Age is a funny thing. As a guy you don't have the biological clock ticking in the back of your mind. Instead you have the sociological clock ticking right before your eyes. Men are supposed to do things by a certain time. Stop acting foolish at 25. Be a good husband by 30. And be an impressive 2-kid dad at 35. Of course it's never as statistically clean as that but it might as well be.

Driven by a desire to avoid the inertia of tradition, age never caught up with me. At 40, I was freshly divorced - amicably - and looking to a new life in New York. The words midlife crisis were muttered by my friends except there was no open top spots car; no 22-year-old energetic blonde by my side. Just me going to New York on my own. I had plans that included starting a charity initiative in India. To me, there was no midlife crisis. Why was it called a crisis anyway? I saw only opportunity and had in my mind that if I could achieve and experience as much in the next 40 years as I had done in the first - life would be golden.

There was one problem. It came from left field. I suddenly realized I didn't have children and time was running out. But I hear you say - you're a guy, you don't need to worry about stuff like that. Ah, but you do. The sociological clock becomes all the more powerful when you are on the wrong side of it. Fortunately my home of New York is way kinder than in London. You feel like you have a 10 year cushion over your actual age. As a Brit, trips to London are fairly frequent and what you see are lots of young couples with kids. Surrounded by these delightful couples, you feel old. The old I’m talking about is the quiet voice that says, it’s too late.

Forty didn’t present a midlife crisis to me but it did present a reality that was in stark contrast to the dream state that existed before. When you’re young you feel invincible. You feel you can do anything. You have the chance to pick a subject or skill and be so good at it that it could set you up for life. At 40, books like Gladwell’s Outliers present a stark reality to you. The concept of 10,000 hours is out of your reach.

So at 40, I asked myself, is it too late to have children? Biologically probably not but from a sociological point of view, am I too old to be pushing a buggy around, playing in a jungle gym park...? The fear was that based on the London observation, I was well passed my time.  

It was at this time that I was fortunate to meet Sally. Two years younger than me (reinforcing the fact that there's no midlife crisis here) and keen like me to have children. We gave it a little time before we took the objective seriously but also knew that time was not on our side. Age once again makes its presence felt because if we were younger we surely would have spent more time together; made sure the relationship was solid before making the leap to as they so neatly call it, family planning. We didn't have time to mess around and maturity gave us the sense that no matter what, we could find a way to make things work in the future.

Time eventually did play its card anyway because things were not quite working to plan. No baby was forthcoming. I decided that the problem had to be with me and eventually even found a specialist who agreed with my own prognosis. I had tests that showed that all was good - better than good actually and I should have walked out of the specialist feeling ready to impregnate the world but I didn't. I went to another specialist and went through the whole process again but had told him that I had my suspicions. He added a level of analysis that would check for everything. I got to enjoy more free porn in a room that could be best described as pushing one's imagination to the limit. No success; no analysis.

A week later I got the call. Top-level results look great as previously confirmed but there was a problem. Your guys are not good swimmers. It's funny because I've never been a great swimmer myself. It's the breathing that takes me down every time. Put me on a surfboard where my head is above water and I can paddle with the best of them but in a pool, I'm shit. So the irony of this made me laugh out loud but the smile was soon wiped off my face when I heard how to solve the problem. An operation in that area of my body isn’t going to be fun. The specialist gave me tons of documents in support of his approach and they all seemed pretty legit. This guy had basically played back what I told him - the problem was with me - so he must be right about the solution. Just shows what trouble your ego can get you in to. It can get personal.

The surgery was a success. Meanwhile Sally had been going through lots of tests herself and nothing showed up. Give it three months of healing and we are good to go - the last words of my specialist. I've avoided going in to detail on the surgery but suffice it to say it’s like a horse catching you right in the groin but the velocity of the kick is so great that you feel it for two weeks. Not pleasant but surely worth it right? Wrong.

Eight months later and still no success. We had changed specialists a couple of times - none of them seemed to deal with the psychological side of the challenge very well, especially for the woman. They also never seem to have a FAQ sheet and I'm sure the questions are the same for every couple. The specialists appear to get frustrated with your questions and you start to avoid asking questions to alleviate their frustration. Trouble is you still don't understand a ton of stuff and that later comes back to haunt you.

IUI and IVF to follow…