Toby Trice, 31, and his partner, Katie Housley, 31, had been trying for a baby for six years before they found out the real reason they’d not been able to get pregnant: Trice’s fertility was the issue, not Housley’s. Even worse: it is a discovery that could have been made years earlier, before the two rounds of IVF and two miscarriages, if he had taken a simple, five-minute, non-invasive test.
Trice, a semi-professional racing driver, was eventually diagnosed with a varicocele problem, which affects 15 to 20 per cent of men. Three months after a straightforward, two-hour operation to remove some swollen veins from his testes, the couple found out Housley was pregnant. They now have a 10-month-old son, Oliver, but that hasn’t rid Trice of the trauma. ‘I still feel incredibly emotional knowing what we went through could have been avoided if I’d got checked earlier,’ he says of their £15,000 IVF journey. ‘I’m frustrated with the system because it could have prevented all that heartache.’
