nokids

There was then a most stressful few weeks, because of the difficulty of synchronising my egg donor C’s menstrual cycle with mine, the aim being to have her eggs ready for “harvest”, via hormone control from outside her body and constant monitoring via scans, at the same time that my womb was nicely plumped up and ready to receive the fertilised eggs, also via hormone control from outside my body and constant monitoring via scans.

My egg donor C lived in London and was a postgraduate research student, so it was not too difficult for her to come in for scans as and when the clinic requested. I had a much longer journey – a minimum of 4 hours drive each way, so it was more inconvenient, but I had taken the precaution of working as a temp before starting all this fertility malarkey, just so that I could take blocks of time off when I wanted, without having to justify myself to an employer.

It was still difficult, though, because the clinic was having to make adjustments to the medication and timing schedule after each scan – eggs will be ready in 7 days, no 5 days, no 6 days. Womb lining mustn’t be allowed to get too thick so a bit less of that hormone, but it mustn’t be too thin either, so not too little – etc.

It was made more difficult by the obnoxious clinic nurse in charge of coordinating the whole shebang. She would imperiously schedule scans and appointments at times and dates without discussing with either of us, and then get very irritated with both of us for even querying whether it could be rearranged at a more convenient time (and often it could, without disruption to the programme – and when it could not, then we complied.)

She frightened C with a lecture about the possible long-term side effects of the hormone treatment and the risks of ovarian over-stimulation – but luckily for me, C was level-headed enough to realise that this was only an over-zealous nurse fulfilling the clinic’s duty to make sure that the egg-donor’s consent was truly informed consent.

C gamely went through it all and we kept in touch via telephone and email, and I dutifully paid all her expenses immediately after each of her visits to the clinic.

We were both pleased that the eggs collected when mixed with the sperm produced 4 embryos, which was a fine number (although perhaps we had both been hoping for more.)

C’s part was now over – and I was and am so grateful for what she did for me. A large bunch of flowers winged its way to her on the day of the egg harvest, together with a cheque, which was considerably less than I would have had to pay an American egg donor, but considerably more than she was legally entitled to. But this was a gift from me, not a payment for services, as I made absolutely sure that I did not give her any inkling that I ever would pay her a penny over her expenses.

Had our roles been reversed, I am not sure I would have gone through what she went through for me. Such generosity – I will never forget it.

I found my egg donor! She was tall, very self-confident, a brain the size of a small planet and convincingly certain that she did not want kids either now or ever. She wanted to put her eggs to good use, felt no emotional attachment to them, but was quite happy to meet any child born as a result in years to come. Fancy passing on the genes of a mathematical genius! (for such she was…) and not only that, but her PhD topic was something to do with probability and genetics - actually, I couldn’t follow her after a couple of sentences when she tried to explain.

Anyway, after an exchange of emails and photographs, my usual letter about the indignities that an egg donor must undergo, together with an explanation of the payment (nil), we met, got on, and decided to get on with it.

After her first clinic appointment, when she was amused that the senior male consultant found her ear stud “prettty” (that had not been the effect she was aiming for), she was deemed suitable by the clinic, and we were ready to go!

It was odd looking for an egg donor. I would be asking a complete stranger to go through something embarrassing, inconvenient and not very pleasant – for absolutely nothing in return, except for expenses, and the warm glow of helping me! It seemed such a cheek even to ask.

I found it was more difficult to come to terms with the need to use an egg donor, than using a sperm donor.

I mean, to get pregnant, a woman always has to have a sperm donation from some man or other!

It was not the fact of losing any genetic connection – although I did feel sad about that, but overcame it relatively quickly. This would be a child conceived in love, just as much as any child born of a natural mother and natural father in love with each other.

No, it was the thought that the egg donor was usurping my own womanly/motherly role to some extent.

Just as for sperm donors, I decided I definitely did not want an anonymous egg donor. I wanted to vet the person myself, and decide not only that their looks were somewhat similar to mine, but also that I liked them, and that they would not let me down, so I rejected the suggestion from the clinic that I find an egg donor for the clinic and then I would get priority from the available anonymous egg donors (instead of waiting a dreary 2 or 3 years or more).

Also, just as for my sperm donor, I wanted the egg donor to be happy to meet the child (if the child wanted) when the child was 18.

I approached various national media asking if they would accept my ad. Many seemed to think that for a private individual, it was either illegal or immoral to advertise for an egg donor – it is neither. One paper firmly rejected my ad – then a journalist from that paper approached me to do a story! I turned the idea over in my mind – it was an attractive proposition if it could net me an egg donor as a result – and the journalist rung a concession from the editor that my email address could be included in the article – but in the end, my innate sense of privacy and shyness got the better of me and I turned the offer down.

I got into some detailed email correspondence with a number kind women who had answered my ads. Some seemed to want to tell me their life story. One seemed promising – then her husband stopped things going any further as he was worried about a child knocking on their door in years to come. Another wanted so much involvement that she wanted to specify the type of primary school the child should go to. I strongly suspected she needed to have her own child, not help someone else have theirs.

After placing an ad on an internet site, I must have received scores of replies from young American women seeking $1,000s for donating their eggs. Impossible! In the UK, it is illegal to offer more than expenses – and in addition, I was not about to fund either their trip to the UK, or my trip to the US!

One young woman with two small children of her own seemed fine – but after a visit to the clinic and a visit to her GP, it transpired that her metabolism could not cope with the hormone treatment required.

Another young woman, who looked a little like my mother at the same age (which endeared her to me) was all for going full steam ahead as soon as possible. I wrote to the clinic to introduce her and a first appointment was made – then at the last minute, she found she could not go through with it, and acknowledged to me that she had not thought through all the implications, especially as she did not have any children of her own as yet. What if she never did have her own children? How would she feel then about the child that was conceived with her egg, but that she had no claim on? It was frustrating to cancel the clinic appointment – but far better cancel the first appointment then for her to have second thoughts after going through all the treatment and minutes before her eggs are collected, or mixed with sperm.

Well, well, well – I picked myself up, dusted myself down, and started all over again.

I considered the situation from all angles – it did not take me long to decide that I was prepared to give up any genetic link with my child, in order to have my child. The important factor as far as I was concerned was to be happy with who the egg donor was. I was confident that I could love the child just as much even it it did not share my genes.

I informed the clinic that I wanted to try again, this time with the help of an egg donor. When can I start? No, no, no, no said the clinic. Not so fast. You have been assessed as suitable for treatment without an egg donor – if you want to try again with an egg donor, you have to be reassessed – go back to the counsellors, we will consider their reports when our ethics committee next meets.

Hmph! Was my reaction to that.

I looked around for another clinic and found the second most expensive clinic and equally well-thought of and well-known clinic.

On my first visit to my new clinic, I immediately felt much happier. They seemed altogether much less stuffy and more modern than the previous clinic. The waiting area was freshly painted in bright colours. Even the receptionists seemed more welcoming. Paying bills was in a private area (at my previous clinic, the receptionist dealt with the money, which I had always felt was very inappropriate.)

Most importantly of all, the doctor I saw seemed sympathetic and was quite happy that as I had passed the ethical assessment at the previous clinic, and I was clearly a sane person who had thought through the implications of egg donation, she was happy to proceed, without further querying my character, my understanding, my moral standing.

Given the waiting list for egg donors, I decided to find my own egg donor. After all, I found my own sperm donors, why not find an egg donor!

Over the next day or so, I busied myself about the shops, museums and art galleries, always waiting for The Call – my mobile always on, charged up and with credit. Trying to distract myself, and failing miserably. Eventually, I could stand it no more. I remember the scene vividly. It was pouring with rain. I was walking behind John Lewis, in a road parallel to Oxford Street, I could not think of anywhere dry that I could make this most private of calls to the clinic, so I took a seat in an empty small public park, and crouched under my umbrella for protection from the rain, and for some privacy against passersby.

I rang the clinic. I got through to my doctor there. She sounded embarrassed that she had not been the one to call me. The results of the egg collection? Three follicles had ripened, but one was empty, so they only managed to retrieve two eggs. The results of the mixing with the sperm sample? My little fishies, in their little dishy? Neither egg had fertilised. I could feel myself dissolving, into the rain, the rain, the rain. I pulled my umbrella lower and lower, and curling underneath, there was weeping, and weeping, and the weeping was me.

When I next became aware, I was curled up in a comfy recliner armchair with a lightweight cover over me, and a nurse hovering nearby. The room was full of others in the same state as me – blearily returning to full consciousness.

I soon recovered enough to get dressed, and after some basic checks, the nurse said I could go. I was supposed to have someone collect me, but I reassured the clinic that I would get a taxi to my hotel, and I would be fine.

As soon as I got out of the clinc, I decided not to get a taxi – no one checked that I did. Instead, I strode off, persuading myself that I really did feel fine.

The clinic was near to Wigmore Street, so I set off down Wigmore Street to window shop. I came to the famous Wigmore Hall concert hall and a classical music concert was just about to begin. I decided that that was just what I needed, so in I went.

I got my ticket, squeezed into my seat in the middle of the row, and waited for the concert to begin.

That’s when I started to feel not so good. Like many Victorian concert halls, the Wigmore Hall may be beautiful, but the ventilation is not good, and the seats are not very generous. As the concert got under way, the hall seemed to become increasingly hot and stuffy, and I started to feel rather queasy and very tired.

It was a combination of the effects of the very early start to the day, the heightened anxiety, the buffeting my poor body had taken in the extraction of my eggs, and the after-effects of the sedation/anaesthetic. The last straw was the antibiotic in the form of a suppository that the doctor had shoved up my behind.

Suddenly I realised that I needed to go to the loo – which was difficult as I was stuck in the middle of a full row of audience members, all fatly squashed into and overflowing their seats, all intently listening, with no room to squeeze by, without creating a major disturbance.

Luckily, I managed to hold on until the interval – luckily I did not have long to wait! I dashed out, paid my visit, and reluctantly decided I could not risk sitting through the second half.

I made my way back to my hotel, by now very lethargically and sleepily, quite different from my brisk trot when I had left the clinic.

I got back to my hotel room and crashed.

My treatment could start forthwith. I was prescribed various hormones – to switch off my menstrual cycle and then to control it from outside my body – ie control by the medical team rather than by the hypothalamus. You can get all the technical details from a million other sites. Given my age, I had to take an enormous amount, with the aim of stimulating my poor wizened ovaries to produce enough eggs to be “harvested” and then hopefully fertilised, outside my body, in a little glass dish – yes, with the aim of in vitro fertilisation, IVF as it’s known…

Harvesting - what a comforting and friendly concept that is, calling up images of rolling wheat fields and rosy cheeked buxom dairymaids!

The reality could not have been more different.

I booked myself into a small hotel near to Hyde Park. It was not shabby-chic – it was just shabby. And expensive.

I was both anxious and excited about what I was going to go through the following day. Somehow, in my heightened state, I decided that my alarm clock had stopped working and had lost an hour. I reset it, putting it to what I thought was the correct time, an hour on.

The next day, I arrived bright and early at the clinic, in good time for my appointment, for the clinic to collect my eggs. I was of course, one whole hour early! Luckily for me the clinic was open, but I did get to see some of the doctors and nurses arriving, (not all for me of course) which only made me feel more bizarre.

I always hate hanging about for scary things – I always aim to arrive no more than 5 minutes before a job interview for example, so this waiting was agony for me.

Eventually, the anaesthetist came and introduced himself to me. He was very nice, and explained, as he asked me to undress and put on a skimpy robe, leaving it untied at the back and me exposed, that there was nothing dignified about fertility treatment.

I shuffled into the operating room, (another elegantly wall-papered drawing-room), clambered up onto the couch, and the rest, mercifully, I do not remember.

Before actually starting the treatment, I had to be accepted by the ethics committee of the clinic.

In fact this stage came before the choosing of the sperm donor – but that’s what the passage of time does – it is really true that things do get blurrier and easier to bear, the more distance there is between now and the painful/sad memory.

Fertility law in the UK at the time I was going through all this (late 1990s/early 2000s) required clinics to have regard to the welfare of any child that might be born if the treatment was successful. In other words, I had to be vetted to be sure that I would be a suitable mother! How humiliating is that! The day that the law requires inadequate pregnant baby mothers to have terminations or elderly gigolos to have vasectomys or even any normal healthy person not undergoing fertility treatment to be scrutinised, will be the day that I will willingly be judged on my ability to be a mother.

However, I had no choice. At least at this particular clinic, I was not being ruled out purely because I was single (as did other clinics for this reason.)

I had to attend two counselling sessions by two different counsellors, chosen by the clinic and not by me. And I had to pay for the privilege. As all infertile people know, whatever is required of you by fertility clinics, it always costs. And as a friend said to me at the time, how can it be counselling if you have to go?

The first woman I went to see, who was probably in her 60s, seemed to have very dubious qualifications, but as she was pleasant and seemed to regard the whole counselling requirement as so much of a farce, I soon relaxed. I think luckily for me, she happened to take an instant liking to me, a sort of gut feeling that I was ok and genuine and that no child would come to harm in my care.

We had quite a pleasant chat. It turned out that she used to live in the same city as me, so we had a nice chat about the old place. The interview took place in the living room of her beautiful flat, which was on the first floor of a lovely Victorian building in Holland Park – a very nice part of London. The conversation even moved on to people that she knew that I might know, and the interesting vases and ornaments in the room. I was relieved that this was all so easy.

It was clear to me that I had passed whatever unspoken test she had made of me. On the other hand, I could easily have been telling her a pack of lies, and I had no confidence that this woman would have realised. If vetting is necessary, then surely it should be done by someone who is up to the job.

My second session of counselling was altogether less enjoyable. It took place in a rather mean basement flat. This woman was definitely a professional counsellor, with the dead pan expression (one must not intrude one’s own personality into the session) combined with hard-hitting questions. All my previous resentment returned – why should I provide details of my private life to this little thing, half my age, who barely looked old enough to be capable of bearing children herself? I had already given all the information required to the first counsellor and did not see why I should provide the same information all over again. I clammed up and the counsellor said that she found my attitude worrying. She would not reveal whether or not she was prepared to recommend me to the clinic as suitable for treatment.

I was drained by the time I left this second session. It was clear to me that I had not passed, and I felt tired and resentful.

I was therefore delighted to learn some weeks later that the ethics committee had indeed recommended that I was suitable to be accepted for treatment!

Choosing my sperm donor was fun. Hallelujah for the internet! I trawled through numerous sperm donor catalogues from sperm banks mainly in the US, and mainly in California.

I decided that the spookiest thing about using a sperm donor was the anonymity, not just for me but for the child that might (“would”) be born as a result. So I considered only those sperm donors who were prepared to make themselves known to the child at age 18. Then I picked other characteristics appealing to me which included intelligence, musicality, similar background (being Jewish, ashkenazi and Russian) and a certain indefinable something in their personality. I picked one - and then one other.

There was then a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing between me and the sperm bank, me and the clinic, the clinic and the sperm bank – but at last all the paper-work was completed, the sperm bank was paid (by me), the HFEA was satisfied (by the clinic) and the sperm samples were shipped to my clinic, and stored.

More anxiety on my part – how could I be sure that the right samples had been shipped? How could I be sure that they hadn’t accidentally been defrosted on route? How could I be sure that the samples would be properly stored by the clinic?

I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t.

Now that’s what I call faith.

Enough of being maudlin! At least for the time being… And the question of whether my style should be Mills & Boon or sturm and drang, or preferably somewhere in the middle, I will leave to work itself out as I go on…

I pulled myself together again after the disastrous interview with the dismal and prejudiced BUPA consultant, and decided to get practical. I obtained a booklet from the HFEA setting out details and statistics of all fertility clinics in the UK and I got writing. I quizzed them on their policies with regard to single women and in particular single women over 40.

Eventually, I decided to go to the top – in other words, the most famous and most controversial clinic - and not surprisingly, the most expensive. I was lucky – if you can call it that – as both my parents had died and I had the money (via my inheritance) to make this choice.

I turned up for my first appointment at the very elegant offices of the clinic in central London. Apart from a few obvious additions, it could still have been mistaken for the 19th century private residence of a gentleman of leisure.

The doctor that I saw was a tiny woman behind an enormous desk. She reassured me that she had warmed the speculum beforehand so that her examination would not be too uncomfortable for me – however, she had placed it on the fender near the gas fare – so it was too hot! Ouch!

The radiographer quickly put me at my ease for the scan. It did seem odd undergoing this in what seemed to be a beautifully decorated drawing room!

When I was fully clothed again and back before the diminutive doctor, she considered my situation.

Her medical advice was that I should go straight to IVF treatment, given my age. I was happy to accept that.

Her medical advice was also that I should use an egg donor. I was not happy to accept that – I was still living my fantasy of agelessness. The doctor was happy to proceed in line with my wishes and use my eggs, now that she had warned me about my chances.

We discussed my need for a sperm donor. (I had retired my previous sperm donor!) The clinic had links with a sperm bank. I explained rather diffidently what my requirements were – intelligence, height, background etc. This seemed more intrusive than undergoing a scan and an intimate examination. The doctor quickly made a telephone call, and after a few moments, she interrupted her conversation with the sperm bank to give me some details of a sperm donor that seemed to be what I was looking for – would I like to go ahead with him? I was appalled that I was expected to make such a life-changing decision on the basis of so little information and so quickly – so I said I would have to think about it.

The day had been an ordeal – yet strangely satisfying. At long last I felt I was on my way.