Infertility no bar to becoming a father - of twins

'Aged 37, I’d never heard of a man being born infertile.' Photo / @LandyGareth

“There is no sperm in your sample.” Not the words you expect to hear after you’ve submitted yourself to a test. As a man, you assume that when you want to have children, there won’t be any impediments on your side. Yet here we were. My wife Anna and I had been trying to conceive for several months, but to no avail.

At first, I was reasonably sanguine about the odd result. “Sometimes mistakes happen in the lab,” the GP reassured me. “We’re not overly concerned.”

A few weeks later they tested a second sample. I received another call saying, again, they had detected a negative sperm count. Even then, I still imagined it was something that could be easily resolved. Surely there would be drugs to stimulate sperm? Entering the clinic of a private urologist with Anna, neither of us had any inkling of what was about to follow. There was no gentle build-up; no warning of the serious news.

Instead, the urologist looked me straight in the eye and delivered the devastating truth in the bluntest way imaginable: “It doesn’t work downstairs. You need to get over that and move on.”

A terrible silence followed. I could hear my heart beating loudly in my ear. Anna asked some questions but I didn’t hear the answers. Instead, I pictured a family tree with Anna and me and nothing below, no children. Outside in the car park, the two of us broke down. I ran my own business then, as a wedding videographer, but suddenly all the cares I’d had about work vanished from view. I couldn’t father children. That was all that mattered in the world.

Aged 37, I’d never heard of a man being born infertile. In the weeks that followed, I retreated into myself. I’d been a keen long-distance runner but I replaced exercise with gaming, staying up into the small hours of the morning.

Thankfully, Anna, a speech and language therapist, was more proactive. She booked us an appointment with a highly recommended urologist in London called Jonathan Ramsay and before too long we were flying out from Dublin to see him. He carried out further tests and, once we were back in Ireland, he phoned with the results. Again, they were not what I could ever have imagined. It turned out I had Klinefelter syndrome, a genetic condition where boys are born with an extra X chromosome. As had been the case for me, it often goes undetected as it doesn’t usually cause any obvious symptoms.

I know all this now, but had never heard of XXY (as Klinefelter syndrome is also known) when I was diagnosed. Yet it’s less rare than you’d think, affecting roughly one in every 660 males. I learned that my testosterone levels were between a third to a half less than the average man and that, if I’d ever had the ability to produce sperm, it would have dropped off during my mid-20s.

Nevertheless, I underwent a fine needle aspiration to see if there was any sperm. When the results came in, the urologist was very excited. “This is amazing, Gareth,” he said. “You’re the first person I’m aware of in the world who’s XXY and who, in their mid-to-late-30s, still has the ability to produce the building blocks that make sperm.”

'Meeting them was indescribably amazing; all the pain and misery I had felt washed away,' says Gareth Landy. Photo / Daily Telegraph

It was a ray of hope, no more than that. I was put on a programme of various hormones, in the hope that my body would turn them into testosterone, which would then become the fuel to make sperm. After several months, my testosterone level did indeed start to increase. A second operation, called a Micro-TESE, was performed, to see if any sperm could be retrieved. I’d been warned the chances of this working were pretty low – between about 10 and 20 per cent. Even so, the results still came as a blow: my body’s ability to produce sperm had diminished. I couldn’t do it any more.

By then, though, we were already exploring a back-up plan: using donor sperm. The idea was off-putting at first. Anna would present me with the profiles of potential donors with similar attributes to me, but I found it hard to engage with the process. During this time, I also had a recurring dream in which a child would run towards me but would always disappear before reaching my arms.

Then, one day, Anna and I went to a talk by a woman who had been conceived via sperm donation. Her testimony was transformative. “The man who contributed his sperm to make me is important,” she said. “But the man who changed my nappy, who took me to school, who taught me to drive – he is my dad.”

Hearing this moved me to tears. Afterwards, Anna and I talked to a woman called Erica Foster, who runs a sperm bank in London, and she helped us to find a donor who looked like me. The little we knew about him was that he had green eyes and was tall. The height was important as I am 6ft 3ins. He was apparently 6ft 5ins.

Following two failed rounds of IVF, we returned for our third round in late February 2019. On St Patrick’s Day, Anna took a pregnancy test and we were overjoyed to discover it was positive. And then, in November, our twins arrived. Meeting them was indescribably amazing; all the pain and misery I had felt washed away. They were finally here. Anna and I were now a mum and dad.

Today, our little 3-year-olds keep us on our toes but I love them so much. They are who they are because I was infertile. And so, now, I tell everyone I am proud to not have sperm.