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| Image via Wikimedia |
Looking back, I never saw myself having to
choose an egg donor
to help me conceive. So to be faced with choosing a donor for a second
time was something completely foreign to me. I always knew the
potential was there, but it was something I didn’t think I needed to
think
about.
The first donor I chose for my cycle last
October was remarkably similar to me, only prettier. And skinnier. With a
better skin tone. OK, she was better version of me. And don’t we want our
children to have it better than us? She was unproven, meaning her eggs were
going to be used for the first time by yours truly. Still, why would I have any
doubt about the quality of her eggs? One in eight women will have difficulty
conceiving. She statistically should have been one of the other eight. I chose
her because our child would have looked like our biological one should have.
Apparently though, her eggs ended up having
a bit of a difficult time waking up from the thaw, as we wound up with only two
embryos out of eight. Of those, one was a stage behind and the other was two
stages behind. My newly diagnosed MTHFR mutation may have played a part in losing
those two embryos to a miscarriage, but we were warned in the kindest way
possible from our doctor that if the cycle didn’t work, it was not related to
me, it was due to the quality of the donor’s eggs.
Obviously, the cycle didn’t pan out. We
were back to square one, needing to once again choose the other half of our
future baby’s genetics. Last week, I emailed the donor coordinator, telling her we
needed to pull out all of the stops and only choose from the list of the best
candidates. As the movie "Mean Girls" is said to be quotable in any situation in
life: We needed the Regina George of all egg donors.
“Well, that depends on what characteristics you’re
looking for,” the coordinator replied back. “Why don’t you look at the list of
donors and let me know what characteristics you’d like and I can tell you if
they are popular or not.”
I wanted to scream my frustration
through
the laptop screen, ticking off on my fingers in sequence: “Preferably
Caucasian.” Tick. “Has successfully donated the most.” Tick. Those were
my
characteristics. I am not against a donor of a different race, but I
want the child that I birth to resemble my natural child as much as
possible.
But I muttered to myself under my breath, and started picking through
the large
list of donor profiles to email her.
Eventually, I settled on a rather daunting
handful that the coordinator confirmed had successfully gotten other women pregnant
and, after multiple conversations, both with my friend as well as with myself, I
placed my request form. The donor I picked doesn’t really look like me, but her
profile was minimal for concerning health conditions and I chose her feeling
good about my selection, which is what the whole goal of this was. Most
importantly though, she was a proven donor, and it brings me one step closer to
a baby.Labels: donor egg, mom.me
