Choosing a sperm donor was quite a different experience for me than choosing an egg donor. We have decided for our last and final try to use not only donor eggs but also donor sperm, since we didn't have luck with our donor egg cycle using my husband's sperm. Based on the information we have, my husband is convinced that his sperm is the problem. Who knows - but by using a young, proven egg donor and a young, proven sperm donor, we feel like this will give us our best shot at getting pregnant.
My options and access to information when choosing my egg donor have been very limited since I'm using an in-house donor. Basically, I can look at a list of all available donors which includes age, height, weight, hair color, eye color, blood type, education level and occupation. I pick a few based on that limited information. My doctor reviews my choices and then picks then one that he thinks would be the best match for me. They do provide me with additional details once the donor has been selected, but the whole process is pretty much out of my hands, other than narrowing down the list to a few donors I may be interested in.
Choosing a sperm donor felt like being on match.com. I could use any sperm bank out there - the choices were endless and the amount of information available on the donors was overwhelming. To make things simpler, I narrowed my choices of sperm banks down to 3-4. Then I'd go online and begin searching for someone who closely resembles my husband -same hair and eye color, similar height, weight and build, someone who is smart, athletic, somewhat creative - ok, and someone who is fairly good looking. Surprisingly, I found my ideal candidate fairly quickly. I was on a website where they tell you what celebrity the donor looks like and the one I found was perfect. His celebrity look-a-like was very similar to my husband and all his physical characteristics matched up. He even had dimples - just like my husband! I knew for sure that he was my man - or my sperm donor. I ran the details by my husband (who, by the way, had absolutely no interest in participating in the search process - he said he would leave it to me)and he liked the guy, too. I was amazed at how easy it was - decided it must be fate, but then saw that he is CMV positive. I got tested and I'm CMV negative. Dang! I read a lot of the research and some say it's no big deal that the risk of infection is so small that it's not a factor while other research insists that if you are CMV negative, you should only use a CMV negative sperm donor or else risk possible harm to your fetus. Ugghhhh.....
My first instinct was to just go with him anyway and not worry about it, but then I started thinking that since this truly is our last shot, why risk it if I don't have to? So, I resumed my search. I actually found a sperm bank that posts adult photos of most of their donors. After paying a fee and spending time on this site, I decided this was the way to go. I really liked being able to see a photo of the donor and fairly quickly found one that was nearly perfect for us - he doesn't have dimples but he meets all our other requirements plus he's smarter than my previous choice. My husband approved of him so I went ahead and reserved a vial of his sperm. Like I mentioned before he is only 20 - so weird. I mean my husband will be 44 this year - old enough to be this kid's dad. It's all so crazy when you think about it. But I guess you got to do what you got to do. I mentioned that I liked the fact that I was able to see his photo, but now that I've seen it - I kind of wish someone would take it away from me. I keep going back and reading the details of his profile, his donor essay and staring at his photo. He resembles my husband but he is not my husband. Right now, his image is burned into my brain. I think I want it to go away. If we do get lucky and have a child, I don't want to constantly be looking for signs of the sperm donor in our baby. I guess if that happens, it will be more than nine months from now. By then - if I can stop myself from going back and looking at his profile all the time - I will have forgotten exactly what he looks like.
Who would have ever thought that this is how we'd go about trying to have a baby?
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6 comments:
i think you will look at it less once you are pregnant. i used to look at my egg donors profile and pics all the time. after i got preg ...not so much.
Interesting quandry. I hadn't thought of all that. Because we did donor embryos, we are sort of twice removed from the egg and sperm donors. I have statistics about them and some narrative from the egg donor, but no pictures. I see what you mean about looking for the donor in your child. But hopefully Peeveme is right and when the time comes you'll just let all that go because it will be YOUR baby. And as for age, when I went to find out the year my egg donor was born, I gulped....I was in 10th grade the year she was born! Made me feel old!
Which site did you find that has adult donor photos? I've never seen those but then I agree with you that maybe they aren't worth looking at for the reasons you mentioned. If I don't have a HB on my u/s by next week, I think we are going to end up using 1/2 DH's sperm and 1/2 DS next go round.
I went with Xytex http://www.xytex.com/ You have to pay a fee of $165 but then you have access to all the "enhanced" profiles that contain the photos for three months. I think we are going to go half and half as well. Good luck!
Thank you, good to know!
Interesting the difference between picking a sperm donor and egg donor. I have wondered if egg freezing becomes a better option if they will start to look more alike. I also wonder if that will make the cost of eggs go down.
In my situation, I was in charge of picking the sperm donor and the egg donor too - with DH approval at the end.
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