"If this was real-life dating, the good ones would all be gay AND have cancer."
... The Power Latina and I are discussing donor profiles. My whole dinner table is full of print outs, tables, notes and markers. We go over profile after profile, but all the medical histories list at least one kind of cancer, Alzheimers or Parkinsons. Based on the medical profiles alone, it seems to be impossible to find just the right guy that could potentially become my child's donor.
My ideas of picking someone with a certain eye and hair color combination, with dimples or a certain height, have long been buried under piles of paper and reports about allergies, genetic testing and all kinds of causes of death. Even if I wanted to, I would probably never find what I was originally looking for. At this point, all I can see are brain tumors and breast cancer.
I let my head slowly sink until my forehead hits the table. I close my eyes and think that I am about to grow my very own brain tumor instead of a baby if I keep on reading through more medical profiles.
*******
When I first started looking for the right donor, I was amazed by how many people have all kinds of cancer running in
their families. The more I read about it, the more blessed I felt that there does not seem to be any cancer running in my immediate family.
Before I dove too deep into the medical histories of potential donors, I made sure the donor had a negative blood type and CMV status just like me. I did not want to risk anything in these areas and I discussed it in this post. This only left me with about 15-20 profiles from the sperm bank I had selected. Then I went for the remaining medical information. I soon discovered that everybody seems to have something running in their family and that the donors who had a completely clean medical history even seemed a little suspicious to me. Do these 18 year old college kids even know what kind of medical problems their grandparents had, when they were younger?
I immediately eliminated some donors because of Alzheimers, Parkinsons and the sheer number of different kinds of cancer and other medical problems they had listed. I also eliminated some donors because of things they had listed that might have been completely fine with anybody else, but that really bothered me due to my own family's medical history. I really did not like the process but sometimes it came down to judging which medical problems seemed to be more serious than others. I even looked up some studies to find out how high the chances were that my child might inherit a certain condition or medical problem.
I know not everybody is giving this that much thought. A friend of mine, who is going through the same process, does not bother that much about the medical history of the donor. She decided that if she had a boyfriend or husband, she also could not pick the medical history. But for me, these are two completely different kinds of shoes. If I have the luxury of hand-picking a donor, then I will take these things into consideration.
In the end, it came down to only a handful of donors. So, then I started to look at some other criteria which I will discuss in some upcoming posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment