Denmark - here I come?!?

At the beginning of the month, I had my first skype consultation with a Danish clinic. After a lot of internet research, I found a clinic that I liked and that I thought might be right for me to do IVF with.

I decided for a European clinic, because they offer refunds if the IVF process has to be cancelled at certain points during the procedure (e.g. before egg retrieval or after retrieval but before implantation). Most American clinics asked patients to pay the full amount upfront and did not offer any refunds.
Also, the Danish clinic I found offered a package deal with 3 IVFs and 2 FETs for about the same cost that a single IVF treatment would have cost me at the clinics in my area. Unlike many American clinics that make package deals only available to women that fulfill certain criteria (age, hormone levels, BMI etc.) the Danish clinic offers the deal to all patients.
And finally, I was planning on spending my summer in Europe anyway. Being off work and having the time to travel to a clinic for monitoring and treatment makes things just easier. So, seaking treatment in Europe just seemed the logical step.

The skype consultation went very well. I really liked the doctor. She was super nice and answered all my questions patiently. So, I believe, I will go with this clinic and I am currently aiming for trying IVF in July.

If everything works out as planned, I have to get an ultrasound in June to check that everything is okay. I am a little bit worried about having suddenly developed a problem, in the last half year. That would put my IVF plans on hold and I could not try it this summer in Europe. I would be so crushed! So, let`s hope and pray that there are no polyps or cysts or other bad things that could cause a delay.

Then I have to figure out where to order my meds. I will compare prices in the US and in Germany and I hope that I will find the cheapest, easiest solution.

I also have to figure out how to pay for the treatment (e.g. transfer money to Europe). But I am not as worried about this as I am worried about a polyp or a cyst or a fibroid.

Finally, I should decide which sperm I want to use. I had my heart set on the American donor that I used for my last two IUI attempts. He is exactly what I always wanted. However, I am worried about transferring the sperm safely to Denmark. How do I manage that the sperm will arrive safely and that customs won`t keep it too long, or x-ray it or something? I also found a Danish donor who I really liked, but I don`t like him as much as my American donor - partially because I do not have that much information about him. So, what shall I do?

Questions over questions and so many things left to plan and left to organize. If only it could already be July!

I bought it!

I bought my first donor vial today!

When it comes to decisions, I am the worst. I just cannot seem to commit to anything. I am usually the last person that orders at a restaurant. I do not have a favorite food, color, song, movie, anything. I like different things when I am in different moods. When you try to pick the biological father of your future child, that is a bad thing.

Every morning on my way to work, and ever noon when I go on lunch break, and every evening when I go home, I have to walk along a small path in between buildings. Now that it is almost summer, everything along that path is in bloom and the sun, while shining through the trees, paints patterns on that little path. Every day when I walked that peaceful path in the last weeks, it was like a mini-meditation for me. I always meditated about my donor choices. I changed my mind so often that every day, I had a different donor that I thought would be my favorite. Every time day, I thought: "That's it! I found him!" But then, the next day, I changed my mind again. At some point, I came to realize I had to make my peace with one of these donors and come to a decision. For someone who seems to be incapable of making everyday decisions, making an important decision like this one is pure torture.

Last night, when I checked the donor profiles online, I saw that one of my top donor choices was running out of vials. And I panicked a little. I really liked that donor. He had flaws, but all donors seem to have them. I still really liked him. So, I decided to sleep over this for one more night to see if I would really mind if he sold out and I could not use him for my IUI.
It turned out that yes, I would mind. I really liked that guy. So, today, I called the bank and asked if he had any vials left. He had only 3 left. I quickly decided I would buy one of them. Granted the shipping costs would usually mandate me to buy more than just one vial, but for my first try, I just wanted to buy one vial. So far, he has no reported pregnancies but he is also a very new donor. In case it turns out that he has low quality, I want to keep the option open to choose a different donor for the next time. Besides, if this does not work, I will probably wait a few months before giving this my second try and by then, there might be new donors. 

I feel happy and relieved. Later tonight, that donor ran out of vials. There will be more from him in a few weeks, but I am glad, I still got one for my first IUI. I guess the first one is always special.

Let the show begin!

The Quest for the right Donor - Personality Traits

After I had limited my selection of donors because of their medical history and open ID status, I tried to find out more about my donors' personality traits. The sperm bank I chose provided a free donor essay (actually just a handful of questions that the donors answered in a couple of sentences) and I bought a subscription that gave me access to an audio-interview and some additional information about the donors.

Why this mattered to me:
I wanted to get at least a little glimpse into who they were and who the biological father of my child would be. Sometimes, I am a very logical and rational person, e.g. I looked at the medical history of the donors and eliminated people just because of that. But I am also a very emotional person and somehow it is important to me that I "like" the donor. Or at least that I do not find him annoying.
I also would have loved to be able to tell my child later that I picked their donor because I really liked what he was passionate about or what he said about a certain topic. But after looking at donor after donor, I am not sure if this is really going to happen. With every new document or file I opened, my perception of that person changed and I never got the impression that I really knew what they were like. There is no way I am going to find the right guy just based on his personality.


Is personality inherited? - The old question of nature vs. nurture.
When I talked about this with an old friend of mine, he said that he would not care about this aspect at all. He does not believe that personality is inherited. My friend the Power Latina said the exact same. They both believe that it is mostly the upbringing that shapes a child's personality. But I am not so sure about that.
My dad is a twin. He and his brother are different like day and night, even though they grew up in the same household and their parents treated them exactly the same. If personality is acquired or learned, how come one of them turned out more confident than the other? I personally believe that it is a mixture of nature and nurture: The basis for a personality trait may be inherited but if this trait really comes out in the child might be triggered or suppressed by how the child is raised. Believing this leads me to my next question:

Do I pick someone who matches or compliments my personality?
If personality traits are inherited to some extend, should I pick a donor that matches my personality or someone whose personality is the opposite to my weaker traits so that we balance each other out? I thought a lot about this. I tried to pick someone who has some personality traits that I do not have but would like to have. And I also picked one that matches my personality in other areas. I tried to pick someone that I knew I would be able to get along with and then, I hoped for the best...

Donor interviews and what they really taught me
I just spent the last weekend checking out donor essays and audio-interviews with my friend the Power Latina and we think we "cracked the code" to donor personality. Of course, this is not scientific and it probably also does not always hold true, but these are our little theories that we came up with:

(a) The interviewer often says more about the donor than the donor himself
A lot of the donors that we listened to were interviewed by the same woman, but the way she talked to some donors was quite different than how she talked to other donors. She actually seemed to be flirting with some of them, while she seemed to be completely down to business with others. We think that the ones she was flirting with might be more attractive than the others. If the interviewer started giggling during the interview - bingo! we have winner!

(b) If the donor is trying too hard to sell himself, there might be nothing worth buying
This is something that the Power Latina and I learned from years of online dating. If a guy tries really really hard to sell himself, he might really need to sell himself because otherwise people would not be interested in him. If someone is good-looking, an interesting person, or just confident, they usually do not try to sell themselves. Short and brief answers will suffice to make others become interested in them.

(c) The good, the bad, and the totally pointless
Most interviews seem to consist of three kinds of questions: the good, the bad, and the totally pointless. Let's start with the good ones: The good questions are the ones that really tell you a lot about the donor, e.g. If you could spend a day with any person dead or alive, who would you like to spend the day with? If the donor answers with a contemporary slapstick comedian that probably nobody will know in 5 years ... not the kind of donor I am looking for. If the donor answers this question with the name of a good author or artists and gives an intelligent answer why he would like to meet that person-it would definitely be a plus. 
Bad questions are questions that almost every donor will answer the same or almost the same way. For example: I have read that you are (not) religious. Can you tell me a little bit about your moral values? Every donor will answer: "I think we should treat others like we want to be treated ourselves" - or some variation of this answer. If everybody answers the question the same way, the answer does not really tell me anything about the donor. So, it is a bad question.
Pointless questions are those that the donor has already answered multiple times in other parts of his profile. So, for example, if the donor has already written in his profile what he studies, answered one of the essay questions by going into his studies and then gets asked the same question again during the interview, it is kind of pointless.

The bottom line
After looking at a lot of profiles, listening to audio-interviews and reading essay answers, I decided that these are some things that I am looking for in the personality of a donor:
- Does the donor seem at least a little bit intelligent? (Do his answers demonstrate insight? Can he give answers that pertain to the question without going off on other topics? Does his answer demonstrate cohesion and coherence?)
- Is the donor confident without being arrogant?
- How does the donor talk about his family?
- Does the donor have a goal in his life? Does he have a passion? (To me, it does not matter that much, what the passion or goal is, but it is important that the donor has one.)
- Does the donor contradict himself? (Does he walk the walk or just talk the talk? If the donor claims to be shy, does he really appear shy in the audio-interview?)
However, the bottom line really is that no matter what the donors wrote in the essays or said during the interviews. This is only a one-time glimpse into who they are. It is not a complete picture of the donor and should not be treated as such. Maybe a week or a month later, the donor would have given completely different answers to the questions.

I had hoped to get some idea about the donor and with some donors that worked out with others not so much. When it comes down to it, donor personality is only one of many factors that played a role for me. It always was important but never the most important thing about the donors.

The Quest for the right Donor - Open Identity?

One of the factors that played into choosing the right donor for my future child was the open identity factor. When donating sperm, donors can decide if they are willing to get contacted by their children once the children turn 18 or if they would rather not get in contact with their offspring. If they agree to that contact, they are called open identity donors. Their sperm usually costs a little more than the sperm from donors who are not open identity donors.

For the donors it is a tough decision because most of them are not much older than 18 themselves and a lot can change for them over the years. They might get married and have a family of their own. I also doubt that they can foresee how many children they might get contacted by in 18 years. Depending on how many kids they fathered, there might 40 or more "kids" later. That can be quite overwhelming.

So, this was a really tough decision for me, too. I have been going back and forth. At first I thought, that I wanted an open donor. I wanted to give my future child the opportunity to meet their biological father when he or she turns 18. I read about some people online, who were conceived via donor sperm and never got a chance to find out who their donor was. I think, a lot of these people really struggle with the fact that they were never even given the chance or a choice. It breaks my heart thinking that my future child might have to go through something like that, too. It does not have to be that way, but I thought it might be fair for my child to give him or her the chance to find out about his or her biological father.

However, this possibility of contact is only like a door that is kept ajar. There is no guarantee that anybody will ever step through this door. My child might not even be interested in the donor or the donor might be dead by the time my child turns 18. There is also no guarantee that my child will get a lot of answers, a long response or a lot of information from or about the donor. A lot of things can happen in 18+ years, so, who knows what this contact will look like.

It is also important to look at how banks will try to establish the contact with the donor. I read in some online forums that some banks will not tell the donors "Hey, there is a kid who would like to meet you." They contact the donors every x number of years and ask them to update their medical profiles etc. If the donor changed his phone number and/or address he might not even get this request for an update. If the donor reacts and updates his profile, the bank might (or might not) tell him that there is a child that wants to contact him. If he does not react to this request to update the profile, he might never find out that someone would like to get in contact with him. At that point, establishing contact with the donor is a courtesy service of the sperm bank. They will not make more money whether the contact is established or not. There is nothing left for them to gain out of this. So, they may or may not put real effort into this. As far as I know, donors will also not get more money for updating their profiles, so there is no more gain for them in that either - except for helping their offspring, of course... 

There are also some sperm banks out there that promise to try to establish contact with the donor before the child turns 18. There are some mothers and children that feel the need to get in contact with the donor while the children are still little. They might need information for medical reasons or the children just want to know who their biological father is. However, from what I read in different online forums, you cannot really trust that promise some sperm banks give you. They will not give out information of the donor, unless the child`s life is at risk and/or the risk is due to some genetic issue. Often this genetic connection is hard to prove, especially without any information about or additional testing of the donor.

When I found that I had a hard time finding an open donor that also matched my other criteria (such as Rh factor and CMV status) as well, I moved away from choosing an open donor. It is extra money, there is no guarantee if and what kind of contact there will be in the future and I might have to compromise on other important criteria. The question is if having an Open ID donor would be worth the compromises and effort.
 
In addition, some sperm banks give you a lot of information about the donors anyway. For example, one bank gives you the full birth date and adult pictures. 15 years ago, nobody would have thought how easy it would be to find old classmates via the internet. Who knows? In 18+ years, you might be able to find out who this person is just based on his birth date, some adult pictures, and a college major.  It is hard to tell what will happen in the future, but I see that as a possibility. Then again, the question remains if it is a good idea to hunt someone down who never wanted any contact with your child in the first place. If the donor wants to be found in 18 years, he will be found. He can register with the donor sibling website or several yahoo groups no matter if he is an open donor now or not.

So, I came to the conclusion that taken inconsideration all the factors that are not guaranteed, all the things that can go wrong, and all the compromises I would have to make, choosing an open donor might not be one of the highest criteria on my list. It might be unfair to ask a 20 year old donor, who has no idea where his life may take him, to make a life decision like this. But taking away my child`s chance to meet his or her father in the future, is also quite unfair. So, I have been going back and forth trying to make the right decision.

I am currently leaning towards an open donor after I found another reason on the donor sibling registry website. There is a section in which the reviews of sperm banks  from different online discussion groups are compiled. Parents report about their positive and negative experiences with sperm banks. There is one case where some parents suspected that the sperm bank they had used, was falsifying information in the donor profile. These parents had found each other (and maybe even the donor- I cannot recall) on the DSR website. They suspected that the sperm bank thought it could get away with tempering with the donor information, because the donor was not an open donor and the parents, children and the donor would never meet. I don't know in how far this is true or what exactly went on there, but I think this might be a point to keep in mind. With an open donor, a sperm bank has more reason to be really honest and might be less tempted to change or hide some information, because it will come out sooner or later.

So, in summary, this is a really tough decision. Right now, I have a donor I really like and he is an open donor. However, if he should not be available anymore when I try to conceive, I don`t know if I will be able to find another donor that is an open donor and matches my other criteria. And I don`t know if I want to compromise any of the other criteria for this one. If anybody who is reading this has made a decision regarding this issue, I would really welcome any comments in the comment section below.

The Quest for the right Donor - Medical History

"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.

Selecting a Sperm Bank - Part 3

The first two parts of this post can be found here and here.

As I was searching for the right sperm bank, I also wondered, how the banks would react, if a problem occured later. If the child was sick and I needed information from the donor and could not wait years for the first contact.

While I was searching for answers to this scenario, I read this great article called "The Children of Donor X" which appeared in the April 2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. The article is about a number of families that have used the same sperm donor and some of their children turned out to have Asperger's syndrome or Autism. Among other things, the article discusses how sperm banks handle a situation like this. While in similar cases, some sperm banks did not seem to be concerned about problems like this and continued selling the sperm without even keeping record of the problems that arose, another sperm bank pulled the donor from their bank, notified other people who had bought his sperm and even informed the donor. I really liked that attitude.

However, the same article also lists a case, in which that sperm bank tried to protect a donor's anonymity when parents inquired about the donor's medical history after their daughter developed a kidney disease. The parents had to sue the bank to get that information. However, this was in 2000 and I hope by now the situation has changed a little. In the end, the donor had to provide the information anonymously, granting him the right for privacy and still getting the parents the necessary information for their daughter.

There seem to be a lot of dirty little secrets hidden in the basements of many sperm banks. The more I looked for them, the more I found. The DSR has a webpage on which you can check comments that users have made about different sperm banks. The comments are organized by bank and can be very helpful, but also frustrating. After I read through the comments of my top candidates, I learned a few points:

• Even if banks say they will contact the donor if a medical issue arises, they often don't seem to do that. Or they will only do it if it is a life-or-death situation for your child and if you can prove that this is a genetic problem. If the donor does not react, you are out of luck. 
• Some banks say they notify donors if the children want to get in contact with them, but what they really do is just send the donor a request to update his profile. It is only if he reacts and contacts the bank that they will tell him that there is actually a child who tries to get in touch. Or they won't even do that.
• Banks can and will change their rules (regarding family limit, donor contact, etc. you name it) if and when they please and they won't contact the recipients to notify them about the changes. So, you might buy some sperm from a bank that you think has a certain family limit, but they can decide tomorrow that they want to raise this limit to make more money out of the donor.
• Sperm banks seem to lose or misplace records (of donors of children that they fathered etc.).
• Some recipients accuse sperm banks of erasing or changing information in a donor's profile at times just to be able to sell them better.
• Sperm banks are nice to you as long as you are a possible customer that is about to give them money. If you contact them later without the intention to buy more sperm, but because you want something from them like an updated medical record, they might not react/ be nice/ ignore you.

The bottom line is: Sperm banks seem to have a lot of freedom to do whatever they please. There seems to be no regulation when it comes to that industry. Some banks voluntarily adhere to some guidelines, others don`t. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to find a bank that has a completely clean record.

Some online forums offer long lists of questions that you can ask the sperm banks when you get in contact with them and try to make a purchase. I looked over these lists, but after reading the points above, it looks like it does not really matter what they will answer to these questions because they might change their policy anyway.

I believe that there is a lot of truth in the comments above, but on the other hand, they might also be a little bit like any other kind of review or evaluation forms, e.g. at the end of the semester in college. Students who get bad grades try to voice their frustration and vent on the evaluation forms, no mater if the claims are really true or not. They might get a low grade because of their own fault or laziness. If a student is happy about a class, he or she rarely voices that in the end evaluations. So, I believe evaluations of any kind always have to be taken with a grain of salt. There might be a lot of happy families out there that used a specific sperm bank but they do not necessarily take the time out of their day to look up online forums and comment on there.

So, at some point I decided to stop reading all the comments. Choosing the right sperm bank is a tough decision, any decision is better than none. If this is your only way to get pregnant, you just have to decide which bank you trust most. 

In the end, I chose a bank that offered me a few donor choices that fit the criteria I was looking for. . I liked that they offered a detailed medical history for free and also had free donor essays giving me the opportunity to get a first impression about the donors. I liked how they presented themselves and I had heard good things from other SMCs who had used them before.

So, yay! I found a sperm bank and got one step closer to my goal!

Selecting a Sperm Bank - Part 2

The first part of this post can be read here.

Once I had eliminated all but three sperm banks, I took a closer look at the leftover sperm banks. Not all sperm banks offer the same services or have the same policies. Your selection of a sperm bank kind of depends on what is important to you as the customer. So, here are some criteria that are important to me and that I focus on as I am trying to select the right sperm bank:

Family Limit
Family limit refers to the number of families that they sell vials to before they "retire" the donor. Of course, these banks want to make as much money as possible, so they often have limits that are very high. For some it is about 40 families.

This only counts the families that register the births of their children with the bank. This is a very gray area, because the numbers are often not accurate.

Some families don`t register their births because they think the doctor does that for them, or because they are just too busy with their new baby. So, there might be even more families that get pregnant from a specific donor than the family limit states. In other cases, mothers said they tried to contact the sperm bank to register a birth, but the sperm bank did not take note or lost the information. So, when they contacted the bank later, they were told that they had no records of any births.

Once the donor hits the limit, there might also be some families who have bought sperm earlier and who are still TTC with the sperm. So, in the end, the number of families can be much higher than 40.

In addition, the family limit only refers to the family and not to the number of children. So, some families might have conceived twins or triplets. Or, if they want more than 1 child, the banks might sell them more sperm from that donor later.

As one of my SMC friends said: The family limit issue is an iffy topic. I know some people do not really care about this issue, but I do. For me it is important to choose a sperm bank that has a relatively low family limit and that I trust that they really enforce that limit.


Information about Donor Personality
A lot of banks offer you all kinds of things like audio interviews, essays, pictures, etc. but most of the time, you have to pay big bucks for these features. Some of the banks only offer a short profile and a brief medical history for free and that is just too little for me.

For me it is important, not only which information about the donor's personality the sperm bank offers, but also which information they offer for free. I decided that I wanted to have at least a tiny glimpse into the donors' personality before I committed to a bank. I am currently thinking about opting for a bank that offers you donor essays (which are actually short answers to a handful of questions) for free. I found it helpful to get a first impression. Unfortunately, you have to buy the complete access to get the audio interviews if (!) the donors have any available.


Number of Open ID Donors
Open ID Donors are donors that are willing to be contacted by the children when they turn 18. I will discuss this issue further in a future post when I will talk about selecting my donor. But for right now, I am looking at the numbers of Open ID donors that different sperm banks have to offer. It would be nice to at least have the option to pick an Open ID donor.


Donor Testing
All sperm banks that were on Dr. Stork`s list seem to test their donors for certain things. When you look through the profiles, all donors seem to test negative at all times. I assume that the ones that tested positive did not qualify as donors and were not included in the donor catalog of the bank. My next step is to compare the actual tests they did on the donors. I am not familiar with most of the things they tested them for, so this will still require a little bit of research ...


Customer Service
To me, the customer service that a bank offers, matters, too. About 5 days ago, I wrote an email to one of the sperm banks in my closer selection pool and I am still waiting for a response. Not a good sign... I am trying to find a bank that I can trust and that will help me and work with me not just now, when I am about to make a purchase from them, but also in the future, when I am no longer a paying customer. How will they react if I need their help to get in contact with the donor for medical reasons? I will discuss this and some additional issues in my next post.

To be continued... here.

Selecting a Sperm Bank - Part 1

Just a little warning at the beginning:
This is only the first post about how I tried to select a sperm bank because - oh my goodness gracious - is this selection process complicated or what? Like you would not believe! Then again: This is about a future life and the selection process should be complicated... So, if you are willing to listen to my trying to find the right sperm bank, here we go:

Very early on in my journey to become a SMC, I had not the slightest clue what I would be getting myself into. But I guess most people don`t know that in the beginning. So, I started with the SMC network online and I found a list of sperm banks they had posted. I think they even sent me a list when I signed up with them. I started checking out some of the banks but I was so overwhelmed by the amount of information and donors that I did not really know where to start or what to watch out for.

You do what kind of testing? What on earth do these abbreviations mean? Can I select my sperm donor based on his IQ as tested by how fast he understood how to navigate your website?

I was lost. Completely lost.

As I was about to post a cry for help in the SMC online forum, I found a post by another SMC. She had created a spread sheet with information about some of the most popular sperm banks. A lifesaver! Besides the bank's name, internet address and general cost of sperm, the spread sheet compared a number of criteria that seemed to be important to her. This was very helpful for me because it showed how the banks differed from each other without having to read through their entire websites.

Shortly after I found that spread sheet, I met another local SMC for the first time. She told me about the sperm bank that she had selected and why she made her decision (basically because they offered a lot of information for free). After our meeting, I went online and researched that bank. Things looked good and I did some donor searches with the criteria that were most important to me and I got some excellent results. I naively thought:"Great! I found my sperm bank!"

Silly me! Little did I know, this was only the beginning...

During my first RE visit, Dr. Stork ran some blood tests and it turned out that I am Rh negative and CMV negative. It is adviced that if you are negative,  you also choose a donor that is negative. Being negative in one area is rare, but being negative in both areas is even rarer.

When I returned to the sperm bank that my SMC friend had recommended and ran another search with these criteria, it turned out that of the almost 400 donors they had in their catalog, not a single one matched a negative CMV status and a negative Rh status. Since, it is important to me to eliminate any risks for my baby, even the small ones, I did not want to compromise on these issues. So, I could not use that sperm bank.

I was back to square one!

I think this was also about the time that my friend C., who was supposed to be part of my support network, jumped ship. I had kept him updated on my search and I think at this point it got too complicated and frustrating for him. Without trying to make excuses, I think I can understand him. This path to single motherhood has more potholes than you can find in the midwest during spring. There are so many hurdles you have to jump and this is only the beginning. If you are not really dedicated to it, I don`t think you will last very long.

But I was dedicated, and took this little setback as a chance to newly approach the search for the right sperm bank.

Dr. Stork gave me a list of 8 sperm banks that she works with because they follow certain recommendations and guidelines. I eliminated the ones that only worked with couples that provided the sperm for IVF and the ones that had a very poor internet presence/ website or none at all. (Seriously, in this time and age, you can pay a high school student 10 bucks an hour and he will set up a professional looking website for you in no time. How can a national company not afford to hire someone to create a professional internet presence? Do they also keep their files in shoeboxes?).

So, I ended up with four banks, one of which was the bank that my SMC friend had recommended to me, which I had just eliminated. So, there were actually only three left. 
I ran a quick search for these other sperm banks,  and I found that they had about 10-16 donors that matched my CMV and Rh status. Not many options, but at least something to work with. And boy was there still a lot of work to do!


To be continued... here.

Paying and Planning

This week, I got a bill from Dr. Stork listing all the things that my insurance did not cover and that I have to pay myself, now. Ugh! It was a pretty steep bill and my insurance should have covered these things, but they said it was the way that Dr. Stork's office coded them. If they had coded them differently, then I should have been covered.

So, I called Dr. Stork to find out what the issue was, but her nurse, let's call her Nurse Nancy, told me that the doctor makes the decisions and that she only goes by what the doctor decides. So, no chance that they will try to submit them under a different code. Great! Also, I was charged for an ultrasound that should have been part of my yearly exam. Wonderful! I was a little angry and talked to Nurse Nancy for quite a while. I am about ready to switch doctors, but would like to at least try my first attempt with Dr. Stork.

Finally, Nurse Nancy said that since I had such good results during the exam last time, I would not need to have another ultrasound next time I came in. I had 22 viable follicles on day 12 (I usually ovulate on day 17-20) and she said that was a really good result. Woohoo! At least something.

Nurse Nancy said, I am ready to move on to the next step. I have not lost enough weight yet, but she did not say anything about that being an issue. I also asked her if they received the report from the counselor and she said they did and that would be all they required. It sounded almost like they did not even care what the counselor really wrote.

Then Nancy asked me if I had already picked out a sperm bank. I have not. I am going back and forth between two banks and I am still trying to make a decision...

She also said that Dr. Stork had offered me the option to take an oral fertility drug and she asked me if I had decided yet, if I wanted to do that. I am not quite sure about this either.

Ideally, I would like to start my first attempt in June. This gives me a little more time to lose some more weight and if it works the baby would be due at the end of March which I think would be great!


So, here is my plan for the next two months:

Within the next week: Decide on a bank and sign up with the bank.

After AF arrives in May: Send documents to Dr. Stork to sign so that I can order the vial once I am ready.

Mid May: Upgrade membership so that I can find out more about the donors.

Memorial Day: Wait to see if they have any specials for Memorial Day and place order. (I heard sometimes they offer holiday specials like free shipping or a free vial.)

Beginning of June: Go in to get my day 3 testing done and decide if to use fertility meds.

Mid to end of June: Hope that I will ovulate and give this my first and best try.

Negative

Last Tuesday, I suddenly got a phone call from Dr. Stork's office. The nurse called me to let me know my blood test results and it turns out, everything is negative. Well, in case of the STDs that certainly is a good thing, but when it comes to my blood type and CMV status, maybe not so much...

I did a little research and it turns out that only 15% of all people are Rh negative. If the mother is negative and the father is positive, there is a chance that the child could be positive, too. This in turn could cause complications if the blood of the mother and the baby got interchanged during the pregnancy or birth. There are ways of reducing the risk with shots etc. but there still is a risk and mothers who are negative should consider to buy only sperm from donors that are also negative.

I talked to P. L., my friend the Power Latina, about it. She said that the same was the case in her family, where her mom is negative and her father is positive. Her brother is positive, but it all turned out okay. This was more than 35 years ago in Mexico, so she thinks, I should not worry too much about it.

But it is not only my Rh factor that is negative, but also my CMV status. CMV is a flu virus that almost all people have been exposed to in their life, usually via chicken pox, cold sores, or mono. Even though I had chicken pox as a child and I believe I also had cold sores before, I tested negative for CMV. I don't have any antibodies in my blood. Should I get exposed to the virus during pregnancy, or if the sperm is CMV positive, the baby could have developmental problems, and be born blind, deaf, etc. So, this is a serious risk to consider, too, when I make a decision about the sperm donor.

I really seem to be a rare kind of breed with a negative blood type and a negative CMV status. One of the sperm banks I looked into has about 300 donors, but only one of them has a negative blood type and a negative CMV status. He is not an open id donor and is brand new to the bank, so no pregnancies have been reported, yet.

It is already hard to find a donor that is negative in one area, but one that is negative in both areas drastically limits my choices. So, I will spend the next weeks trying to figure out what is important to me and which risks I am willing to take in all of this. I definitely have to look into more sperm banks.