“I changed my whole life to improve sperm,” says Jacky Maughan. “Everything revolved around my sperm health, to the point where my social life was damaged. I didn’t go on my best friend’s stag do. I kind of shaped my entire life around improving sperm quality and having a family.”
Maughan, a 37-year-old former professional DJ from Durham, was offered semen analysis on the NHS at the age of 31 after he and his wife Eleanor struggled for years to get pregnant. His result was a diagnosis of “unexplained infertility”. “It’s basically a diagnosis to say, ‘We don’t know what’s wrong, so we’re going to label it this way without further investigation’. It led us to going down the rabbit holes.”
Maughan’s results showed morphology of less than 1 per cent. This means that less than 1 per cent of the sperm in the analysed sample had a normal size and shape. This is low, although in a typical healthy sample, it’s common for 90-96 per cent of sperm to be abnormally shaped. meanwhile, his wife, Eleanor, discovered she had PMO and endometriosis, which can also impact fertility.
Shorts
Seeking more answers through private healthcare, Maughan learned he had high DNA fragmentation and a varicocele – an enlargement of the veins within the scrotum. He was told he would have a low chance of conceiving naturally, or even through IVF because of his sperm quality.
