Welcome

11 Feb, 2009 at 8:01 pm | In General, egg donation, egg donor, weird world | Leave a Comment
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Egg donation: the myths, the studies, the chaos and weirdness surrounding the idea. This is an attempt to de-mystify, explain and/or comment on the varied emotional, sociocultural, spiritual and physical effects of egg donation. As a donor in the midst of my second cycle (I start injections next week), I feel compelled to write about my experiences, and perhaps advise, if possible, on this rather strange and yet broadly acceptable medical treatment. Both of my donations have been anonymous and to be totally honest, I’m motivated primarily by the floudering financial fiasco that is my everyday life at this time.

But I also love to write, and share, and one can only yap so much about such things to willing friends, colleagues, boyfriend, etc. (they quickly become unwilling). So…here I am. An anonymous 2-time egg donor in Colorado, hoping to shed some light on the subject. While financial motivators have been key for both of my decisions to donate, a number of other factors have also come into play, and towards the end of my first donation I felt an enormous sense of responsibility and gratitude. My decision to donate a second time was driven by this feeling as much as it was by money. The sense of being part of the formation of a family, the enormity of realizing that the recipient parents who chose you depend entirely on you for their ability to create progeny, is a wholly awesome experience.

It is my hope that what I share here will enlighten and educate. Please understand, however, that this is a first-person testimonial. I am not a medical professional nor do I claim to be one, advise as one, or consult as one. The experiences I will share here are my own, from my perspective, and while this is intended to give a rounded perspective from the donor standpoint on egg donation, it is not to be taken as advising or consulting on the matter. Everyone is different; our bodies respond to things differenly, our ethics vary in complexity and magnitude, we are all unique, and we all respond uniquely to the myriad opportunities and experiences within the realm of reproductive medicine.

Thanks for reading.

Your Clinic, Your Agency & You

18 Apr, 2009 at 11:11 am | In agency, egg donation, egg donor, experience, weird world | Leave a Comment
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Most clinics will have a nurse or team of nurses who work specifically with donors. Your nurse is your medical authority and is there to help answer any questions that come up during the donation process. If you’re working with an agency, expect your communication to diversify a little bit. While your agency represents you, and your interests as a donor, they are often staffed by non-medical professionals. At this point, therefore, any and all medically-related questions that arise throughout the rest of your donor cycle should be referred to your donor nurse.

This may seem counterintuitive or, at least, somewhat befuddling. Wait a minute, you may be thinking, shouldn’t my agency be able to answer these questions? Shouldn’t they be the ones I talk to about any concerns I have? And my answer to this is: yes and no. While the agency staff is usually comprised of brilliant, insightful, helpful employees, they are often not medically trained, and will refer you to your clinic or nurse for any medically-related questions. Personally, I found this quite reassuring in my most recent donor cycle. My agency handled the legal end of the donation, hammered out the contract between myself and my recipient couple, provided resources for questions I had and, yes, referred me to my clinic anytime I had a medical question. This, to me, made total sense: it allowed my agency to focus on their job–representing ME–instead of trying to get answers to questions that really needed to be handled by my nurse. My agency gave me a great legal team, as well as exceptional support and encouragement…and my donor nurse at my clinic handled all of my medical concerns.

As the donor, however, you need to make sure you’re keeping everyone informed of what’s going on. While your agency may not be medically involved in your treatment, keeping them in the loop is part of your job as a donor. For me, this meant using email, that miracle of the modern era, on a daily basis. I emailed my agency with every change in medication dosage, with updated appointment schedules, with ultrasound results, with anything I thought might be pertinent to the donation process. I emailed my agency so much I thought I’d be blacklisted by the end of my donor cycle.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

As it turns out, the more you communicate, the more your agency appreciates it. The info I sent them could then be directly communicated to my recipient couple and my progress could be more easily tracked by everyone involved. It really just simplified the process for everyone, and I think it demonstrated my credibility and commitment to the process as well. My agency, my clinic and, most importantly, my recipients knew that I was a reliable, responsible donor. It was the least I could do.

Following Up…

18 Apr, 2009 at 10:36 am | In egg donation, egg donor, weird world | Leave a Comment
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So, you’re a prospective egg donor. You’ve submitted photos, written more about yourself than you thought possible, and wracked your brains (and perhaps the brains of your siblings, parents and extended family) to give as complete and accurate a family history as you’re able to put together. You’ve gone through an extensive interview process, perhaps a blood draw or two, and finally–FINALLY!–were informed that you’ve been chosen by a recipient. This is where the real work begins.

For you, though, the real work doesn’t mean much at this point. While the clinic is getting together charts and paperwork, legal contracts and waivers, you’ll be asked to make appointments to come in for interviews with your nurse and a psychologist or psychiatrist, a physical exam, bloodwork and ultrasounds. Some clinics do all of this in one day, some will work with your schedule to accommodate multiple appointments, and variations on this occur by clinic and, sometimes, by state (as state regulations on assisted reproduction can fluctuate). One part of the donation process that is bound to occur around this time, though, is your introduction to your nurse(s).

Being Chosen

10 Mar, 2009 at 3:42 pm | In General, egg donation, egg donor, weird world | 1 Comment
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I’m not married and I don’t have kids yet, but being a donor–twice!!–is such an honor to me. Realizing that a couple wanted me to help create their family was such an incredible, bigger-than-life moment. I was awestruck for a little while, proud of myself, and at the same time, intensely humbled. It was a strange feeling. I was in it for the money–wasn’t I? At the same time, having gone through this process twice now, I have to say that the enormity of the contribution I know I’ve made (and am about to make again now…I’m in the final days of injections of my second donation as of this writing) to these families is beyond my understanding. Being chosen as a donor for these two families might be The Greatest Two Days Of My Life…so far, anyway. I have no doubt that they will always be tremendously special days.

We all grow up with families: our own, other people’s, our friends’ families, our neighbor’s families, our extended families, our adopted families, our foster families. The people who surround and envelop and love and enrich us, who show us how to fly kites and climb trees, look for constellations and shapes in clouds, solve puzzles and homework and the small and giant mysteries of life, the people who grow us up, we will remember those people forever. When a child is brought into the world an incalculable opportunity is gleaned for the people who will help shape him, who will love her, who will teach them to hit a ball, ride a bike, solve an algebra equation. I will never, more likely than not, know the children of my recipient couples. I donated my eggs freely so that they could become part of my recipient couples’ families, so that they could help these couples create families. I’m reasonably sure at this point that this is as honorable a contribution as any I’ve ever made.

More soon…thanks for reading…

Beyond The Application

03 Mar, 2009 at 10:17 pm | In General, egg donation, egg donor, resources, weird world | Leave a Comment
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Along with all of the information about you, the application will also request a fair amount of your family’s medical history. Be prepared for this one: if you don’t have this information, it’s highly unlikely that you can be considered a viable candidate for egg donation. This is a basic requirement, and it makes sense. After all, wouldn’t you want to know what your kid could potentially have in store for his or her future if you were in the situation of choosing their potential genetic inheritance, and it wasn’t yours?

Something I found helpful during the application process was putting myself in the shoes of the recipient couple. If someone chose me to donate my eggs to help start their family, what would they want to know? Probably everything about me that could factor into their child’s growth and development. In this case, more information is always better than less.

After you complete the application and submit it to an agency or clinic (I’ll stick with “agency” from here on), the wait begins. The agency will generally let you know they’ve received your paperwork and are reviewing it. The reviewing process can take a few days or a few weeks; it’s best to let them get back to you once they’ve confirmed that they received your application. At this point they’ll be going over all of the information you’ve provided to determine if you’ll be a good potential donor. At this juncture, they’ll let you know if they want to proceed and list you among their donors. (See my post: “Egg Donation Is NOT For You If…”)

If the agency decides to list you as a potential donor, they may want you to come in at that time and interview with a nurse, donor coordinator, psychiatrist/psychologist, or other personnel in their employ. They may ask you to bring or send in more pictures of yourself at various stages of your life. They may do a phone interview and/or request that you come in for bloodwork to begin blood and genetic testing. Or they may have you wait to do any or all of this until you are chosen by a recipient couple.

While the organization of the above-mentioned meetings between you and the agency varies widely from agency to agency, I’d suggest that, if told you have been approved and will be listed as a donor, to ask at that point for an outline of the process. For me, my first donation was coordinated by an agency who had me do all of my “workup”, from the application to the interviews with a donor nurse and psychologist to the bloodwork and genetic testing, before I would be listed in their “donor book”. (It was literally a huge 3-ring binder filled with donor applications and pictures.) My second was coordinated through an agency who had me submit paperwork and photos, and then when a recipient couple chose me, I submitted more paperwork and had my workup done at that time. Because this process can vary, I highly recommend asking the person working with you from the agency what the process is. They are generally extremely helpful and informative, and happy to answer any questions you might have about the process.

Next up…being chosen. Thanks for reading!

Egg Donation Is NOT For You If…

25 Feb, 2009 at 6:38 pm | In Miscellany | 2 Comments
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…you smoke. You won’t even be considered for donation if you do, and it’s largely because the medications you must take increase the chances of blood clotting and stroke substantially.
…you don’t know your family’s medical history. It’s essential to know your family history for the past three generations, and to know it in great detail: causes of death, cancers, heart disease, other life-threatening health issues, depression, & mental illness are among the many factors considered when a prospective donor initiates the application process.
…you know your family history, and genetic or congenital conditions run in your family. Generally speaking, you probably won’t be allowed to list as a viable donor.
…you think it’s a “quick fix” for a miserable financial situation. You have to be chosen by a couple first, and the process can take 4-6 months from there.
…you feel even the slightest emotional attachment to your eggs. This sounds silly, but how do you really feel about them? If you see them as prospective children, who are going to be raised by another set of parents and you can never have anything to do with them unless they electively involve you, if you can get past that, you could donate. But if you can’t, then you shouldn’t. The psychological exam helps to bring this to the forefront of your considerations, but it’s something you should really think about.
…you have medical ethics concerns about the destruction of genetic material and/or embryos. Once you agree to be a donor for a recipient couple, you waive your rights to the eggs you donate. The recip parents can do whatever they want with them…use them, freeze them, discard them…and you have absolutely no say in the matter.
…you don’t have a solid neutral or good gut feeling on it. If you’re stressing about donation, you probably shouldn’t do it, at least not until you’ve faced your demons and worked the stressors–whatever they are–out entirely.
…you’re doing it “for” anyone other than yourself. The donation process is often stressful and emotionally complex. It can be incredibly rewarding, but only if you can find a really good reason that you can believe in, “in your heart of hearts” as my mother used to say, for going through with the donation. While this applies more to anonymous donors, it can affect known or relative (sister of recip couple’s husband or wife, and the like) donors as well.

The Beginning

18 Feb, 2009 at 7:03 pm | In General, egg donation, egg donor, weird world | Leave a Comment
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What most of those advertisements showing carefree, delighted models gallivanting across a verdant meadow against a serene-sky backdrop, what those hand-drawn signs they’re each holding (“women helping women!” “change a life today!” and most important of all, “earn $5,000 or more!”), what they don’t say is this: egg donation takes a really long time. It’s not like you sign up and some desperate couple picks you to be their donor, and you’re suddenly $5 grand richer in a matter of a week or so. How the process usually works is…

The Application
When you call, or email, or post an inquiry on the site of an agency, the next thing you have to do is a TON of paperwork. The usual medical-questionnaire queries regarding your name and age and height and weight and so on are there, but there are pages more on things like your eye color, shape, size and set (close, wide, etc.), skin tone (even/uneven, impetigo, dry/oily/combination, etc.), family history, ethnic heritage, and that’s just the beginning. You’ll then be asked what you were like as a little kid, how your family treated you, what kinds of things you liked to do, where you grew up, how your relationship with your parents developed, what your hobbies/dreams/goals/motivators/anything else they think might be important. Once your application is complete, you send it to the agency or clinic, along with photographs of yourself as a baby, a toddler, an adult.

More on the next steps in the next post…

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