Sometimes it’s really hard to let go.
At the last minute, a man who’s about to undergo a vasectomy might, understandably, get the jitters. Does he really want to shut down the pipeline forever? Fortunately, now there’s a convenient way for him to put a last-minute sample of his sperm on ice for later use.
The sperm bank at the University of Illinois at Chicago has a mail-it-in option, called Overnight Male, that takes sperm banks to a new level of customer service. (This variety of bank, after all, can hardly offer a drive-up window.) A depositor puts his sperm sample into a small jar provided by UIC, slips the jar and several legal forms into a Federal Express envelope, and overnights it to the university’s sperm bank, part of its Andrology Lab. The fee: $175.
Many of the bank’s depositors are preparing to undergo vasectomies but have seeds of doubt. “Usually it takes them a year or two to get used to the idea that they had a vasectomy,” says Mary Coppolillo, coordinator of the sperm bank, “and then they call and tell us to go ahead and destroy their samples.”
But it’s not only pre-vasectomy hand-wringers who need to put their sperm in safekeeping right away.
“A lot of the depositors have been diagnosed with testicular cancer and find out that chemotherapy can render them permanently sterile,” Coppolillo says. “We are giving them the opportunity five or 10 years down the line to have their own child.”
It also enables them to “collect a sample” — as Coppolillo calls the very personal process — in the comfort of home, instead of in a sterile, cold examining room at UIC’s urology clinic.
“I didn’t want to do that in a lab; I’m sure it’s much more relaxing at home,” says depositor Kevin Wittlieff, 28. (More relaxing, mind you, even though his mother was in the house both times Wittlieff collected his samples.)
Wittlieff was diagnosed with testicular cancer last January, but wanted to preserve the chance to have children someday, so he and his mother started researching options for putting away some of his viable sperm. The nearest sperm bank they found to his southwestern Michigan home is in Ann Arbor, about 120 miles away.
“I’d have had drive down there to produce a sample in their lab, then wait around for a week to go produce another one,” he says.
UIC’s year-old service is “for a man who doesn’t have the time to come in and produce a sample, either because he has chemotherapy scheduled right away, or because he has work commitments,” Coppolillo says.
She warns that whenever possible, donors are urged to collect in the lab. Even though they are shipped in a medium that UIC urology and physiology professor Gail Prins developed expressly for Overnight Male, home-collected specimens still can lose about 10 percent of their motility, or vigor, before being frozen by UIC technicians.
“When they do it here, it’s in the technician’s hands a minute or two after collection,” she says, although, of course, she doesn’t mean that part about the technician’s hands literally. It’s in a small plastic vial.
The sperm bank started in 1988 at Michael Reese Hospital. It moved to UIC with Prins, its founder, in January 1996. Not a program for sperm donors, this bank stores sperm samples for men — about 500 of them so far — who will later reclaim their samples for their use in artificial insemination.
Samples are stored at minus-321 degrees Fahrenheit in liquid nitrogen tanks. There, “theoretically they can last forever,” says lab supervisor Raisa Dolgina. UIC’s oldest specimens have been on ice for nine years; medical literature reports that frozen sperm samples have stayed potent for at least 20 years, she adds.
Depositors pay $175 a year for storage (in addition to the Overnight Male charge, if they collect at home). UIC keeps on file each man’s “Ownership of Cryopreserved Sperm” form, which states whether, upon his death, his samples should be destroyed or entrusted to a person he designates.
Each sperm sample is mixed with a yellow “freezing medium,” also developed by Prins, that looks like egg yolk, and put in a number of 1 1/2-inch plastic vials. The typical sample, Dolgina says, fills one to four vials, although depending on sperm count and concentration, individual samples have filled as many as 22 vials.
About 150 sperm samples share a tank, which is roughly the size of a Shop-Vac and sits on a wheeled cart. About a dozen full tanks stand in a UIC storage room. (While there are 500 depositors, there are many more deposits, because a man can send in as many samples as he wants, all for the same storage fee.)
Depositors know their samples are stored in liquid-nitrogen containers equipped with alarms that will sound if the temperature rises much above minus-321, and that they can phone for a “visual” anytime. While the caller is on hold, a lab technician goes to the tanks and verifies that the man’s sperm is still there. “We have one man who calls us every six months, just for peace of mind,” Coppolillo says.
Depositors rarely ask to come visit their potential progeny, she notes, though they’re welcome to.
Overnight Male, Wittlieff says, “sounded a little unconventional at first, but it’s been great for me.” Only one small question remains. “I wonder what their (Federal Express) delivery man must think,” he says.
