How we made the decision to use donor eggs

Now that I’m nearly 27 weeks pregnant(!), I’ve gotten a few private messages lately from women in the infertility trenches asking me things like how we made the decision to use donor eggs, how we decided between anonymous and known donation, and how the process compared to non-donor-egg IVF. I actually love getting these questions, because if I can help other people by sharing our experience, it honestly makes it all worth it. (Well… almost worth it… I’m no masochist.)

So for those who are currently considering donor eggs themselves, or those who are just curious, I thought I’d write a series of posts attempting to answer these questions. I’ll start by sharing how the decision process went for our particular case, with the acknowledgement that each case is different, and therefore our case may not mirror yours.

How did we make the leap to donor eggs?

I’m one of those people who researches the hell out of everything, so as soon as we learned that I had premature ovarian failure, I basically already knew that we would end up using donor eggs. To be clear, our OB-GYN here in Holland didn’t actually use the phrase ‘premature ovarian failure’… However, she told us that I had the hormone levels of a menopausal woman despite being 34 at the time, and then once we confirmed how my ovaries were responding to IVF (i.e., they weren’t), I put two-and-two together.

Of course, we still tried my eggs three times, which took quite a bit of effort — we had to talk the infertility clinic we’d been referred to into even doing a second IVF attempt after only getting a single egg the first time. This may be surprising to some people (‘Isn’t helping people get pregnant sort of the whole point of infertility clinics…?’), but the way they explained it is that with such a poor response, the risks of IVF start to outweigh any potential benefits.

That second attempt, we got three (poor-quality) eggs and transferred two — neither of which stuck.

Then we had to switch clinics (and countries) to get to a third try. The new clinic had me on different medication (both for the hormone therapy and for sub-clinical hypo-thyroidism), and I had also drastically altered my diet, so I was kind of hopeful that we’d get a better outcome. With that said, we went into it knowing it was likely our last shot, and the clinic suggested that we do a 5-day embryo transfer instead of 3-day like my other attempts, with part of the reasoning being that this might help us get ‘closure’. Indeed, when the single egg that fertilized (of a measly two retrieved) didn’t even survive to transfer day, that did help us close that chapter.

Was that an easy decision?

No — obviously that was still devastating. Just like normal, fertile people (lucky bastards…) can’t truly understand what it’s like to go through infertility/IVF, I think that those doing ‘regular’ (non-donor-egg) IVF can’t understand what it’s like to ‘give up’ on your eggs. (The same holds for the use of donor sperm, donor embryos, surrogacy, and etc.) For my husband and I, making the leap to donor eggs was a far bigger leap than ‘just’ doing IVF in the first place.

If undergoing ‘regular’ IVF was the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree, accepting that we needed donor egg IVF was the equivalent of writing a doctoral dissertation.

With that said, I knew that I just really wanted to experience being pregnant, and if it took donor eggs to get me there, I was willing to make that leap. Luckily, my husband felt the same way.

Considering the whole spectrum of cases, I can imagine that making the decision to use donor eggs or not would be harder for those whose ovaries aren’t as geriatric as mine apparently are. When you’re only getting a tiny handful for poor-quality eggs each cycle, like we did, the decision basically makes itself for you. If you’re getting a larger number of eggs, or the reason behind the failed implantation is less obvious, the decision is much less clear-cut, of course. If this applies to you, then my advice would be to talk to your clinic and decide ahead-of-time if a non-donor-egg cycle will be your last one. That way, you can grieve appropriately during the cycle.

How are we feeling about it all now?

So now that we are finally pregnant through donor egg IVF (i.e. DEIVF), how are we feeling about our decision? The short answer is that we feel super excited and ridiculously grateful. Before it worked for us, I used to worry that any eventual DE pregnancy would be bitter-sweet, with each exciting milestone marked by an equal amount of grief for the lost opportunities. (I’m clearly not at all dramatic/prone to melancholy.)

Now that we have made it to the other side and things appear to be going well, I’m happy to report that I am just thrilled to be pregnant, and I don’t even care that it took donor eggs to get us here. Obviously, it being a donor egg pregnancy does raise unique issues — which I will continue to explore in this blog — but the important thing is that my husband and I are 100% happy with our decision. If anything, it just makes us both even prouder of what we’ve endured to get here.

xx

Follow me on Instagram: @thebunlessoven