BILL: I don’t suppose you have super-strength.
MIKAAL: Not the carrying-a-500-pound-sopping-wet-gorilla kind of super-strength.
BILL: Oh well, the European coast is only about five miles from here. I’ll see you there.
MIKAAL: What are you going to do?
BILL: The backstroke.

Cry for Justice

Life has an odd way of slotting things into place. Occasionally it takes a little push – case in point, I get evicted from yet another place and find a new one so quickly that I’m now typing surrounded by packed boxes. More often than not, though, things just happen, and while it’s not always the wisest thing to do to sit around waiting for them to do so, it’s nice to notice them when they do.

I was jettisoned by my second girlfriend for no stated reason, but the message I got from the whole thing once I’d stopped crying was that I couldn’t give her everything she wanted, or at least everything she thought she was due. I didn’t have a job, or a car, and I wasn’t even particularly hot. One more thing I wouldn’t have been able to give her, as it turns out, would be children, and that was something she desperately wanted.

She now has two blonde ones, having married a Dutchman and Completely Moving On. I’d never been sure if I wanted children, although I’m now absolutely certain that I don’t, but back in Spring 2021 I was told that I can’t. The prospect of no fertility was presented to me like I was on my deathbed, and the fact that I reacted like I’d just seen Father Christmas produce a particularly big toy from his sack caused the first of many very confused medical professionals.

Months of waiting and two jizz rushes later and I still don’t have a definitive answer.

This isn’t the post I wanted to be writing at this point, I’ll be honest. I wanted to be able to say that I was utterly, irreversibly, 100% infertile (and STD-free, come to think of it) and finish it off with something like “…ladies.”

But I’m almost there.

My sperm are doing odd things. Fertility isn’t one of them. Nearly all of them have misshapen heads which wouldn’t get through an egg, never mind making it far enough to attempt to do so. Some of them break in half easily; some keep going in circles; some just die without explanation… and quite a few of them are swimming backwards.

No, I didn’t know that was possible either.

Everything else about my semen appears to be healthy – in terms of viscosity, appearance, scent and all the other things they test for. It’s just the spermatozoa that aren’t working… which, come to think of it, is the result I was sort of hoping for. I had to have the “no, I genuinely aren’t trying to conceive / no, I genuinely don’t want help from the fertility clinic” conversation with my GP, but I was expecting that.

What I wasn’t quite expecting was the fact that a special note had been added to my results commenting on how there was rather more volume than they would normally be expecting…

…

…ladies.