December 4, 2011

Today I will continue the egg donor story.

While I was working at the finance department of the video on demand company, I invested all of my free time in looking for an egg donor.  It had to be the right person.  We were looking for intelligence, someone that looked like us, good family health history, etc.  We finally found a college student that we liked.  It was a long process to line up our cycles and she lived in another state, so there was a scheduling issue to contend with as well.  I really did not have a choice as to when I go in for treatment.  Our cycles had to align and she had to be available to fly in to make the donation.  Although, I thought the insurance covered the cost, it really was not the case.  I could not be reimbursed for her expenses because they had to protect her anonimity.  No one was willing to help with the documents.  It was quite stressful.  I started to slowly gain a lot of weight and it wasn't helping my situation any.  Every time I am stressed I turn to food for comfort. 

I was super stressed during this period of my life.  When the day came, they were only able to get one good embryo and one average one.  I went in for the good one and froze the average one.  I was under the impression my doctor would perform the procedure.  It turns out there was a less experienced doctor in his place.  After 20 minutes of struggling to get the embryo into my uterus (I have a difficult anatomy) I started to call out bring me my doctor now.  I saw in the eyes of the nurse, as much as she was trying to hide it that the embryo was not going to survive all this torture.  There goes $20,000 cash that I saved $1,000 at at time, over a long period of time. My doctor finally came (he happened to be in the building), he performed the procedure but a couple of weeks later I found that it did not work.

I started to prepare for the frozen embryo.  Again, my clock was ticking fast and I had to move on this procedure.  I went in for the frozen embryo.  I had to schedule on a day that was right for my cycle and for my doctor to be there.  It worked out fine.  However, it caused problems for me at work.  My boss had a fit because she wanted one stupid report and she coudn't wait 1 day.  I took 1 day off and it was a HUGE deal.  To make a long story short.  This embryo was quite tough.  For the first time ever, I saw signs for the pregnancy hormone in my blood test.  They were very low.  I had also decided to job search around this time to alleviate some of the stress of wanting a day off the next time around in case things did not work out.  As I continued to check the levels of the pregnancy hormone they were not high enough and eventually the pregnancy did not take.  I blamed myself.  I blamed the stress of my job.  Losing weight, having fertility treatments, holding down a job, and saving the money to make it happen were all in conflict with each other.

Tomorrow I will write about the changes I made.