What are the alternative methods of acquiring sperm?

There are a number of different ways to obtain sperm from a patient. Certainly handing a gentleman a cup and asking him to collect a semen sample by masturbation is the most common, although not necessarily an easy task for a gentleman who is just battling a new diagnosis of cancer, who may be under a lot of stress.

But certainly the first route we would try is through masturbation—semen collection that way—and sperm cryopreservation. There are some men who have difficulty ejaculating, and there are things that we can do using vibratory stimulation devices to facilitate ejaculation in these gentlemen, and finally some men are not able to produce a sample with conventional means, and in that instance sometimes we’ll surgically extract sperm prior to the patient undergoing cancer therapy.