Egg donor blog

I have been selected by a couple in the past but always chickened out.  I just got a call that I was chosen by a couple again and I’m feeling a bit more sure.  They are in another state and I would need to make two trips – one overnight trip for the consultation and then one for roughly a week for retrieval.  But my concern is how often I might have to get tested at home.  I’ve heard from women who had to have blood drawn and ultrasounds basically every day.  What was your experience as far as actual trips to the clinic?  I can get the time off work for the out of state trips but I can’t really be in and out of the office every day for weeks.

Also – I have heard horror stories about women being sent notices of unpaid medical bills and having them turned over to a collection agency due to their donation agency’s mishandling.  How were the costs covered by the recipients in your experience?  If it’s anonymous, there shouldn’t be any bills with my name on them right?  And I shouldn’t have to pay anything up front myself and rely on reimbursement, correct?

To be honest, just hearing you say you’ve chickened out in the past and this retrieval requires out-of-state travel, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, I’m nervous on your behalf.  This isn’t a maybe-I-can’t-swing-it kind of commitment.  This is like I-want-to-be-an-egg-donor-end-of-story kind of commitment.  There is nothing I can tell you to help you decide whether or not you’re going to make this work at every turn, no matter what.  More of my cycles than not have required daily monitoring appointments, long wait times, last-minute schedule changes and my most recent retrieval was bumped to 3 days earlier than expected, and I had to hope my boss understood.  It happens, and there is nothing you can do about biology.  Every cycle requires you be at the mercy of your own body; what it needs, it gets.

As for the medical bills, I’ve not heard of anything like this.  Donors are compensated for everything down to parking for doctor’s appointments.  If your agency is shady, you should be able to tell immediately.  Like I said, this isn’t a business to be taken lightly, and if you feel it is being taken lightly, you need to look elsewhere.  It wouldn’t have mattered what agency I was visiting for whatever reason, when I sat down with Alexa at BHED, I knew immediately I’d be taken care of regardless; I was–and still am–cared for with the utmost importance.