week and took pre-conception multivitamins. But in early 2017, another test showed no improvement.

At our GP’s suggestion we paid £15,000 for one Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) cycle, where a single sperm is injected into an egg. Two embryos were implanted but it failed. We were heartbroken. In 2018, another attempt ended the same way.

We then saw a nutritionist and a urologist, Jonathan Ramsay, who carried out more detailed tests. These found my sperm had a high level of DNA fragmentation — a sign of subfertility.

The nutritionist put us both on a glutenfree Mediterranean-style diet, and I take a high concentration fish oil and a sachet of vitamins. The nutritionist also advised against products that come in plastics.

In April we conceived naturally for the first time, a wonderful surprise. Sadly, my wife suffered a miscarriage at eight weeks, which was devastating. A test found my sperm count had increased to 17 million and it showed less DNA fragmentation.

We’re still trying to conceive naturally, but we aren’t ruling out more IVF.

I’ve been in a very dark place at times and I have only recently been able to tell friends the pain we’re going through.