The syringe worried my mother though, so she had to leave the room while I did it. Being on hormones was like having premenstrual syndrome, but times worse - I was told that women "experience cramps" but I promise you, there was a lot more going on.
I put on weight, I felt bloated. Forget it - elasticated waists all the way. I got tearful easily over anything - pop songs, animal videos. The visits took up a lot of time, the appointments themselves were short but there were a lot of them - luckily I was only working part-time, and mostly in the evenings. The overall process took over three months. When I was close to donation - or "extraction", as it is sometimes known - I got a text from a nurse in the middle of the night. A terrorist attack had happened that evening near the clinic, and the entire area was taped off as a crime scene.
None of the staff could get to work and the more urgent patients had to be diverted to a Harley Street clinic. I only had a few days to go, so they needed to rearrange my appointment as soon as possible. On the way to the clinic the next morning, I found myself thinking: "If I'm killed in a terrorist attack, can it please be after I donate, because I've got these precious eggs in my tummy that need to go to families who are relying on me. The importance of what I was doing hadn't quite sunk in until that moment.
The Harley Street clinic was so plush that the waiting room had a mural. The magazines were proper fashion magazines and instead of having to crane my neck to look at the ultrasound, I could see it on a huge plasma screen on the wall. The technician counted my egg sacs. I'd got pretty good at counting them myself over the weeks. They decided I was ready and told me about the donation procedure, which involved fasting the night before.
I had to come back early the next morning. I decided to dress up for the occasion because I didn't want to feel like a patient - plus, it was Harley Street! I was put in a waiting room and through the curtains I could hear a steady stream of women who were also there to donate. I couldn't see them, but when I heard someone refer to me as "the Chinese lady" I assumed the others weren't. I'd never been put under a general anaesthetic before, or even worn a hospital gown.
The nurses were concerned for my modesty but I was taking selfies in the bathroom pretending it was a backless dress. Going into the theatre I put my legs in the stirrups and tried to peer around the operating theatre - I wanted to remember everything, but they counted me out and the next thing I knew, I was in a chair in the recovery room.
Since these listings are sometimes posted directly by the intended parents, they may have shorter or less thorough initial application processes, and they can offer significantly higher monetary sums than agencies or clinics traditionally would. But applying to unverified listings poses obvious risks. In , an Idaho woman was charged with fraud for stealing eggs from donors through Craigslist, never paying the agreed upon sums after receiving the eggs.
Attempting, in part, to make the process safer, organizations began pairing donors and intended parents through their own vetted databases. Prospective parents, can now scroll through the profiles of thousands of potential donors, not unlike on a dating website.
Circle Surrogacy offers non-anonymous pairings, where the donor has an opportunity to meet and interact with the families.
Whaley set it up when she was She applied that night and forgot about it. Now, the goodwill of element, not the money, is her favorite part: She plans to donate six times — the maximum advisable. But she also knows that people make these choices with their partners all the time.
To prevent people from donating repeatedly with the risks being unknown , or incentivizing people to withhold information to make themselves more attractive to donors, ethical guidelines suggest offering less money. Mecerod feels the experience is very rewarding for prospective donors, through the education and free genetic testing, even if they choose not to follow through with the donation.
While many women admit to being pulled in by the amount they can earn from their eggs, most I spoke to still saw it as a choice. The first and second time she used the money to cover rent while she was between jobs, the third time, to pay tuition fees. Data and long-term research on egg donation is scarce. In , new research suggested that fertility drugs may be linked to the development of uterine cancers. A report by The Donor Sibling Registry found suspicious occurrences of breast cancer in otherwise healthy young donors who showed no genetic predisposition to the disease, citing hormone therapy during donation as a possible cause.
Furthermore, while health data is monitored for those who donate organs, the same information is not required for egg donation: it is up to donation agencies to request past medical information on donors, and even then they are at the mercy of donors voluntarily doing so — and telling the truth when they do.
Most are not asked for, and do not report, medical changes after starting the process. In the meantime, thousands of young donors every year undergo egg removal and hormone treatment, without anyone fully understanding the consequences. Most of them needed the money. When the cycle ends, the donors leave with the future impacts a mystery.
U p until the very end of my first donation, I felt positive about my experience. Despite fainting; feeling objectified and shuffled around; despite the laborious injections, I still liked it.
I felt comfort and satisfaction knowing I helped people achieve their dreams. But in the final days ticking down to my surgery, I felt a slew of emotions that confused what I thought would be a rewarding end. I felt at the mercy of the clinic. On the day before my surgery, I asked a nurse point-blank why they scheduled surgeries with such little advance.
I felt disrespected and angry. The company was inconsiderate of my time, and I was suddenly left scrambling around to make sure someone could still pick me up from my surgery the following day. I was expected to have absolute flexibility. Appointments popped up and I was expected to be available. As the week wore on, my enlarged ovaries sat heavy in my abdomen as a thick and uncomfortable reminder.
I wonder if the woman receiving my eggs is more informed than I am. The arrival of this check would quell my anxiety for a handful of months, allowing me to return to my studies stress-free —— studies which would offer me stability and confidence towards my dream job.
Every piece was a steppingstone towards a future I desperately wanted. My surgery lasted a total of seven minutes and laid me up in bed for a day and a half at home, as my stomach cramped and contorted. The clinic offered me no pain relievers, so I lived on a cocktail of Tylenol and Advil. I do worry about how it would impact my body, but the impact on my life would be so significant. This article was amended on 9 November to correct the cost of tuition at Columbia University.
A nurse scoots over and pulls my arm over the cuff of the chair. I knew what they really meant by this was that my genetic make-up was similar enough to the eggless mother for them to pretend that I never existed, but the agency couldn't tell me anything about the couple another policy other than the fact that they were "nice.
I imagined the couple sitting in Dr. Greene's office, their hands joined in white-knuckle fist, her eyes glassy, his distant, both of them in suits, maybe even on a lunch break, as they made a choice.
Donor number three-thousand and whatever. We'll take her. The next day I went to the clinic and a nurse read a contract to me. For the next two to three weeks I couldn't drink, smoke, have sex, or take drugs except for the ones they give me. I couldn't stay up too late or go to bed too early, as this would disrupt my injection cycle.
I also needed to avoid jump-roping, pogo-sticking, or jostling up a flight a stairs too quickly, especially toward the end when my ovaries would feel as heavy as navel oranges and tender, like fresh scabs. I was also reminded that I had no right to the contact information of the recipients and I would have no right or obligation to any potential offspring, and, in fact, I will not even be informed if a child did result from my donated ova, or how many, or of the nature of its or their health.
These two I have to keep in the refrigerator. This one I'll have to mix myself; two powders to one cc of saline. This is the one you'll take every night for the first five days, and then you'll add this one and this one in the morning. You use the orange needles on this one, the pink needles on that one, and the one you take in the morning has it's own little needles that twist on the top. Egg donors and women undergoing in vitro fertilization take the same drugs in varying doses and the same extraction procedure.
The difference, of course, comes after the extraction, when the donor's lab-fertilized eggs are implanted into the recipient and the other has them implanted into herself. The injections began for me with a low dose Lupron, an drug that greatly reduces the sex hormones estradiol and testosterone and has been used to treat prostate cancer, precocious puberty, and has even in very high doses been used to chemically castrate pedophiles.
After a few days, a dose of Menopur was added, an injection is made from the urine of post-menopausal women that stimulates multiple ovarian follicles to produce eggs instead of the single follicle that typically matures and ovulates each month. The night before the retrieval I took a final injection of Gonal-F, a mega-follicle-stimulating-hormone that is bovine-derived, at a precise hour the agency had assigned to me so that I would ovulate while on the operating table.
With Gonal-F RFF circulating my blood that night, I considered the slight hypocrisy of ever again buying organic, hormone-free yogurt. According to studies that have been performed since IVF became more widespread in the mid-'80s, taking these drugs does not deplete a woman's supply of eggs as the extra follicles stimulated to ovulate would have naturally withered instead of maturing that month.
But that doesn't negate the fact that taking huge doses of hormones is a tax on your body, and what it could potentially trigger isn't completely known. Despite anything any study could tell me, I knew it was still a gamble. After being on the drugs for a week, I didn't notice any of the side-effects I'd been warned of -- hot flashes, nausea, bloating, etc.
In seminars I had to routinely resist the impulse to pause class for a group hug or slide under the table to weep about how much I loved The Moviegoer. I see a plastic bag drifting in the wind one afternoon and start crying, then realize this is like that scene from American Beauty , then I cry over American Beauty , then I cry over the fact that I am crying over American Beauty. But none of this crying was from actually being sad ; I just felt too connected to the lives of others, to the vulnerability I could hear in someone's voice or hanging plainly on his face.
If I made eye contact with anyone I immediately wanted to mourn and rejoice them. Subways were impossible. Strangers were emotional landmines. I was the menopausal, pregnant, and postpartum mother of the world. I realize now that it sounds dramatic. It was dramatic, even to me: I'm not the weepiest woman who ever was. So I found the over-emotional side-effect strangely enjoyable, like I was renting some more emotional woman's brain. I learned first-hand that a personality can be deeply altered by a medication, that our brains are ever at the mercy of hormones and enzymes.
The morning of the surgery I arrived at the clinic exactly on time with an empty belly, dry mouth, and my long-suffering boyfriend. It was his job to ensure I didn't fall asleep or absently step in front of a taxi while the anesthesia was wearing off on my way home. It was my job to go back to being normal once this was all over. The procedure lasted about 20 minutes during which I was under full anesthesia, though the agency refers to this as a "retrieval," never "surgery.
I woke up feeling quite good -- well-rested, even -- and someone gave me a graham cracker and a glass of water and a few days later I get a check in the mail. Sometimes the ova don't make it out of the Petri dish. Sometimes the sperm just swim frantically around this foreign egg, refusing to plunge, finally dying. Or else the wife's uterus rejects the zygote that is half her husband and half a mystery -- thousands of dollars shaken off with her blood.
About 60 percent of the time everything goes fine. Either way, the donor is never told what happened, but a few weeks after the retrieval, I got a call. It was exceptionally successful , the nurse tells me, you ovulated twice as many eggs as a the average donor. I did not consider it.
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