Third Time is the Charm for Selecting Our Egg Donor?
Our seemingly never ending IVF and surrogacy journey has had another delay.
Our new egg donor that we selected to begin our second round of embryo creation has been disqualified from participating in the fresh retrieval midway through the process.
What does this mean? And what happens now?
These are two great questions, but first I have to unpack some of the emotional baggage that comes with this unexpected turn of events.
I have previously written about how challenging it has been to restart our entire journey after our 3 failed transfers. That being said, we were very excited about this egg donor. It was unfortunate that the medical and legal clearance - estimated to be 4 months or less - took us 6 months. Why did it take this long? I think it’s a combination of scheduling challenges over the summer, and an (unconfirmed) hesitation on the part of the donor (more on that later).
The worst part about this particular delay was the timing. We found this out when I was traveling in the U.S. and my husband was at home in Sweden. It’s so hard to not be together when we get news about the process - good or bad, but especially bad.
All we want is a hug, maybe a quick cry, and you want your person around you as emotional support. Since we couldn’t be together, we did the next best thing and had an extended FaceTime session, and this is what we discussed.
Why was the retrieval cancelled?
Our donor was a healthy, young woman with a good AMH (anti-Mullerian hormone), which is the standard testing for fertility. She had undergone medical clearance with our reproductive endocrinologist, so we thought everything was good.
Unfortunately, things can go wrong when a donor starts hormones for the ovarian stimulation. I have discussed this in a previous article, but women take several weeks of hormone treatments in order to produce as many eggs as possible for the retrieval. Each clinic has their own protocol for the hormones, doses, and durations, and our clinic also does a mid-cycle check with an ultrasound to see how the follicles (or immature eggs) are developing.
When this ultrasound check was done, our donor was not showing normal stimulation and had very few follicles. In fact, it was so few that our reproductive endocrinologist immediately cancelled the retrieval and had to share with her the news that she likely has fertility issues.
At the same time, the clinic sent my husband and I a secure message with the same update. While we feel terrible for our donor and the fact that she now has to navigate her own fertility issues, it means that we have to go back to the beginning (yet again) and select a new egg donor.
What do we do now?
We took a week break. As with all the setbacks we have experienced in this journey, it’s critical to give space and process what has happened. We were frustrated, sad, disappointed, and angry at yet another delay, but we didn’t want to be feeling all those things when we went back to the database for another donor. We needed some time, and we needed to be together again before we could move forward.
Once I got back to Sweden, we felt ready to dive back into the database. While we largely stuck to our criteria from our previous selection - focusing on the donor and her family's physical, mental, and genetic health - we did consider a few different approaches.
What could we do differently this time?
In order to give us a larger selection of donors, we relaxed our criteria for our donor to be Hispanic. We moved this from a ‘must’ to a ‘nice to have.’ We felt that it was more important to find a donor that ‘looked like both of us.’ However, instead of focusing exclusively on Hispanic donors who have dark features, we opened up to include Caucasian girls (for my blue eyed, blonde hair) with and without darker features (for my half-Mexican husband).
However, we had a long discussion on this part of the selection process. Regardless of whose sperm is used, there is a possibility neither of us will look like our child. So, why focus on this at all? Well, as with most things about this process, it’s about the story you tell your children. Even if our child does not look like us, we think it’s important to try. We want them to feel like they belong with us, and even though that will come with being raised and loved by us, it is human nature to want to look like our family.
First the first time, we also considered experienced donors. We have never looked at these before as they are always more expensive, but this would help alleviate some of the fear and uncertainty we have now around this process. Our first donor produced only 18 eggs, and our second one didn’t even get to try. While things are not guaranteed to be the same with every retrieval, an experienced donor is more likely to produce a similar number of eggs. However, we also have to consider that our child could have diblings (donor siblings) in the world. With a first time donor, this is not the case. However, she could decide to donate again after us, and we would not necessarily know that happened.
Another novel approach we are considering is an open donation. We have previously contracted for semi-anonymous donations, in which we do not know the donor’s personal information, she does not know ours, but our child can contact her after he/she/they turn 18. While semi-anonymous and anonymous donations are most common in the U.S., we feel that an open donation could have several benefits: More personalization and more accountability.
My husband and I want this process to be as open and personal as possible. Having an open egg donation would definitely make this step much more intimate than we have had before. It's rare to find a donor who is willing to do this, but we did notice that our agency’s database now offers telephone chats between intended parents and egg donors before matching, which is not something we have done before.
The accountability is another possible benefit of an open donation. She would know us as Bryan and Victor and not just nameless intended fathers. This connection would definitely make her more likely to commit and follow through with the procedure. The delay with the medical and legal clearance of our last donor gave my husband and I pause. It almost seemed like the donor had lost interest in the process. It was as if she was having doubts, delaying the clinic appointment, or holding off notarizing the contract. We do not have any confirmation of this, and we asked our lawyer this when we were having delays with the contract. They didn’t say there was any issue from her side, but in our guts, she didn’t seem as excited as we wanted her to be. We want someone who really wants to do this, who will be excited for us to have a child, and who will be excited to meet our child in the future.
This person will be genetically linked to our child. Our child will likely be curious about their own genetic background so we want this future meeting to be as guaranteed as possible. An open donation seems to offer that more than the semi-anonymous ones. However, we are not holding our breath for this. It will be challenging to find a donor we really like who wants an open process, but it’s nice to have this consideration to personalize and hopefully accelerate the process if it does happen.
Now having gone through donors…
I’m thrilled that we have found several exciting options, with some being experienced donors and some also considering open donation.
After receiving more details from the clinic on their fertility history, we then proceeded to select our top 3 choices, all of which we would be excited to work with. As with our previous two selection processes, we asked for videos of the donors. I would highly recommend this to anyone going through the process. While you do get a lot of information from their online portfolio and photos, seeing them move, talk, express themselves, laugh, and smile always makes them more real, and it always makes the final selection way easier.
After viewing the 3 videos, my husband and I were immediately aligned on our choice and ranking. It’s not as though there is a ‘one,’ but seeing the videos makes it easy to know in your gut who you want to go with. It’s really the easiest part of the selection process as you have already filtered out all the important medical and genetic factors, so you are just watching to see if you feel anything and connect with the video. We have always felt this, and I think everyone will know when they see the video of a donor they want to work with.
While the donors we have selected this round are not experienced donors, they do have higher AMH levels than we have ever had before. Even though this is a scientific and medical process, there is so much that is unknown about how it can play out. I feel all we can do is be excited about our decision and move forward with hope and positivity. Humans are eternal optimists, and that is something every intended parent needs going through an IVF and surrogacy journey.
One thing is for certain, I always feel closer to my husband after these issues. It’s bittersweet that the negative experiences of our family building journey bring us closer as a couple, but maybe this is just the strengthening of our relationship to prepare for our new addition. I will say that I think our relationship is strong enough now, so I really hope this third donor leads to the embryos that will become our child.
