Research

I love information. My mother raised me to be a librarian, my father raised me to be a scientist, my other half loves raw data the way I like raw veggies. When things get messy I turn to information. My preferred diet would be a heap of first person accounts from multiple angles, a few opinion pieces, bits of medical research, and a some stats.

This weekend I started with blogs:

www.themaybebaby.com - I'm finding this a wonderful read about a woman who is also considering donor eggs. She too never assumed that fertility was a given. She lost her eggs to cancer treatment. I lost mine to two large benign dermoid cysts. While I guess I theoretically could have died if the cysts had ruptured, my treatment was only a half day surgery and one week recovery in the hospital hospital. No comparison to fighting childhood cancer.  Still, I had wondered about freezing eggs at the time. I was already dating the man I am now married to - perhaps we could have really been unconventional and created a few embryos together - the image of my parents reacting to me suggesting that I make future babies now, for later, with the college senior I was dating is enough to make me smile - no I'm outright laughing as the image gels in my mind! I also find it amazing how you find a person writing about something you are dealing with and then discover all these other common threads -- oh look she uses the 'words' ASD and MR/DD at work too! Her husband tells her to not be condensing and show a bit of respect for her parents choices just like mine does with me. Then again, she spells and writes a lot better than I do!

http://eggdonor.blogspot.com/ - I enjoyed reading through this entire blog outlining one person's experience being a donor. A very different take from my friend who donated eggs to a friend. While she has no regrets, she said that the emotional toil of the procedure was too great for her to even consider IVF if she should ever need it. There is a real possibility that if we go down this track we'd need to ask a friend. A bit tricky since we are living in a new country and our friends are on the other side of the world. I am wondering though if a good friend could come down for the summer months she has off from teaching - donate some eggs and enjoy some vacation abroad. That said, she'd have to give up summer for winter and what exactly do you tell customs on your return as donating eggs to your best friend is hardly traveling for work, pleasure -- perhaps education?!?! Regardless I feel like I need to understand what the donor would go through before I could ask a friend or stranger to do such a huge thing.

http://greateggs.com/ I also flipped through some egg donor databases in the US. Here there is no such thing. The process is quite different. There is no money in the egg donor game here, something I actually am glad of, but that also means fewer donors. That said, I was amazed at how I reacted to flipping through the head shots of potential donors. I had instant reactions to all of them - yes no no no no no no yes no no NO no no. I found a pattern - I saw a face that made me pause, then clicked to see the full profile. Nearly all of the ones I paused on were tall (even if you couldn't tell from the photo), not-blond, and had similar hobbies to mine own. How do you scan through that many photos, select ones that look a bit like you, and the see that they have similar interests to your own! Yes nearly everyone on there claims to be athletic, musical, creative, easy-going, and smart. But I am talking about people playing my specific sports, instruments,using similar verbal phrases, and being interested in the subjects I studied.

Tomorrow - I research crappy health aspects of this like increased risk of brittle bones, dementia, and Parkinson - oh my! I think a demented version of me might be entertaining for a day, but then it would just suck, particularly for those around me! I am hard enough as is. A demented version of me with brittle bones – yikes! I break myself enough as is...