We are on four waiting lists for specific donors at our clinic. In the last two months we have been offered two of them and turned them down.
The first one that we were offered was my favorite. She reminded me of someone I know who has been a very close friend since I was a teenager. She also seemed intelligent and like a good person, and she looked enough like me so that I felt great about moving ahead with her.
When she was offered to us, in June, I took a closer look at her stats. She had donated four times and three of those had positive outcomes. Sounded good. Talked to the donor coordinator about the low hcg numbers on the form.. turned out there was only one pregnancy that led to a baby.. The word "positive" was misleading. I guess the others were early miscarriages. We decided that since we had had trouble with our first donor (I think it had to do with her) in that the embryo quality was very poor, we would only go with really good, proven donors. So no go for donor-who-looks-like-friend. :(.
This narrowed things down quite a lot. I could no longer just see who looked, sounded and felt right, they had to have really good fertility! Percentage wise there were a lot fewer of these women at my clinic.
I had recently added another donor who had great results and appeared to meet all requirements. We were offered her about three weeks ago. She was really adorable and smart and rode horses... but my gut just kept telling me NO.
Okay, well I haven't lived 48 years and 9 months without learning something. I know I have to listen to my gut. It wasn't really giving me much of an explanation, except "I'm just not feeling it". I decided to honor that, even though waiting is very difficult, and I'm not getting any younger. When I have not honored my gut reactions I have ALWAYS been sorry. That's just the way it is. It was a strong gut feeling.
There is currently only one donor now that I really want to work with, and she is finishing up a cycle with 2 other recipients this week. My clinic splits cycles for donors who produce a lot of eggs. When we were trying to decided about one of the other donors I had asked the coordinator to ask her (the one we're waiting for now) if she was planning on cycling again. Her answer was that she wasn't decided yet and that she'd need to discuss it with her partner. I took that as a possible yes, so am waiting to hear about whether she will become available soon. Sigh. I really hope so.
