The Choice

Aaaaaannnnd now we come to the post that has been looming for some time.  The donor.  How to choose.

There are a million ways to start here, but I'll dive in.

If I'm lucky enough to ever experience the joy of giving birth again (and I am skeptical that this is even possible), I plan to be honest with my child.  Age-appropriate honesty, but yes, I am in the camp that wants my child to know where they came from.  And be able to reach out to this incredible human being with questions if and when they arise.  A donor who is open to future contact, is therefore, pretty high on my list.

I want Niblet to know too, and our closest family members.  But that's it. My fertility novel is kept pretty close to the vest, primarily to protect the Nibble.  But also because it is, frankly, an exhausting story to tell.  If the Viking and I embark on this final frontier, we will have traveled a very long road to get here - from the partial molar pregnancy of the innocence of my thirties, to the point where my biggest (and most treatable problem) was Asherman's Syndrome, to the soul-sucking world of recurrent miscarriage, to the PTSD-inducing awfulness of Termination for Medical Reasons, to the out with a whimper losses of repeat chemical pregnancies...all these miles and seemingly endless mountains to this.  Donor Egg IVF.

This very long intro is my way of saying that sometimes, I, myself, can barely believe what I have been through.  And the last thing I want is to after years. of. this. bullshit. is to have to talk to people about how I birthed a red-headed, freckled baby with green eyes.  SO, with all of that said, I am seeking a donor who bears some physical resemblance to me.  She doesn't have to be as short as me (true story, I was attracted to my husband because he can reach high shelves), she doesn't necessarily need my exact eye color or hair color, but honestly, a nice-looking, medium complexioned, brown-haired, brown-eyed woman who tans easily would really make my life just a teensy bit easier.  Niblet looks like a swedish meatball - all blond hair and hazel eyes and jesus she's tall, and for the first two years of her life I couldn't see any of myself in her.  But I'm there. Her sweet dad likes to say she "got her pretty from her momma."  It's sort of true.

Now, for women who have had failed DE cycles, there is only once choice that matters.  The proven donor, that donor who has cycled before, cranked out as many eggs as can be imagined, and her eggs have resulted in babies.  Preferably more than one.

I used to think talents were a crap-shoot, until we discovered that Niblet is a beautiful dancer with natural musicality.  Like her mother and grandmother before her.  So, yeah, I won't lie, a little artistic ability would be awesome, it is, apparently, inheritable.  So if it's a toss up between the donor who played violin for 23 year and won competitions, versus, say the hypothetical long distance runner and track star, I'm gonna choose the musician every time.

So here I am.  With a donor who recently joined my clinic's roster, who is currently being screened by them.  She has brown hair and brown eyes.  Not a freckle on her. Her eyes in her childhood photos actually resemble mine as a kid.  She is very pretty, actually, probably more WASP-ishly pretty than my admittedly straight-outta-the-shtetl prettiness.  She has played violin for 23 years, her mother in fact, is a music teacher, musicality reportedly runs in her family.  Her answers to the standard questions were sharp and articulate and didn't raise any extreme red flags.

Tomorrow I travel to my clinic early in the morning, for an exam and a saline sonogram. I have also reached out to a lawyer to discuss what a donor egg contract would look like.  The viking and I have $15K in a home equity loan, but we would likely need to pull together a bit more if we want to work with more eggs.  Which I think we do. I have six thousand in savings at my disposal.  I know how lucky we are.

We would be doing a FET.  There's no way in hell I can do a synced cycle, and I am pretty sure I want to PGS those embryos anyway.

This is getting so real that I barely feel any emotion at all, I can't afford to.

Move along, nothing to see here, just a potential last-ditch crazy effort to fill a long-empty room in my house that currently doubles as storage.