Deciding: the process

First things first - I am astounded that so many of you are out there still reading this blog after all this time. I am so touched - and a bit shocked - to see your comments. So, thank you for sticking with us. I know it hasn't been a fun read for quite some time, if it ever was. It means a lot that you're still reading.

I promised to try to convey our decision making process....it's been a long one...but here goes....

In terms of trying to figure out where to go after our sixth loss, we've had many options on the table as you know: gestational carrier, donor egg, donor embryo, and sometimes adoption (although adoption has felt like a whole other enchilada with different stressors, rules, and uncertainties, and therefore not the choice for us right now).

The two options that we've been most closely contemplating at this point in time have been using donor egg vs. using a gestational carrier with our own frozen embryos. And deciding between them has been more difficult than I can articulate. I think a lot of it has been due to the fact that we - and our doctors - still don't know what is going wrong. Whether there is something terribly wrong with our embryos (even when they are chromosomally normal) or whether there is something terribly wrong with my body, making me unable to carry a child to term.

We've been round and round and round the different options. I've been researching them, trying each different choice on for size, trying to find the option that seems like the right one to begin with. Typically, my decision-making process involves gathering scads of data to figure out what makes sense rationally and then waiting for some intuitive process to occur to narrow it down from there and feel confident in my decision. Will is much easier than me about all these things. He doesn't question things like I do, doesn't exhaustively research. In fact, if he'd been in charge of this decision, it would have been made long ago, more impulsively, and probably would have been to transfer our embryos yet again into me and see what happened. Problem is, I couldn't do that again, not with our track record. And once Will thought about it a bit, he agreed that it probably wasn't really a very prudent plan.

So in choosing between using a gestational carrier or a donor egg, I tried to get a sense of what each entailed, what we'd be giving up with each choice and how hard that might be, what we'd potentially gain from each choice and how cool that would be, how expensive (my oh my) and uncertain (sigh) each choice would be. I spoke with a couple of friends, I read everything I could get my hands on, I made pro and con lists, I slept on it, I talked to a professional about it. Problem is, even after exhaustive research, neither a gestational carrier with our own embryos nor an egg donor with my body stood out as "feeling" exactly right.

We perused surrogacy forums and databases. We even signed on with a surrogacy agency and had them start looking for a carrier for us. We simultaneously contacted our current and former clinics and got some names of egg donor agencies and began a search across the U.S. at several egg donor agencies with the parameters we thought most important to us in selecting an egg donor.

We narrowed it down to two egg donors at two different agencies. And we began looking at gestational carrier profiles that were sent to us.

And although none of the gestational carrier profiles seemed to be the exact right fit, we figured we would most likely move forward with a gestational carrier because it seemed to make the most rational sense to use our own embryos first..... Meanwhile, Will was ready to move forward with anything. He told me he'd be happy with either egg donor. And as we looked at each gestational carrier profile, he said he'd be fine with each of those as well.  As is typical of Will, he was ready to choose any and every option.

And me? I was scared to commit to any option. I kept waiting for the "right" feeling to come.

(to be continued)

Mo


Click here to subscribe