Lizz and Dakota

Everyone calls me Lizz and my husband is Dakota. We have that cheesy love story that you always hear about where we knew we were gonna get married the day we met We both just knew. Having a big family has always been very important to my husband and I. He grew up with three other siblings and I grew up with two. Right after my husband and I met, he lost his twin brother and we knew we wanted to get pregnant right after we married. 

We were both extremely overweight. We tried anyways. We had no luck. We assumed I was the problem. You don’t really hear about male infertility. So we assumed. Well you know what they say about assuming. I did numerous tests and took numerous rounds of clomid. Still no luck. We got referred to a urologist. My husband had a sperm count of zero. We were crushed. We decided to take a break for a while from trying. My husband decided to have weight loss surgery. He was over 600 pounds. He had his surgery in May of 2018. We started going to the fertility specialist about six months after his surgery. They did a sperm count. He had a count of 100,000. 

It was critically low but we had sperm! We were so excited. Then, I decided to have weight loss surgery in May 2019. In October of 2020 we went back to the fertility specialist. His count was up to 22 million! All of my tests came back normal. Together we had lost over 400 pounds! We went back for another appointment and had more tests ran and waited for the results. A few weeks ago we had a teleconference appointment and he told us everything was completely normal and we shouldn’t have any problems getting pregnant on our own. 

If we’re not pregnant by May we can do IUI. We are super excited to hear the word “normal”. Our doctor told us he wished all of his patients that he told to lose weight would talk to us so they understood the importance of it. That he doesn’t just tell them that to be mean. I hope that our story will help someone. 

Insurance coverage is important because infertility is an issue for so many women AND MEN. Most costs aren’t covered by insurance. Infertility is a disease. No one asks for it. Why should this be different? It should be treated like any other disease.