CNHI News Service Banking on babies: Clinic stores sperm for couples

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Lynn Collins, laboratory supervisor at the sperm bank in Danvers, Mass., counts active sperm in a man’s sample. Mark Lorenz/Eagle-Tribune

Frozen sperm stored at the Danvers, Mass. sperm bank. Mark Lorenz/Eagle-Tribune

Mike and Natalie Girouard of New Hampshire with their daughter, Lucy. They used the sperm bank in Danvers, Mass., before Mike was deployed following Sept. 11 with the National Guard. They were afraid the anthrax vaccine he had to get might interfere with his fertility. Mark Lorenz/Eagle-Tribune

In the process of setting up and running the sperm bank and laboratory, Collins has picked up an endless supply of interesting facts about sperm.

DANVERS, Mass. — There’s not much you could say that would make Lynn Collins blush.
In her narrow office in a back corner of a fertility clinic in Danvers, Collins holds a plastic cup containing a semen sample from a man who is having trouble getting his wife pregnant.
She takes a glass slide out of an incubator and presses it against her cheek to make sure it’s not too cold. Sperm don’t like the cold, she says. She loads the live sample onto the slide and slips it under a phase contrast microscope.
“I’m not sure of this gentleman’s sperm count,” she warns, as she leans forward to take a peek.
“Ooh, it’s a good one,” she says. “No problem there.”
Through the lens she sees a jumble of tiny white circles with jiggling tails. She superimposes a grid over the view and starts counting.
“He’s got so many,” she says, clicking away on a counter.
It’s a routine morning for Collins, a woman who started her career in animal sciences before moving over to human medicine and becoming one of North Shore Medical Center’s leading experts on sperm.
Her laboratory is down the hall from the obstetrician and gynecologist offices at the hospital system’s Women’s Center in Danvers. Women come here when they’re having fertility trouble, Collins said, and one of the easiest and most common first infertility tests is a sperm count on the man, so a lot of her work involves counting sperm.
The lesser known part of her job involves the two metal tanks stored beneath her laboratory bench. They are cooled with liquid nitrogen to 196 degrees below zero Celsius. Collins puts on “cryo” gloves and a plastic face shield to open a lid. White fog drifts out toward the floor as she draws out one of the slender canisters containing 12 sleeves of bullet-sized vials of preserved, frozen sperm.
This is a sperm bank, the only sperm bank as far as she knows north of Boston and south of Exeter, N.H. It has been operating quietly out of the Women’s Center since 1999. Unlike the big-name sperm banks in Boston, this is a noncommercial operation, and the men who use it are not donating to strangers; they are storing sperm for their own use in the future.
“It’s not really a sperm bank in what at least the reproductive medicine community would typically refer to and define as a sperm bank,” said Dr. Mitchell Rein, a fertility specialist at the Women’s Center.
Yet it is a place where sperm specimens are collected and stored, and it has all the trappings for the process, from the emergency backup liquid nitrogen tanks to the DVD player in the collection room.
Men pay $500 to $600 to deposit a specimen and store it for the first year, then $308 a year thereafter for as long as they want. Insurance may cover the expense if the storage is for a medical reason, but men often pay the fees themselves.

Small beginnings
The process typically starts with a telephone call, similar to the one Collins takes this morning. Without a hint of embarrassment, she asks the caller when his last ejaculation was, answers questions about the process and then schedules him to bring her a specimen, reminding him to remain abstinent until then.
Whether the specimen is for a sperm count or to be frozen for future use, men have the option of collecting it at home or in the clinic, Collins said.
“It’s where you’re more comfortable, where you’re able to produce it,” she said. “It’s not like a urine specimen. This is a specimen that’s, well, it’s embarrassing. It’s not the easiest specimen to collect.”
If the man chooses to do it at home, the plastic specimen cup must be delivered to Collins’ laboratory within an hour and held close to the body to stay warm so the sperm don’t die.
If he prefers to do it at the clinic, he uses a small room with a sign outside the door that says “andrology collection room,” a cross between a public bathroom and a private den.
There is a sink in the room and a toilet stall, along with a leather recliner, which Collins picked out herself, and a television that she recently upgraded with a DVD player. The door locks and the lights dim. Hidden in a cabinet is a collection of explicit magazines and movies. On the wall is an artistic black-and-white photograph of a naked woman seen from behind, which Collins tracked down from the company that supplied the more traditional artwork throughout the rest of the practice.
“It was their first request for a picture like this,” she said.
Natalie Girouard, whose husband used the collection room in 2001 before he was deployed with the National Guard, said as nice as the space was, she still feels a little uncomfortable thinking about that part of the process.
“You don’t know what to expect,” Girouard said. “I think it was a little bit awkward. (Collins) brought us in the room with the recliner. She said, ‘You can stay if you want to.’ I said, ‘No, I think I’m all set.’”
Collins asks for about four specimens from a man if he intends to bank his sperm. The collections usually take place over the course of a week or two, leaving a day or two between each specimen for replenishment. Each specimen typically is enough for three monthly cycles of artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization, so the four specimens are enough for about 12 monthly attempts to get pregnant.

Big challenges
From Collins’ point of view, arranging the collections is the easy part. The excitement, she said, is the occasional unusual request for delivering the frozen specimens to their destination when it is time to thaw and use them.
“I can ship sperm anywhere,” Collins said. “I’ve shipped sperm to Africa.”
Once a Beverly, Mass., man was trying to have a child with his wife, an art importer working in California. That was hard enough. Then his wife was called unexpectedly home to Zimbabwe for a family emergency, Collins said, and she expected to stay about six months. So the husband banked his sperm in Danvers and Collins made a call to FedEx.
“The problem is my shipping tank. I had to make sure it would keep the specimen frozen,” Collins said. “If it defrosts for any reason you have to use it right then and there. You can’t refreeze. It’s dead in hours. They’re dead. They’re lost.”
FedEx found a way to keep the sample frozen and hand-deliver it to the woman’s doctor in Zimbabwe, Collins said, and the shipment went without a hitch, until customs agents in Africa took a look at it.
“Somewhere in the paper information when this tank went, someone thought the word ‘experimental’ was there, which it wasn’t,” Collins said. “So the African government took my tank and held it hostage. They thought I was shipping the sperm for experimental reasons.”
Collins scrambled to get in touch with a laboratory in Africa and convinced the government to release the tank to an African sperm bank until the problem was straightened out. The woman eventually got her husband’s specimen. On the last attempt, she got pregnant.
“Now that I’ve done it once I could do it again,” Collins said.
In the process of setting up and running the sperm bank and laboratory, Collins has picked up an endless supply of interesting facts about sperm. For example, sperm that have two X chromosomes and are destined to create a girl baby move more slowly than the XY sperm that create a boy, she said, but they live longer in a woman’s body.
She talks about such intimate subjects without the slightest hint of pink rising to her cheeks.
“It’s incredible,” Collins said. “I’ve learned so much.”

Julie Kirkwood writes for The Eagle-Tribune for North Andover, Mass. E-mail her at jkirkwood@eagletribune.com

After Sept. 11, deployed guardsman banks sperm

High school sweethearts Natalie and Mike Girouard of Hampton, N.H., had a lot going on in their personal lives when they found out Mike would be deployed overseas with the Air National Guard in December 2001, just months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Though she was only 24, Natalie was having trouble with her ovaries, so the couple were trying to get pregnant through in vitro fertilization.
Natalie’s immediate concern about Mike’s deployment was that the anthrax vaccine he would be given might cause infertility. So before he was vaccinated, they arranged to freeze his sperm at the sperm bank in Danvers, within the Women’s Center where they were already going for fertility treatments.
In the process of filling out paperwork, they had to discuss what would happen to the sperm if Mike died. He’s a boom operator who refuels airplanes midair, Natalie said, so every time he deploys he’s in danger.
They agreed that Natalie would use the sperm to get pregnant, even after Mike’s death.
“If anything happened to him, God forbid, we would have gone through with it,” she said. “It’s a part of him.”
The couple never had to use the frozen sperm specimens.
Mike has flown several overseas missions, but the timing has worked out so he’s been home for each in vitro fertilization cycle. The anthrax vaccine did not impact his fertility, so they eventually asked the sperm bank to stop storing the specimens.
On their fourth in vitro fertilization try, Natalie had a healthy pregnancy and now they have a daughter, Lucy Rose, who turns 3 in November.
“It’s worth it in the long run, especially if you end up with a little one,” Natalie said.

Reasons men bank their own sperm
The main job of commercial sperm banks is to collect samples from anonymous donors and offer them to women for artificial insemination. A lesser-known role of sperm banks, including some noncommercial banks like the one in Danvers, Mass., is to store sperm samples from men for their own use at a later date.
Why would a man pay money to have somebody store his sperm? Here are some of the most common reasons:
He travels for work and is not home during the few days of the month when his wife is ovulating.
He is home on those days, but has trouble producing under the pressure of his wife’s schedule. (Sometimes just knowing a backup sample is available is enough to reduce anxiety).
He has been diagnosed with testicular cancer or another type of cancer, and the treatments could render him infertile.
He’s about to have a vasectomy and wants to bank a sample just in case he changes his mind.
He is going to be deployed overseas with the military and is either worried that he may not return or that he could be exposed to something that would impair his fertility.
He has a very low sperm count or a sperm count that varies, and he needs to have frozen specimens available as a backup.