Egg Donation
I've been meaning to write this post for aaaaaaages, and now I finally have a chance to sit down and write it all out. Lets begin!
At the end of 2013, after Melon was born, I started thinking about donating eggs to an infertile couple. I can't really explain why, it was just something I wanted to do, and after experiencing pregnancy and labour I knew it was something that I want every woman/couple to have the opportunity to experience. So I started out doing some basic searching online. I came across the website Egg Donor Angels pretty quickly. It has a lot of information on it and also a pretty active page of "Ads" where you can either advertise yourself as looking for a donor, or being a donor.
I got a lot of messages, I'm not going to lie, but few of them I would even consider. When you're thinking about doing something as serious as donating a part of your body, you want someone to write you an email that is polite, detailed, and just... good? Like, I got messages that seriously just said "We want your eggs, when can you meet us?" No. Just no.
After fielding emails from weirdos and people I just didn't like, I got an email from a couple in Brisbane, Australia, that were super nice. They'd been through 13 failed IVF cycles, and as they were in their 40's, their time to have a family was running out. We emailed back and forth for months, we all spend countless hours on the phone together (the two of them and my husband and I), and it was all going well. They paid for the three of us to go to the Gold Coast to meet them and start the process.
The first thing we had to do was counselling. We had counselling with just me and my husband, then appointments with the nurse to discuss the hormones, then more counselling with the four of us. All of this was to go through everything that could happen, what we wanted done if more than 1 egg was harvested (ie did we want them destroyed, frozen, given to another couple etc). It was all stuff that the four of us had discussed many times before hand so it was nothing new.
There was quite a bit I had to do medically. When you're preparing to donate eggs you basically go through an IVF cycle, except when they remove and fertilise the eggs, they implant them back in your recipient instead of you. I had a few internal ultrasounds, and had to go on a specific brand of birth control to hold off ovulating on my own. I was also given hormones that I had to inject into my belly every day. I was on the pill for a month and when my period started, I started injecting the hormones. I had two types, I had Gonal F and Orgalutran. The Gonal F came in a pen type needle, kind of like a epi pen, where I'd just change the needle on the end and inject a specific amount, and the orgalutran came in single dose needles that I just opened up, injected, then threw out into my provided sharps container.
This went on for two weeks, then we went back to the Gold coast, ready for the egg collection. I had another internal ultrasound and the eggs/follicles weren't ready yet, so our 1 week stay in QLD turned into a 3 week stay over all. Over the three weeks there were a lot of ultrasounds and a change of medication, but finally the follicles were ready. I went into the hospital and was put under a general anaesthetic (put to sleep) for the collection. They collect the eggs by inserting a small tube up through your vagina, through your cervix and fallopian tubes and suck out the viable eggs. As I was waking up they told me the number of healthy eggs they collected was written on my hand: NINE!
Over the next week we kept getting bad news. We were now back home and our couple were waiting on the eggs to mature into embryo's so they could be implanted. Out of 9 eggs 8 were able to be fertilised, 8 turned into 5, 5 turned into 3 and eventually only 1 egg developed into an embryo, and unfortunately upon implantation it didn't take. Our couple didn't get pregnant.
We decided to try another cycle, but I was offered a full time job, something I couldn't turn down since we were now living with my husbands parents, and this ended up in a very emotional discussion between all of us. I understand that they were upset, but it wasn't my fault that I needed to provide for my family. They haven't spoken to us since.
Over all I'd say it was actually a pretty negative experience. I felt like I was being blamed for them not getting a baby in the end, and I honestly didn't expect it to fail, I hadn't truly thought about how I'd feel about it if they didn't fall pregnant afterwards. I wanted to do as many cycles as it took but I had to put MY family first. I have no idea if they've had a baby since. This is so hard to write about I'm actually getting pretty teary just thinking about it.
If you want to donate eggs, go for it, it can be very rewarding, but it can be extremely traumatic as well. Since doing the cycle I also haven't had a regular period and it's been almost a year. Currently I'm on day 37 of my cycle with no sign of my period, and prior to this I've had cycles of up to 80 days. It's not something I would ever do again, not for a stranger. I'd be more than happy to do it for a friend and I do have friends who have things going on which could make it difficult for them to conceive and I would do it for them in a heart beat. We developed a really good bond with this couple and now they don't even speak to us, it's heart breaking for everyone involved and I feel so used. Like they were only nice to us because I could give them a baby, and when I couldn't, they wanted nothing to do with me.
