When Do You Know?

When do you know it is time to move on to donor eggs, one of my friends asked me? When do you decide to make that next step in the infertility journey? Well, I find making decisions hard enough when they don't concern life-changing events. Give me a choice of tea or coffee in the morning and I need to think hard. And oh, the horrors of a restaurant menu with 20 different starters or main courses (choice stress!)... On the other hand, I am quite quick to decide on what I like for our house and also with clothes I generally know what I want. And desserts. Dead easy: something with chocolate of course!

The decision of moving on to donor eggs probably fell in between very easy and impossible in terms of decision-making. We had talked about it before, childishly joking who we'd like our donor to be. After all, one has to joke about very serious things! When we had our evaluation after our third ICSI, we asked our doctor about it. Who dismissed it rather abruptly, especially since we mentioned egg donation abroad. Infertility tourism, anonymous donors with weird diseases and no doubt even weirder personalities, we were stabbed with the speech. We were not to involve them in this hideous crime we were planning and just had to learn to live with being childless.

Building our family through donor eggs did not feel like a crime though, if maybe a little unconventional. And remaining childless didn't sound like a nice option. I know that donor eggs are certainly not for everyone, any more than adoption or even IVF is. But after 3 failed ICSIs and talk of very small percentage chance of conceiving with my own eggs, we were ready. Ready to seriously consider it as an option for us to build our family. One night over dinner we decided (as you do) to go to Spain for an intake in a clinic there.

It turned out that donor eggs would definitely be our best option. And I must say, it was fantastic to hear a doctor say that you have a 60%+ chance of getting pregnant, as opposed to less than 5%!! So we tried to figure out how we'd integrate it into our lifes and our future children's life. We discussed anonymous donation and whether we would tell our future children.

We carefully tried the idea on our closest of family and friends and they were wonderfully supportive. There was no judgement, no difficult questions about things we so painstakingly worried about ourselves. They just wanted us to be happy and for our future child to be healthy and happy. They reminded us that a child is more than it's DNA, that we would still be able to see Jonny's groovy characteristics, that it was a great opportunity for us to get pregnant and have a baby. To give life. Wow.

And in being so sweet and caring, our family and friends made it possible for me to make peace with the the loss of my genetic link with our baby. It helped us in the process. Because that is exactly what is was. There is not one point in time I can pinpoint and tell that is when we decided. At one point it just felt right and we were comfortable with the idea of donor eggs. The decision was made. Spain sounded like a pretty good place for doing some baby-making to us!