Choosing an Egg Donor is scary.
I was approached by GoStork to explore their new free one-stop-shop platform for prospective donor parents and share my thoughts.
In doing so, it brought back a lot of memories for me.
I guess that’s why infertility is trauma - because when I am triggered by something that reminds me of a traumatic event, my body and mind literally go back to that exact time and place. I vividly remember what it felt like to start our search for our egg donor. Sitting next to the man I married, turning on the computer to look at young (gorgeous) fertile women together.
Nothing could have prepared me for this moment.
NOTHING.
Before logging in, I opened a bottle of wine and said “come on babe, lets go surf the web for hot chicks!”. Humor has always been my most prized coping mechanism for handling life’s most awkward moments. If someone had told me this is what we would be doing 5 years into our marriage, I wouldn’t have believed them.
Our fertility clinic gave us five different egg donor agency websites to carefully study and examine. FIVE. I can barely keep track of two email addresses, let alone five different logins and passwords. This process was already overwhelming enough, and now I have to manage an army of young, beautiful women and remember who I saw, where I saw them, and what I liked about them?
Huh?
We tried the first login and put in our search criteria to filter through the results. Blonde hair. Blue Eyes. Height 5'6"- 5'9". Pretty straight forward, right? Um. NO. I just wanted a few snapshots of the perfect donor candidates, but what we found was a library of ALL the young, blue-eyed fertile women to ever exist in the land of donor eggs.
The profiles were intense. Photos at all ages, photos of their parents, their kids if they had kids, their favorite movies, diet restrictions, medical history, bra size, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, blood type, you name it. They even listed their favorite color. I'm over here stressed out trying to make sure our donor has some sort of education and straight teeth and now you're talking about colors? What is this fucking Sesame Street? We were so overwhelmed. I spent hours and hours sifting through profiles. Searching and searching for our "chosen one". Pulling my gray hairs out, one by one.
More wine, please.
I actually had to excuse my husband from the process and take the wheel alone. It was just too much for me.
It was hard enough trying to manage my own emotions, let alone worrying whether he had a boner or not.
(Disclaimer, he did NOT have a boner, but naturally I was worried. These girls were HOT. HOT. HOT!). Believe it or not, he was actually more weirded out than I was.
Critical does not even begin to describe my frame of mind. #743 was cute but her smile was too gummy. #652 looked good on paper but didn't seem outgoing enough in her profile. #786 seemed great but her GPA wasn't quite high enough, and Lord knows I ain’t no genius. She also listed Twilight as her favorite book - and I had to draw the line on vampire romance novels. Ew. #689 was damn near perfect but she decided at the last minute to move away to grad school. Oh, and her sense of fashion wasn't exactly what I had hoped - she had this red sweater situation that I just couldn't get past.
I obsessed over the littlest things and I felt so icky about it. Who am I to judge? I can’t fathom an infertile couple judging me by my bio and photos when I was in my early 20’s. I can just picture it. “Oooh, let’s go with #342. The girl who still has a baby tooth, dropped out of a college sport to join a sorority and skip class, sued her boyfriend on Judge Judy and works at Hooters part time.” (Side note, I only worked at Hooters for two weeks. I got fired because I wouldn’t peel a guys shrimp for him).
Double Ew.
I finally decided to create a spreadsheet of the ones we were considering. I was getting so lost in the search and was confusing donors.
How is this my life?
I recently learned about GoStork.com which is a free resource that aggregates all the egg donor sites out there to one central place and I soooo wish I had a resource like this when I was beginning my search. They are the largest free online database and have over 10,000 egg donors in their database!
The GoStork platform gives you access to all the information you need about egg donors you are considering in ONE PLACE - ie. age, appearance, photos (some have videos too!!!) education, race/ethnicity, religion, location, fee, any prior donation record or proven fertility, medical history (of themselves and their family) and more.
I repeat, in ONE PLACE.
They also have a pretty awesome comparison tool where you can view egg donors side by side (ie. that spreadsheet I took hours and hours to create) and get in one click/a few seconds. YES. YES.
And you know what the best part is?
GoStork shares the cost breakdown on the comparison tool too!
I don’t know of any other site or resource out there that does this! I remember having to send so many emails, phone calls, etc to get price breakdowns from the different donor agencies, add it with my IVF fees from my RE and update line by line in my spreadsheet. GoStork gives you the full “Journey Cost” in…. (wait for it….)
ONE PLACE.
They also have a direct messaging tool to easily message with providers with questions about their services, their egg donors, etc., or book meetings (calls or zooms) with them. ALL provider’s calendars are integrated with GoStork!
And it is totally FREE!!
I digress.
So, I went back to my doctor and asked for her advice. I asked her…
What am I even looking for?
Is there a criteria I should be following?
How the hell do I even find the “right egg donor”?
Is there a guide book on this stuff?
The short answer was no. She told me to think about choosing the donor like choosing my spouse. She said that there should be a spark or some sort of connection. She assured me that I would know when I had found the “one”.
I’m sorry, what?
How the hell am I supposed to feel something for a young girl I’ve never met?
I mean, I don’t even know her name. This is crazy talk.
More scrolling. More wine.
After hours, days and weeks of searching we finally found “the one”. She looked like she could have been my twin sister AND she was available! Blessed be the fruit (literally).
My doctor told me that the donor had my same mannerisms. She talked like me, she laughed like me. Is this the connection I was seeking? She was a first time donor, so we knew we were taking a risk, but I felt something for this girl (at least I thought I did). She’s gotta be the one! We selected her as our donor, signed legal agreements and began the process. The love connection was made but unfortunately ended in a break up. The day before her egg retrieval was scheduled to take place, most of her eggs had vanished. Poof, gone. We don’t know what happened, but she wasn’t the one after all. We were heart broken.
Yes, my egg donor was also infertile.
After a million ugly cries and taking much needed time off from the process, we decided to try a new doctor. I’ll never forget what he said to me when I told him what had happened… “You don’t need to fall in love with your donor, or find your twin, Victoria. You just need to find someone with healthy, fertile eggs.”
Hmm, that was a theory I could get behind. It definitely seemed less stressful, but at the same time, seemed a little too “business” for this life altering process. So, I decided to take his advice, but with my own special twist. I’d focus my energy more towards healthy and fertile and less on doppelganger, but I’d look for one or two things that I felt connected to.
The second donor we ended up choosing, definitely wasn’t my twin. She looked like she could be a second or third cousin, maybe. MAYBE. But she was very fertile, had proven success and had a very clean medical record and family history. I didn’t feel a spark, or love connection. She had a similar heritage to me - German and English - and I thought this could be a special bond to share with my future child and a way to connect her to my side of the family, beyond genetics.
She also put Step Brothers as her favorite movie.
“Did we just become best friends?”
I didn’t feel a spark or love connection yet this is the woman that helped make me a mother. She didn’t look exactly like me yet her eggs led to the love of my life, my one and only. My soulmate, Florence.
So, my advice?
You can’t possibly expect to feel a connection with someone you have never met.
And frankly, you don’t need to. Your child and partner fill that role. You just need a good healthy seed that your soil can nurture to grow. Your body has EVERYTHING your baby needs to develop and thrive into a beautiful flower. And the growth of that flower will continue on for years and years, and it is YOUR love that will water it.
If I were to do it all over again, I would definitely use GoStork. It sure would have saved me a ton of stress, time (and wine).
Cheers!
This post has been sponsored by GoStork.com. All thoughts and opinions are my own. I've partnered with GoStork.com to share my thoughts on the Egg Donor selection process as well as talk a little more about their platform.
