Friday, February 04, 2005

Just say "yes, please" to fertility drugs

Drugs for me? $350. Drugs for her? $1,300. Having a baby?

Priceless.

Today I gave my Visa card number, along with enough information to steal my identity (yeah, right, like anyone would want to be me) to a nice woman at a pharmacy in Pittsburgh. She promised to send a happy meal of infertility drugs for me, with a supersize for Our Donor and a side of syringes for each of us. Our Donor is the stranger in my city who, God willing, will provide the oocyte -- an egg, a female gamete -- that finally allows me a healthy pregnancy.

God, I can't believe I'm doing this.

Today is the first day of my egg donation cycle, but only the newest day of a long infertility journey. In August 2003, when I was 38 and had been married for six months, I was diagnosed with diminshed ovarian reserve. In other words, the doctors said, my own eggs were hard boiled. My uterus was fine and I could easily carry a child, but my ovaries had shriveled up like a pair of raisins. My best options for motherhood were adoption, or egg donation with in vitro fertilization (IVF). I was told that I had a 3% chance of delivering a healthy infant with my own eggs. I was in shock. I was in denial. And if you'd asked me then whether I knew the meaning of "egg donation" or "IVF," I'd have said, "Um...how about we Google that?"

Fast forward. I have acquired an infertile woman's vocabulary, bristling with acronyms like ZIFT and GIFT and ICSI. I can chart my basal body temperature with precision equal to an atomic clock...a broken one. And I've spent oh, let's say $10,000 of my own and my insurance carrier's money. I've undergone two IUIs and one IVF with my own eggs. Miraculously, with only one healthy egg each cycle, I conceived twice. And I lost both to miscarriage after seeing slower-than-normal heartbeats, at 8 weeks and 9 weeks.

To me those were my babies. My children. They had names, and possessions, and my husband and I had even had a few fights about them. With the last baby, we were able to do a chromosomal analysis. We learned that we had a son, and that he had an abnormality that meant he couldn't live. I knew it was because of my defective egg. I was devastated. I felt like a child abuser. As if I'd fed him spoiled food, or left him naked in the cold. I will never stop grieving.

So now, far from being an obscure search engine result, egg donation is all that I think about. It is sleeptime, mealtime, downtime, car time, any time. It may be the most important, life-defining thing I ever do.

So I've decided to write these days as they happen. I need to understand how I came to this day, when I'm willing -- more than willing; I'm perishing -- to carry a child made from my husband's sperm and another woman's egg, and love it as my own.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Make sure you revoke that credit card authorization as soon as you can after the charge for medication goes through. I just found out today that my donor egg agency just charged $583 on my credit card 3 months later without my authorization.

$1,300 for your donor? you're lucky. Mine was $1,968. It was worth it though. Good luck!

Anonymous said...

I'll be saying yes please again, after a 3 yr. break. I did 8 iui's, and 7 ivf's over 4 yrs. I guess I was attached to the idea of a genetic child.

The 3 yr break did me good = to mourn, and look for a donor. That was on/off. I'd get weirded out by my judgments of the donors pictures, education etc.

But we're starting. Had an u/s and bloodwork. Start the pill in 2 wks.

It'll feel odd I'm sure, to be curious about this other woman's progress on the stims, cuz it's ours. Strange.

Anyway, so glad I found your blog.

Egg Donors said...

Great Post.....

I found your site on stumbleupon and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!

Thanks for sharing....

Anonymous said...

So grateful I stumbled upon your blog! I have just started my DE journey after three years of losses and failed IVF's. At 32, I was diagnosed with diminished ovarian reserve. Crushing! My hubby and I have mourned my eggs. And I think that was what needed to be done. I never thought I'd accept "donor eggs". But I am now so excited about getting started. I still have some horrible questions which nag at my heart... will I love my kids the same way I would if they had my genes? Is that selfish? Does it make me a bad person and a bad mom before I'm even pregnant! I am so grateful for your blog and I look forward to reading through every single post. thank you for sharing your story.