Choosing the donor

The rest of February has been relatively uneventful really. I've had a couple of appointments at the clinic, one with the IVF nurse to talk about the procedure and the medication although she didn't tell me how to actually take the drugs. The other appointment was for a trial run of egg transfer the first of which didn't go well at all.
As I keep telling the nurses I'm doing this as a single person and as I'm single there's not a lot of activity that goes on below the waist for me! :-( And this is coming from someone who really enjoys the physical side of a relationship. Typical isn't it, it's the ones that enjoy sex don't get to have any! So any smear test like examination is really quite uncomfortable for me. The nurses are very understanding though but I am aware it's a problem and will continue to be a problem for me on this journey.

Since my last blog post I've also had to go about choosing a donor which has been interesting, I mean really where do you begin with that one?
The clinic has advised me that they generally use sperm from the European Sperm Bank and so to have a look at their site. I know there's a local sperm bank as well but then I guess you run the risk of potentially your child meeting one of it's siblings without knowing it. The local sperm bank doesn't charge the massive 'pregnancy slot' fee that the European one does but then the prices are slightly more expensive. It's yet another decision to make.

Buying the 'pregnancy slot' involves paying 1000 euros on top of everything else and is just because the sperm is coming to the UK and being used in an English clinic. What you're paying for, in my understanding, is the guarantee that your donor will only be able to father ten families, not ten children but ten families, so technically that could still be an awful lot of siblings. You do get 75% of your money back if you don't get pregnant but of course in this instance I'm hoping I wont be getting any money back.

In the end I did go for the European Sperm Bank and if you go on their website you're able to narrow your criteria. To begin with I thought there was the option to have an anonymous or non anonymous donor and straight away I decided that a non anonymous donor would be what I'd go for. In reality when you put into the website that you're in the UK the available donors drop from 196 to 48 as all donors are non anonymous that are sent here, then if you're after someone similar in appearance to yourself, like most people are, the figure drops even further. This is a good thing for me as choice makes life so much harder sometimes!

So after I'd put in ethnicity, hair colour and eye colour I had under 25 to choose from and when you get into looking at each of the donors, their profiles, baby pictures and audio interview it's actually not such a hard decision to make.

I made my choice on the one person that sounded the most genuine and appeared to really want to do this to help people rather than do it just for the money. So that's how I came to be spending almost 2000 euros on a couple of vials of sperm shipping and a pregnancy slot.

But at least the decision has now been made and I can go off on my trip and just enjoy the sunshine and relaxation.