I’ve known for about three months
now that having a child with my own eggs wasn’t going to be a
possibility. Well, to be fair, I’ve
known since the start of the third and final IVF cycle back in November, ever since
my doctor sat me down and told me he’s willing to give IVF with my own eggs one
last shot. So, officially nine
months. (The irony on that isn’t lost on
me, by the way.)
Nine
months to prepare myself, and grieve the loss of what could have been. I’ll be honest, the first few months were
tough to work through. The shock of
three failed IVFs, the tears shed when I realized I was going to lose the
genetic link to a future child, the numbing fear that nothing was going to work and in fact I would remain childless
forever.
I remember
one particularly bad evening with Chris, I had tears streaming down my face during a
discussion of the next steps. “I don’t
want to think about any of this. I don’t
want to do donor egg. I don’t want to adopt embryos. I don’t want to do anything!” And then I cried harder
because I realized if I was true to my word, there would never be a child. Barring
the miscarriage from the first IVF, I had never experienced such an overwhelming
sense of loss in my life.
I’m better
now. Kind of. I can think about donor egg options, and
moving forward and all that. I can think
about mixing another women’s eggs with my husband’s sperm without completely
losing my shit. For the most part, I
have come to some sort of acceptance of the whole thing, while at the same time,
in awe that I can be this totally,
completely, wholly infertile.
So it was
with this new sense of growth that I could listen to a friend a few weeks ago
tell me about a frozen egg program in Texas that sounded like I may have a shot
at. I would be given eight frozen eggs
from an anonymous donor of my choosing, and fly down to Texas to do a transfer
for about $15,000. The cost of my
medications would be about $500 or so. Doing
this would cost less than the price of a fresh donor IVF cycle here in Minnesota.
Of course, anyone looking to spend a few grand on treatments needs to have options. My husband and I already had an appointment
with our doctor and donor coordinator in mid-July, as scheduled.
We went in
needing to be impressed, as a single cycle of anonymous donor eggs had a price
tag of $25,000. The donor coordinator
walked us through how donors are screened, what the process would be like and
how she matched up donors to recipients. The first step was meeting with the clinic’s psychologist, who would
then give us a form to fill out about our personalities. We needed to provide a good headshot of us,
particularly me, because the coordinator would then take that picture and match
it up with donors to find someone who looked as close to me as possible. “You could be sisters, that’s how good I am
at matching,” she told us with a smile. Once
the personality form was turned in to the clinic, we would then be added to the
waiting list, where we will remain for 6-9 months until we are matched with a
donor.
Clearly, this option will take us well into 2015 before we would even have the chance at
trying to get pregnant again. We were told however, that this would give us the
best chance. At a 70-73% pregnancy rate,
the odds on us getting pregnant were far better than my chances with my own
eggs, even if they were completely normal. That’s huge. That’s something to
consider.
Our doctor
later that day confirmed that yes, using a fresh donor cycle (meaning the donor
goes through the IVF process and all her eggs retrieved would be given to me)
gives us our best chance. There is also
the fact that since we are working with healthy eggs, instead of my own craptastic
ones, we will have embryos left over to freeze for any future siblings if we so
desire.
The
appointments with the donor coordinator and our doctor left us even more in
turmoil. We were facing a decision: Go
to Texas for frozen eggs, with far less of a wait time, risking it not working
and left with nothing and $15,000 in debt; or go on the 7-month wait list for
our clinic here, pay more than the clinic in Texas for a fresh cycle, with
possibly more eggs to fertilize to embryos to freeze for the future.
Or, we
could do both. We will be having a phone
conference with the doctor in Texas. If we liked him, we could go to Texas for
the frozen transfer while on the waitlist here, hope and pray one of the
choices are successful ... and give out homemade peach jam as Christmas presents
the rest of our lives, because all of our money would have been spent on trying
to grow babies.
Whew. Some tough choices. All of these major decisions are enough to
make you want to go eat a doughnut or two. Which, by the way, I am going to go do now.Labels: donor egg, mom.me