“Good afternoon, my name is Gavin Peter, I am phoning to get my results.”
“Mr Peter, I just got my answer from college.”
“What did they say?”
“The results for the … excuse me.”
“I got deferred.”
“I am sorry, for what?”
“What does that mean?”
“For the (sotto) routine sperm test.”
“Oh hold on one moment, Mr Peter.”
“Well, I have to just wait. I go into the regular pool.”
“Hello Mr Peter, can I talk to you?”
“Just a moment I am on a call.”
“Mr Peter, can we cook jollof rice, I am homesick.”
“Mr Peter?”
“Yes, yes. yes i am here.”
“Well, here are your results. We prefer to give them to your doctor, but we can proceed over the phone, but you should go and see your doctor afterwards to discuss them. We first look for an actual count and we need to count at minimum 20 million. We counted 22.3 million.”
“Yay, that is great! What a relief.”
“Hold on, hold on. We look for three things.”
“Mr Peter, please can i call home, with no internet I have not spoken to my parents in a week and they are going to be worried.”
“The second we look for is the Motility. This is the movement in the right direction of the sperm.”
“Yes, hold this. I will dial the code.”
“We look to see if at least 50% of the sperm are at least moving in the correct direction.”
“Mr Peter, here is the list of ingredients for jollof rice.”
“Mr Peter can I call after her to tell my parents about Georgetown?”
“Yes. There you go.”
“You had a functional motility of 50% which is acceptable.”
“Mr Peter, I can see you are busy, so let me come back later.”
“No, please just wait a moment, I will see you in a moment.”
“The third thing we look for is Morphology which is how many sperm are normal and therefore able to fertilise.”
“Mr Peter, it is not going through.”
“Mr Peter, this has been the hardest week for me.”
“Mr Peter, it is very important, but I will come back later.”
“Now that result is not so good. You had only 4% of normal sperm. This will make it very difficult for you to have a baby.
Perhaps you can try for a year and if you do not fall pregnant you can start infertility treatments.
You can wear looser underwear, don’t take hot showers, keep the testicles cool, eat more vitamins.
There is a supplement you can take which I know can help.
You could try to increase your actual sperm count to maybe 80 million, then you will have more chance with your 4%.
Maybe go see a urologist.
But I am afraid it is not good news.”

“Thank you, good bye.”

Some days it is really hard to be positive.