Hellooo.
It's been 16 months since my last blog post, and 16 months since my retrieval. A lot has happened in that time. For starters, I bought a house! Shortly after that, I did an interview with CBC that went incredibly poorly. Initially, they had made it seem like the interview would focus on what it's like to be a donor in Canada, which interested me very much... the interview was actually all about money/the financial aspect of being a donor and an intended parent. I was obviously caught off guard by this as it wasn't at all what I was expecting, and I ended up telling CBC not to air my portion of it. Lawyers were involved, many phone calls exchanged, and it was a complete shit show. I don't know if they ever aired it or not because I tried very hard to block the whole thing from my mind after that. :)
Then I got engaged in October! We'll be getting married in September, so I've been busy with wedding planning. It's busy, expensive, and fun.
But back to the egg donation. I decided to write today because, for some reason, my egg donation is being brought up frequently as of late. Today, I received a DM on Instagram that said: "Hi. I'm helping cast a tv show about egg donors. I've been an egg donor before as well. I wanted to incorporate egg donors from around the country so I searched on social media and I came across your egg donation posts. If you're at all interested, I can give you my info and have my executive producer fill you in on more of the details. Thanks so much."
I messaged her back and politely declined.
A few hours later, my fiance received an email that had been sent via his website (he's the photographer who documented my egg donation story) that read: "Hi. Sorry to contact you through this form, but I'm looking to talk to [my name] actually about a story I'm writing for Vogue about egg donation. If she's interested in talking to me feel free to give her my email at [email address]. I just assumed you know, you guys talk... cause you know boyfriend. Thanks!!!" (A google search later revealed that this person is from Germany.)
By this point in time, I was feeling anxious and stressed about people contacting me about this, so my fiance responded to that email and politely declined for me. In case you haven't read my previous blog posts about my egg donation, I'll give you a quick summary of why this bothered me and what has changed in the last 16 months (mostly my point of view).
I've gone back and read my last blog posts about the donation and recovery, and I'm ashamed to say that I sugarcoated it without even realizing. I minimized the entire experience, or maybe I just couldn't appreciate it for what it was at the time. So let me talk about it again, candidly, in a way that isn't all sunshine and rainbows with a bit of bloating and diarrhea peppered in.
First of all, the whole process was shady, and I'm not just referring to the reimbursement process. On my very first visit to the fertility clinic, I asked the doctor about OHSS (ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome) - its risks and my chances of having it. The doctor brushed off my concerns as if I were overreacting (I wasn't), claimed that the chances of this happening were "very, very rare" (it's not), and promised that I would be very closely monitored during the whole process so it would not happen to me (it did). Maybe I'm just cynical, but now, I understand that egg donation agencies and fertility clinics are in it for the money. The success stories are beautiful, and I'm sure the thank you cards they receive with pictures of babies who've been conceived after years of trying are appreciated, but they're in it to make money. Inf ertility is a tragedy for those affected, and a business for those who can profit from it. Let me tell you, business is booming. It wasn't an accident that my ovaries were hyperstimulated by the fertility drugs. Donors are frequently overstimulated because the clinics want to receive as many mature eggs as they can, regardless of what kind of condition this will leave the donor in. Eggs are dollar signs. So while I was only able to yield 19 mature eggs (a minimal amount compared to some of the women I've connected with since donating), it was enough to throw my body through a freakin' loop.
What was so bad about it? The tender, bloated stomach was bad. I looked pregnant and I couldn't even walk without being in pain and short of breath. The retrieval was worse. Before you go in for your retrieval, the process is explained to you... basically, they'll give you a hefty dose of drugs to allow you to sleep through the entire procedure - "You won't feel a thing! We promise!" - and once you're out and chilling on the table with your legs spread wide open and your knees up to your ears (so vulnerable, awful feeling), they will shove an ultrasound probe with a giant needle attached to it up your vagina and suck those eggs out of your ovaries. It sounds terrible, even if you're heavily sedated for it... but guess what! I wasn't. The nurse swore to me I wouldn't even remember it, which is funny, because I do recall being in excruciating pain, waking up crying numerous times because of the pain (thank god my fiance was beside me and alerted the docs that I was clearly able to feel everything that was happening), staring up at the bright light that hung above me, and hearing the doctors yell, "Give her 5 more!" (What they were giving me 5 more of? No idea. But they did it multiple times so they obviously underestimated how much medication I would require. It wasn't long after that they were shouting at each other to put me on oxygen because my oxygen saturation was dropping into the 80s when it should be almost, if not 100% for a healthy female my age. When I finally woke up for good, they made me walk back to my room and sit there with a blood pressure cuff on until they were content that I wasn't broken. All I wanted to do was hug my mom. The pain afterwards sucked... walking back to my hotel was the dumbest idea I've ever had, and I'm glad I made it there in time to vomit in private. :) Walking hunched over because I couldn't stand up straight without writhing in pain was also good.
The recovery was a great time too. When I went to the clinic the next day for my post-retrieval checkup, the receptionist took one look at me and said, "You don't look so good. I think they're going to have to do a fluid aspiration on you." (I think my hugely bloated stomach was a dead giveaway.) So yeah, I sat around the clinic for hours, they did an ultrasound and told me I had 750ml of fluid built up inside me (hence the bloating), and would indeed require a fluid aspiration if I wanted to be able to breathe comfortably. So, hours later (I had to rebook my train home twice), they did the fluid aspiration on me. I was denied pain meds ( they wouldn't even give me a freakin' Tylenol) and I wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything. So now I'm hangry, bloated, in pain... just plain miserable. They wouldn't let my fiance come in for the fluid aspiration with me, so I went in, alone and terrified. They had me sit up on an exam table with 4 pillows propped up behind me and my knees spread as wide as I could make them go with my feet up on the bed, basically touching my bum. Imagine getting yourself into that position with 750ml of fluid in your huge, tender belly. Next, they explained that the procedure would basically be like the egg retrieval - vaginal ultrasound probe with a giant needle attached to suck the fluid out, except this time, no pain meds and no sedatives. Fun, right? I literally cried like a baby. I'd never felt pain like that before. If I thought the retrieval itself was bad, I didn't know pain until the fluid aspiration. The best part was when they told me I would feel so much relief afterwards because the pressure would be diminished. They removed 250ml of fluid (they "couldn't find" the rest of the fluid...) and I didn't look or feel any different. In fact, I felt worse and made it back to my 'room' (a curtained-off space just big enough for 2 chairs) just in time to dry heave into a garbage can. After that, I went home and spent the next week sleeping upright on my couch because if I tried to lay flat, the fluid would push up onto my lungs and make it very difficult for me to breathe. Before I left the clinic, the doctor said to me, "The fluid shouldn't come back and interfere with your breathing... but if it does, come back to the clinic [3 hours away from my home]. Don't go to the emergency room because they won't know how to treat you and they'll make things worse." Okay, good talk. I didn't care if I couldn't breathe at all. I was never going back to that clinic. so I lived on the "OHSS diet" which is basically Mr. Noodles and Gatorade. They encourage a high sodium diet to assist with the symptoms of OHSS. I drank so much Gatorade during that time, I felt like the people in those Gatorade advertisements where you can see the colourful Gatorade dripping from their pores. I'll never touch it again.
BUT, fastforward to now. It felt like forever, but the pain went away, the bloating went away, and I went back to work. Despite the fact that I contacted the agency immediately after the retrieval and asked them to remove me from their donor database, I would go on to hear from them 4-5 more times over a 14 month period, begging me to donate again since I am such a "kind, generous, selfless young woman." The agencies know exactly what to say to sweet talk young women into blindly handing over their eggs, but they weren't going to fool me again. I told myself frequently that what I had done *was* wonderful... I had given my eggs to a couple who could not conceive on their own, and I would be helping them have the baby they had always dreamed of! Except it's been almost a year and a half and to the best of my knowledge, a pregnancy has not occurred yet. The last time I contacted the agency to ask if this was normal or not, they assured me that it was - but that each time they did a transfer with a surrogate, it would cost them money regardless of whether the transfer was successful or not. Every single time they would try and potentially fail to impregnate a surrogate, they were paying out of pocket. Cha-ching. Maybe, someday, the agency will contact me to tell me a beautiful baby was born because of my eggs. But until then, I will go on with my life being bitter and cynical towards the idea of anonymous egg donation. I keep telling myself that it's over, I don't have to deal with it anymore, but it's never really over. A month ago, I had to go to the dentist for a root canal. I was incredibly nervous and they gave me laughing gas to help take the edge off and for a bit, I thought I would be fine. But the next thing I knew, I was laying there, in tremendous pain, crying fat tears that were dripping down into my ears as I stared up at what felt like the exact same bright light that hung over me as the doctors extracted the eggs from my ovaries. Once my mind tricked me into thinking I was back there again, I was crying harder, I couldn't breathe, and the dentist had to stop the procedure. I wanted to vomit, both from fear and pain. It didn't matter that I knew I was at the dentist. I felt scared and vulnerable again and that was all it took. I'm dreading going back to the dentist in a couple weeks to finish the procedure.
So far, my cynical attitude and my fear of all medical procedures are the only lasting effects I've had from the egg donation, along with the nagging feeling of knowing that my eggs are somewhere out there, just hanging out. I think I would feel better if they were at least a child, but I'm sure the IPs feel the same way. If you're reading this and you've had your heart set on being a hero and donating your eggs, don't let my cynicism deter you. Not ALL egg donation stories surface from the depths of hell (although many do... I found that out after I was interviewed for the We Are Egg Donors blog and connected with many other donors from around the world)... some are pleasant and wonderful and quickly result in the birth of a child, which I'm assuming must be so gratifying! Knowing that you went through the pain and discomfort would feel so worth it if you knew you helped a family become whole. But I'm not there yet. So I want my brutal honesty to at least inspire you to do a TON of research prior to donating. Research the procedure, the fertility drugs you'll be on, OHSS, short and long term side effects of donating, look into both the agency and the fertility clinic and don't ignore negative reviews. Connect with other donors and learn about their stories before you blindly commit to giving a part of yourself to someone else. While some side effects are known, the long term effects of donating your eggs are so uncertain. Will it impede your ability to have your own children in the future? No one seems to know for sure, but I don't feel like it's a coincidence that so many of the donors I have spoken with ended up having to go through IVF to conceive their own children. Will it contribute to reproductive cancers? Don't know, but they seem to be another large coincidence (although 1 in every 2 Canadians will end up with cancer according to recent news). A lot of the questions about long term effects of egg donation are met with "we can't prove it, but we can't disprove it either" and that's enough for me to never do it again.
A friend asked me tonight, "Did it have any long term effects or affect your chance at future pregnancies?"
All I could say was, "We'll find out when we start trying this winter."
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Thanks for reading. I know the post was super long and basically just a big vent session from me, but it was necessary. My first few blog posts about egg donation were very kumbaya, and I needed to show the other, darker side of it. As always, feel free to ask me any questions about my experiences.
'Night, folks.