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I have both bright blood and old blood during my period; the color alone means nothing.View Thread



Volume of semen
pH: (the pH of semen is usually around 8 because the vaginal secretions are around a pH of 5-6 to inhibit bacterial growth, so the higher pH of semen buffers the the sperm against destruction by the acidic environment).
Liquefaction: Semen starts out as a thick fluid, gets thicker like a clot, and then thins back out between 30 and 60 minutes later. Too thick means the sperm cannot travel to meet the egg, so we check whether the semen thins out in the right time frame.
Motility: What percentage of sperm are in motion versus still
Direction: Do the sperm move forward or do they flail in place or go in circles. If they cannot move forward they will not be able to get to the egg easily.
Count: We make a dilution of the semen using a solution that kills them (so they will hold still) and makes the count reasonable (there's usually many millions of these little guys). We then count them in a hemacytometer (measured grid on a glass slide) and calculate the count.
Healthy sperm that move well but are in small quantity can be concentrated using a "sperm wash" and implanted using artificial insemination. This way a man who make a small amount of sperm can still be a dad.
Volume of semen in no way tells us how many sperm, but if you miss some of the collection, the part you missed may be more or less full of sperm and skew your results.View Thread
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