Woman Allergic to Husband's Sperm

A new bride discovered that she's allergic to her husband's sperm.

The Daily Mail reports that Mike and Julie Boyde dated for two years and were then married. Their wedding night was the first time they decided to have unprotected sex, and that's when things went wrong.

"Pretty much right after I knew something was not right because I was in a lot of pain," Julie told ABC News . "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."

Julie said she would be in pain for days and that on a scale of 1 to 10, her pain was a 10.

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

Their situation has essentially rendered them unable to conceive as Julie's body automatically destroys the sperm.

While rare, doctors said that it's possible for someone to be allergic to another person's proteins. Julie's condition is known as seminal plasma hypersensitivity. "The body recognizes semen as a foreign protein just as it would recognize a peanut allergen or pollen," Dr. Andrew Goldstein at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center told ABC. "So you have swelling, you have itching, you have inflammation of the nerve endings."

The Boydes experimented with getting allergy shots that would essentially immunize Julie from the Mike's proteins that she was allergic to. But after that method failed, the couple said they plan to adopt a child.

In Britain a man said he's allergic to his wife -- specifically he's allergic to a chemical called polyethylene glycol, which is a common ingredient in many creams and lotions.