Plan B

I had a follow-up with my RE this morning. He was a little more hopeful than the other one, but still realistic. He said my chances of success with my own eggs were somewhere between 0-8%. He will not go to retrieval with less than 3 follicles, but said that even if I’m not really responding, I can continue stims if I want and if I don’t get 3 follies for IVF, we can do an IUI.

I want to at least get to the point of transferring SOMETHING. I think then I can move on with some peace.

Plan B for me is embryo donation. Egg donor is beyond my means. I would like an open donation, with some mutually agreed upon contact. After all, my child and the embryo donor’s child would be full genetic siblings. This feels right to me. I don’t feel comfortable with the agencies that treat embryo donation like adoption. Also, that is just as expensive as adoption, which is beyond my means.

Okay, here’s where the story gets interesting. Wednesday I was looking on a site that facilitates matches between embryo donors and recipients. I saw a donor profile that looked like a fantastic match, but before paying the (reasonable) fee to email the donor, I wanted to do a little research about the site. I have no idea how well the site is updated and how current the profiles are. So I posted some questions about the website to a yahoo group that was set up months ago by a single mom who donated her leftover embryos to another single women. The group was set up with the purpose of connecting single women with embryos with single women looking for embryos. After an initial flurry of introductions, the group has been pretty quiet. I got a few responses to my questions throughout the day. Just before I left work there was a new response. It was from the woman whose profile seemed so right for me!! Within hours of reading her profile, she contacted me! I did not mention a specific profile at all in my questions to the yahoo group.

We have been emailing and playing phone tag since Thursday. She has a 4 year old from the fresh cycle of these embies. The embies were created with donor egg and sperm. My main concern right now, after talking to 2 REs about embryo donation, is whether this donation would be legal under the current FDA guidelines for tissue donation. My RE says they can’t handle them if they don’t meet FDA criteria. He thinks she may have gotten a verbal okay over the phone or something from her clinic about donating the embies to another woman. I hope he’s wrong. Or that, even if they don’t meet the criteria, her clinic is willing to transfer them into another woman. So, obviously, this question is now at the top of the list.

A rollercoaster of hope and disappointment. I’m looking forward to talking at length with this woman. Even if we are not a good fit or if we can’t make this work from a technical standpoint, I love what she is trying to do. What an awesome gift to give another woman, and what an awesome gift to give her son a sibling this way. New and exciting ways to create families! Wonderful.