Donor Family Next Steps

Yesterday, my period finally arrived.  Five days from my last dose of Es.trace and PIO shot.

Getting my period after a procedure is always hard.  Last transfer was hard because I was technically pregnant, even if just barely.  Therefore the period indicated I was miscarrying.  This transfer is even harder..... as not only was I pregnant, I had a high beta number.  We were overjoyed for a few days until we found out it was again, another chemical pregnancy.  So yesterday, my period marked that I am again miscarrying.  But this time it is harder.  My pregnancy was more real.  I am experiencing the loss of my babies.

On Friday, I spent over an hour on the phone with Debbie, our counselor that works with donor and recipient families at NEDC.  Since we will have to wait until May for our next transfer, we will most likely have to update our home study before we can do our transfer as our current home study expires in April.

From our discussion, I found out some things that I did not know or even had to consider back in May of last year when we did our matches with our first two donor families.

• NEDC requires a recipient to have at least 6 embryos adopted before a transfer.  Because we currently have 2 embryos left from our current donor family, we will need to be matched with at least another donor family to meet the minimum number of embryos.  Therefore, we will need to have at least one other ODA (open donation agreement).
• There are no expiration dates on the ODAs.
• If we end up going with a different donor family for our next transfer (not use our existing embryos), we could reserve the current embryos for future siblings, and the current ODA will still be valid. However, because this next transfer will be our third and last at NEDC (we are only allowed three tries), we may have to release our leftover embryos if this next try is not successful.
• For our next transfer, we will need one or two new ODAs,  depending on if we end up selecting one or 2 different donor families.  We will pay one fee for up to 2 ODAs, but only if we need 2 families to meet the minimum of 6 embryos (minus the 2 we already currently have).

Last week, I had contacted Angie, the patient coordinator at NEDC and requested additional Asian/Caucasian and Asian donor family profiles that had not already been sent to us back in May of last year.  I was considering if we should look at profiles of Caucasian families too.  I was concerned if Caucasian families would reject an Asian/Caucasian biracial couple like us.

I spoke to Angie on Friday and asked about looking at profiles of Caucasian donor families.  She said NEDC does not have any rules or policy against a biracial couple like us adopting Caucasian embryos, so we are more than welcome to request those profiles.  I asked if Caucasian families are accepting of a biracial couple like us adopting their embryos.  She said she did not know off hand or had any numbers of such cases.  It would be up to the donor families to accept or decline our match.

*Note: I asked Angie if NEDC has a policy about us adopting Caucasian embryos, because I knew that NEDC tends to reserve biracial/multi-ethnic embryos for couples of the same ethnicity because the pool of embryos tend to be very small.

So in the mean time, there are lots to think about.

1. Do we want to consider asking for profiles of Caucasian donor families, or just look at the limited pool of Asian/Caucasian and Asian families we already have?
2. Do we want to stick with blastocysts, or change to embryos from either 2PNs or multi-cells?
3. Once we have considered the above, we will actually have to select one or two donor families, and then wait to see if they accept our match.

Whew!!  Lots of things to consider.