Picture

I think the major artifact of egg donation clinics is the big book with pictures of egg donors and the answers we put on the initial survey they had us fill out. Based on this, I have no idea why anyone has picked me, let alone FOUR families.

First, I filled out my survey at like 5am (and I was still up, not just up). It's stripped of all my usual eloquence and reads more like a poor translation of an angry Soviet woman in the 1950s.

The picture is about the same.

I have never been photogenic. I cringe looking at yearbooks and school pictures. The photos where I look dead are the good ones. In most of them I'm all scrinched up and contorted. I become horrified looking at myself. I may as well skip the picture and just put in a caption: "The Love Child of Quasi Motto and Gilbert Gottfried."

No good parent should want a child that looks like I do in my picture.

I guess the attraction of my eggs is my intelligence test where I admittedly did better than most donors in the clinic. This is apparently because I got all the math right and also was the only person to find the answer to the following test question in the allotted time:

Choose one word to fill in the blank that is synonymous with the first word and the third word:

plank _______ meals

(click here for answer)

A gift

I didn't mention it up here, but I received a gift from my recipient family after the last cycle. The evening after the retrieval I got a call from the clinic saying that the family, who had come in later in the day had dropped off an REI gift card for me.

"There could be a gazillion dollars on there, for all I know," said the clinic employee who takes care of us donors (we'll call her Donor Mom).

This was kind of weird. Our clinic does have a money back policy, where recipients only pay if they get pregnant from my eggs, but there is still a non-refundable $9,500 donor cost for each cycle. And I get $5000 of that. So this family is shelling out $27,500 total, with almost $10,000 of it going to paying me and giving me the medications I need. But they thought, "Hey, I know we gave her $5K, but how about a gift card, too?!"

So they did. It turned out not to be for a gazillion dollars, but rather $50.


I was really touched by this present from my egg family. It made me feel like they were really appreciative of what I was doing, and that they knew it wasn't something I did just for the money. I think about the families all the time when I'm in the clinic. They go through so much, and I sometimes am just consumed with how much I'm hoping for them. I felt like this was a little sign that they know I care.

I used the card to buy a Swiss army knife and surfing watch on clearance.





I told Donor Mom I was glad the amount wasn't more. I would have felt tremendously guilty while my husband and I trekked around Thailand on our REI adventure vacation, decked out in high-tech waterproof gear as we awaited our REI sponsored climbing safari on Kiliminjaro.

Back where we started

Last night I took the last birth control pill in the pack that followed my egg donation. That puts us right back to where the first post on the blog started. I'm going in this weekend to get my sonogram, and then start on the birth control that leads into the 4th donation cycle.

So the last series of posts were designed to be informational for people who really wanted to know step by step what is involved. I figure I can be a little more of a human with personality this time around.

So: Those of you here for some information - head back to the first post and start from there. It has all the juicy details about shots and pills and morals. The helpful yet boring stuff.

Now we'll get into the good stuff. Like when I fill up my empty syringes with extra saline and shoot it in a tiny stream at my dog...and how that's one of her all-time favorite games.