Featured: Donating My Eggs and What It Cost Me

A few months ago, I wrote a very personal post for Slutty Girl Problems about my egg donation last year.

I decided to register with Nurture as a donor because I am already a blood/organ/bone marrow donor, and I understand that people are willing to go through great lengths to have a child, especially one they can carry themselves. While I still feel that adoption is the most ethical route for those that wish to have children, genetics is an enormous motivational factor. Couples are willing to pay vast sums of money for IVF treatments so that they can carry and birth their own genetic offspring. Heck, in the case of egg donation, couples are willing to pay vast sums of money to have a child which may only be 50% genetically theirs.

We attach so much value to genetics, despite ideologically knowing that an adopted child will be no less our child than if we birthed it ourselves. Even as a donor with full knowledge and acceptance that the ova I gave would never grow into 'my' babies, I felt a vested interest in the process. My partner at the time was very serious about having children of his own someday, although he knew that I didn't want any. The donation brought these issues to the forefront of our relationship, and eventually we ended a very happy and healthy partnership due to the reality of our lifestyle differences -- how could we be together, if we knew we would eventually need to deal with the irresolvable question of children? Although we cared about each other, the experience forced us to confront the issues that we had been attempting to ignore. He struggled to understand how I could essentially have genetic offspring with another man (my donor couple was heterosexual), but not want children with him. Although I maintained that this was not the case, I wondered how I would feel if my partner eventually found a serious girlfriend who couldn't conceive, and through some twist of fate, they selected me as a donor? Naturally, egg donation is completely anonymous and neither of us would have known, but the idea of that possibility was enough to make me realise that the emotional attachment of genetics still has a hold on me.

I still don't regret my donation. After the procedure I received a gift and a card from my receiving couple (through the donation agency of course -- anonymity, remember?) thanking me profusely. It just made me understand the relevance of my decision to donate; the enormity of my decision to give something so insignificant to me -- something that would have been shed along with my uterine lining and discarded in the toilet -- and the impact that it would have on someone else's life. Although the experience was difficult and I still miss my previous partner, I also understand that we would have needed to break up eventually.

Below is an excerpt from the article. The published SGP version has been edited slightly, but I preferred the original text:

This is what it’s like in the weeks leading up to the retrieval: You keep the meds in the fridge between doses, and after a while you start feeling emotional. You start crying when the weather is too warm or the parcel you’d ordered is a day late. You also have about a day’s worth of crazy, inexplicable diarrhoea. You feel your ovaries getting heavy with eggs, swelling to the size of oranges (for reals – oranges!) and becoming externally palpable when you rub your lower belly. You get strange, stabby pains sometimes, and are forbidden from exercise in case your ovaries twist under their own bloated weight. At night you put your hand just above your pubic bone and rub yourself softly, trying to soothe your weirdly pregnant body. You’re told to use barrier methods due to your rabbitlike fertility, and drink lots of water.

You have blood drawn to see whether your hormonal levels are on track, and at some stage you’re flown to Johannesburg for ten days to be close to the donation centre. You have more ultrasounds and clinic visits and receive additional hormones. The new batch comes as a powder that you need to mix and inject using a real needle, not a pen, and causes a mild allergic reaction that stings and leaves a large, itchy welt around the injection site. You’re terrified that you’ll accidentally give yourself an embolism but an internet search tells you that the needle has an inbuilt mechanism to prevent air from entering your body. You wish you’d bothered to do the search before repeatedly stabbing yourself to try avoid injecting the bubbles.

The day before the retrieval, you need to inject at a very specific time, which happens to be exactly at the moment of an interval in a theatre show you’re watching with a friend. The lights come on and Sweeny Todd Live patrons start filing past you as you pull the needle out your belly. The timing is important because it signals to your body that it needs to release the waiting eggs.

You spend the night before the retrieval alternating between crying over Skype to your boyfriend and feeling anxious about the anaesthesia, because maybe it’s still a childhood fear despite whatever the doctors told you.

Read the full article here.