Woman Is Allergic to Her Husband's Sperm

Nov. 4, 2009— -- The only thing newlyweds Julie and Mike Boyde wanted was a baby. The couple had already begun planning for a family and started to build a nursery in their Ambridge, Pa., home.

But a painful diagnosis shattered their dream of parenthood. They learned that Julie Boyde was allergic to her husband's semen.

So the Boydes tried a revolutionary new treatment they hoped would allow them to have a baby. And although it proved unsuccessful for them, doctors hope it can help other women who have a similar problem.

Julie and Mike Boyde had been friends for years before he had the nerve to ask her out.

"I didn't ask her out until after our first year in college," Mike Boyde, 27, said. "We were just friends the whole way through high school."

The couple became engaged two years later. They married in 2005 and spent their wedding night at a bed and breakfast.

"Before we were always very careful and, you know, used protection, and that time we didn't," Julie Boyde, 26, said. "So, we figured we were married now, so if we got pregnant, we got pregnant."

But then something went terribly wrong.

"Pretty much right after, I knew something was not right because I was in a lot of pain," she said. "The pain that I was feeling was inside, kind of like, somebody was sticking needles up inside of me and like a burning, like really painful burning."

It was a scary moment, she said.

"Was there something wrong with me? Was there something wrong with him," she said.

But the attacks only got worse. Boyde said she was in pain for days, and they wondered if one of them had a disease.

"When … this actually happens, afterward on a scale of ... 1 to 10, it's pretty much close to 10," she said. "And I don't think that that's what a lot of people understand is ... how painful this actually is."

Test after test came back with no explanation for why she experienced pain after sex. Then a friend of hers suggested that she might be allergic to her husband.

"And after they said that, I'm like, you know, it kind of crossed my mind. Could that really be possible? So, I kind of went home that night and did a little research on the computer," she said.

It's possible to be allergic to another person, according to sexual health experts.

"The body recognizes semen as a foreign protein just as it would recognize a peanut allergen or pollen," said Dr. Andrew Goldstein, director of the Centers for Vulvovaginal Disorders in Annapolis, Md. "So you have swelling, you have itching, you have inflammation of the nerve endings."

Boyde said those were the exact symptoms she was experiencing.