K, at work, was fine by the choice--she generally trusts I'm making the right decision and just wants to hear the main points/highlights. It's not that she doesn't care about the details, she just hates the research and finding of the details and I love that shit. We had a great weekend together, even going so far as telling a few people that we were choosing a new donor and oh wasn't it great, joy joy.
By that Sunday night I had the novel idea that 'hey, why don't we sit down together and go over all of his information, 'audio interview, lengthy family history', you know. And once we did...all was not so rosy in donor land.
Let's just say in my haste to find something/someone to blame and solve my problem of not getting pregnant, I looked over some things because I wanted the new donor to be the one. And upon closer examination, he was not the one after all.
We then decided to have another look at our old guy, Seth (not his real name!). What was it about him that was making me want to switch? To my horror, I saw that we'd never even ordered his audio interview or baby photo?!? Was it not available then? I can't imagine how we overlooked these details other than that I was probably too cheap to spend the money on it back in February. Now...I want all the information and I'm willing to pay for it.
Well those two pieces of information paid off and won me back. We were staying with Seth. There was one more vial at the RE and 6 more on ice at CCB. Things felt good and I spent the next week secure in the knowledge that we had a donor both of us really wanted.
Later, I had a nice, long talk with the Doc and I questioned how does one know when to switch donors? Unfortunately with IUI's there's no clear data that shows switching donors increases the chances. You hear about the women who switched and got pregnant but you don't hear about the others who didn't. Plus, who is to say that they wouldn't have gotten pregnant regardless that cycle, maybe it was just their time? In short, no clear answers.
We talked about Seth's sperm, his counts, etc. He's had other pregnancies, his motility is good and the speed of his swimmers is excellent--but his counts are only average, or 'adequate' as my Doc put it gently.
But isn't that the Cryobank's fault for not given us more?? I seriously think they sell off the bare minimum because they have to guarantee 10 million. You want more? Buy another vial. We've always had the 10 million, but only as high as 16 million. That sounded great until I heard of others getting 22 million. WTF?? I feel so cheated. I've heard others here complain about the counts of their donors from CCB, so it just makes me wonder.....
If this IUI cycle doesn't work...we're not only on to IVF, but we have to find another donor. We discovered that stupidly, we'd bought 12 vials of IUI ONLY and well...we may very well need IVF. The good news is that CCB will buy back the five remaining vials at 1/2 price. My stomach almost goes into convulsions thinking of the wasted money ($1400?? Gagging now...). I hate wasting money pretty much more than anything.
There was a beacon of hope on August 12th, because our donor was coming back ONE LAST TIME and he maybe he would give off some IVF quality swimmers. I'm not quite sure how that all works...but that's what they said. I called. No IVF swimmers and now our donor has retired.
If I'm not pregnant this month, we have to change donors one way or another. The thought of going through all of that again and wasting so much money makes me crazy.
But it is what it is. Right?
This is the last weekend that K and I are home for the next six weekends so I'm feeling a little pushed for time to get everything done in regards to traveling. We have two 4-day weekends and then it's off to Indonesia.
And now, to know that come Aug. 22, I may be on a new donor search as well...argh.
I can do this. I can do this.
You know what? I'll find someone even BETTER than our current donor. And all will be right with the world...
If this IUI cycle doesn't work...we're not only on to IVF, but we have to find another donor. We discovered that stupidly, we'd bought 12 vials of IUI ONLY and well...we may very well need IVF. The good news is that CCB will buy back the five remaining vials at 1/2 price. My stomach almost goes into convulsions thinking of the wasted money ($1400?? Gagging now...). I hate wasting money pretty much more than anything.
There was a beacon of hope on August 12th, because our donor was coming back ONE LAST TIME and he maybe he would give off some IVF quality swimmers. I'm not quite sure how that all works...but that's what they said. I called. No IVF swimmers and now our donor has retired.
If I'm not pregnant this month, we have to change donors one way or another. The thought of going through all of that again and wasting so much money makes me crazy.
But it is what it is. Right?
This is the last weekend that K and I are home for the next six weekends so I'm feeling a little pushed for time to get everything done in regards to traveling. We have two 4-day weekends and then it's off to Indonesia.
And now, to know that come Aug. 22, I may be on a new donor search as well...argh.
I can do this. I can do this.
You know what? I'll find someone even BETTER than our current donor. And all will be right with the world...
9 comments:
I liked the "finding a donor" part of the TTC process (although we don't have a whole lot to choose from because we're fixated on redheads). It's like ...I don't know, car shopping or something. lol.
All of the 3 vials we used for the 1st donor had over 20 million, so I'm happy with our cryobank...but of course, we're still waiting to get pregnant...
Oh, oh I hope you are not looking for anouther donor come late August!!! We looked at other donors for this cycle too, but it turns out we are strangely VERY attached to our donor. But if you are looking for , you will find someone for sure, and he will be better then this donor because, hopefully, you will be pregnant.
you can do it! we got to a point with donor choosing (we are using ccb, too) that i seriously just wanted to throw a dart and see which profile it landed on and that was it!
however, we are happy with our donor and his counts - well the 2 vials we used were 29 mil, however, he just retired and we only have 6 of his vials on ice so we may be starting over, too since we do 2 a month.
it'll work out. it will.
i'm so excited for your trip! you're gonna have a blast and i hope you post pics!
You can indeed do it! Can and will do whatever it takes.
I'm with you on wasting money. I pull my hair out whenever I get one of those $30 credit card fees. Oh man, those make me mad even though it's pretty rare I get one.
I don't think you're going to need a new donor, ok? :)
I commiserate with you on having to find a new donor, we've started to touch on the question of what if BD isn't good enough but we really don't want to go down that path.
It's such a hard question of when do you change it up, but it sucks that you don't have the choice (although obviously, best case scenario is that you don't need to worry about any of this!!)
Sperm banks offer IVF prep sperm mainly just because fewer sperm are needed for successful IVF than inseminations, so IVF samples have lower TMC and are cheaper. My doctor says she can do IVF with IUI or ICI prepped sperm. You should check with your doctor to see what is permitted at your clinic.
i'm with gizmo gadget...
we bought a bunch of sperm vials and have them stored at the doc office and the sperm bank.
i got worried about our sperm when i read your post, so i just double checked with our doctor and she said that we are going to be able to use the same sperm specimens for our up coming ivf that we have had been using when we were doing iui. no problem...
so, check it out and perhaps you can check this off your list of things to worry about.
course, we are going with that you are knocked up already and this won't be so relevant ;)
We are right there with you-- we really like the donor that we've used for the past two months, but when I called to order more of him for this month, I found out that he was sold out! At this point I just asked for the numbers of the top three performers and we went over those profiles to choose a new guy. This is definitely a far cry from the time and energy we used to put into finding a donor!
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