Day 1: My first ball bath

I have now "dipped my balls in it" for the first time.

It was difficult for me to find an exact description of Voegeli's method. One article did describe it as sitz bath, and I saw no mention of any sort of continuous heating method. So I am going to assume that we use water that starts at 116F and gradually cools over the 45 minutes.

I ordered a sitz bath kit from Amazon and filled it up. For good measure, I put the water bag in a cooler. Unfortunately, it appears our tap water only goes up to 114F. I decided to go forward with the treatment anyway.

Observation Number 1: I liked having 45 minutes of quiet time to read.
Observation Number 2: Sitting on a toilet for 45 minutes is quite uncomfortable. I don't know if I will get used to it with practice, or if it gets worse.

I turned up the hot water heater a bit, and will try again tomorrow.

It's my sperm!

Pics or it didn't happen.

I have to admit, it was kind of weird gazing upon my little swimmers. I debated getting the proper equipment to do a formal semen analysis, but decided it would expand my budget too much.

So my experimental technique consists of:

1. Collect specimen in paper cup
2. Allow 10 minutes for semen to liquefy
3. Draw with disposable plastic pipette
4. Mount on glass slide without staining or preparation
5. Observe at 40x

The slides below will be my baseline.   Most of the sperm in the high-power-fields below are out of focus. I think actual semen analysis is supposed to use a special slide to give a uniform depth.

In the 3 days before obtaining this specimen, I had taken 2 long baths. I don't know if this would have much effect on my sperm count.

Again, this is not a formal analysis, and I have no specific training. But it appeared to me that less than half of my sperm were motile. I saw several with abnormal morphology. Near the bottom of the second slide, you can see a sperm with two tails.

Conception was not particularly easy for my wife and me. We didn't require any medical interventions, but we did track cycles and time our intercourse to maximize our chances. We have been able to conceive, but it took at least 4 cycles. Obviously I am fertile, but I maybe not ideally so.

My microscope

I bought a microscope off of Ebay and it seems it will work out quite nicely.

It's an Amscope M200. There's nothing too fancy, but it's got an electric light, coarse and fine focus, and 3 levels of magnification. The digital camera is pretty basic with just 0.3 megapixels. But it plugged and played well with my computer. And since my main purpose for the camera is blogging, 640x480 will be sufficient.

Why Louie?

You probably don't remember MTV's sketch comedy program The State. Heck, neither do I. But I later found out many of my favorite comedians got their start on that show.

Who is Louie? To quote: "Louie! The guy who comes in and says his catch phrase over and over again!"

MTV2 Legit - MTV Shows

As we are both dipping our balls in things, I thought it would be a perfect match.

I am continuing to make preparations for my experiment. I have purchased a microscope with a digital camera and some slides. I will soon post pictures of my sperm before using the heat method.

Link to Louie video:

Preparation and Planning

Due to a number of reasons, I have decided that male contraception will be the best for my wife and me.  Although humans have been working on this for centuries, the options are limited. Condoms have not worked well for me in the past and I don't desire the permanence of a vasectomy. As a physician, I knew some heat-based methods existed but wasn't really sure how they worked.

I found this extremely useful page on male contraception and was intrigued by the method espoused by Dr. Marthe Voegeli. Between 1930 and 1950 she had good results with a small sample of Indian men. Her method consisted of soaking the testicles in 116°F water 45 minutes. This was done every day for 3 weeks, and resulted in 6 months of temporary infertility. She found it to be extremely effective and low in side effects.

I have started to gather information and equipment. While I won't be tracking formal sperm counts, I will be examining my semen and posting the results. This won't be much of an experiment, because I don't have any sort of control. I will try to do it as systematically as possible.

My hypotheses:

1.  3 weeks of daily scrotal heat will prevent pregnancy for 6 months
2. The number of sperm seen on a 40x microscope field will visibly decrease

I will work out my design methods and post them as I figure out what I am doing.