Rachel's home page - Egg donation - Aftermath
Two days later I received a lovely bunch of flowers which the clinic had sent with a thank you message from the recipients. I was very touched. At about this time I was developing a mild case of OHS: very bloated belly and cramps, which got worse if I did any physical exertion at all - even standing still for more than a few minutes was exhausting. I stuck to the recommended high-protein diet, borrowed some bigger trousers from a friend and sat around a lot. My job is sedentary so I was at least able to continue working. I found those few days very difficult to deal with, probably because the Big Event was past and this was an inconvenient anti-climax. After a few days symptoms subsided and I went back to normal.
The clinic will tell you the result of the donation, if you ask, so after a few weeks I rang the clinic to ask how the attempt had worked for the recipient. The practice is to collect lots of eggs (usually about 5-13), fertilise them all, use the best now and freeze any spares for future attempts. I had produced an above-average number of eggs so was feeling quite hopeful. However, not many of them had successfully been fertilised, and only three of those were suitable for use. They were all implanted into the recipient, but there were no spares to be frozen.
Unfortunately the recipient did not become pregnant following the implantation. I felt devastated to hear this, after all the effort and pain I'd been through, and presumably so had she. I even felt guilty about the flowers. I talked to the Logan Centre about how I felt and they were very reassuring: I had done the best I could, what I had done was very generous, sometimes fertility treatment doesn't work and it's nobody's 'fault'.
The whole way through the donation process, all the staff I came into contact with treated me with respect and appreciation for the time and effort I was going to. For me, donating eggs was something I very much wanted to do, so I didn't mind the effort, but all the same it is very nice to be repeatedly told you are doing a lovely thing.
Rachel's home page - Egg donation - Aftermath