Now.....where were we?

So there we were in the midst of the longest IVF lay-off known to this pair of infertiles.

In an instant it all changed. The world turned upside down.

One telephone call was all it took.

Would things ever be the same, we’d later wonder as a series of events took hold of our previously pitiful attempts to reproduce and gave them a good old fashioned clip around the ears.

IVF cycle five had gone out in TS Eliot style; ending with more of a whimper and less of a bang. It was May 2009 and I was months away from turning 45, the usual cut-off age for the use of a woman’s own eggs in Australian fertility clinics. A ‘no eggs at pick up’ result and our loverley fertility specialist would no longer allow us to go through the agony of our poor results. We’d seen only one embryo transfer in those five cycles.

We were tired, sore and broke. There were looming housing issues in need of attention, there were careers, study, minds, bodies and souls being neglected in our efforts to have ourselves a baby.

The donor egg ‘option’ had long been mooted as our only hope – making it less of an option and more of a necessity. We vaguely acknowledged that we would get around to the whole process when we had collected our thoughts and regained some energy. We undertook the clinic’s mandatory counseling and made a joint decision to start advertising for an egg donor from mid-2010.

In Australia the only means of purchasing a donor egg is to go overseas – at great cost – and join the fertility tourism trail. Otherwise it is down to altruistic donors who give eggs as either a known donor or as an anonymous donor. Clinics keep lists of donors, but the numbers of potential recipients are far larger than those offering this very generous gift.

Would be recipients are encouraged to advertise for their own egg donors. Government permission is required for donor advertising, and clinic studies suggest that almost all advertisers eventually find a donor. However, the donor search is fraught with difficulties. Eggs remain the property of the donor up until they are mixed with sperm. There can be endless reasons why an agreement to donate will not make it all the way to fertilization. We heard stories of lawyers, secret requests for payment and more. Filing all this under ‘things to worry about later’ darling Wobbles and I went about reacquainting ourselves with the world and drew up vague plans for what would later become our advertising campaign in the search for the Great Egg Donor.

Time came to move house (again!) but first we had to find a place to move to and maybe sell a house that had become more of a nuisance and less of an asset. An exhausting round of house inspections and talks with banks and we were eventually on our way. Breaking every rule in Real Estate for Idjuts book and we made it into a new home of our own. There were kitties to be adopted and a non-traditional house lay-out to be dealt with. We settled in for some exciting changes and furry distractions.

There were only days left of 2009 and we turned our flagging spirits to viewing the New Year with renewed hope.

Then it all changed.

One unexpected phone call from the fertility clinic and it seemed like the gods of ART were finally smiling down on us.

Somehow we had moved from the bottom to the very top of the clinic’s own egg donor recruitment list. They had a donor for us. Were we ready to act immediately? If we weren’t there were one hundred people on the list behind us who would “gladly jump at the chance.”

Shock set in for the next few days. Sheer happiness mostly kept the terrible thought that we might be at the butt of one horrible administrative mistake at bay. Could fate possibly be so cruel? Fertility clinic errors remain some of the most difficult to forget.  Things seemed more ‘real’ once official documents and  donor information arrived in the mail. Could we really be finally on our IVF way?

Things had changed in Australia’s IVF clinics since our last outing. Changes to the level of ART coverage by our so-called ‘socialised’ medical insurance Medicare meant cycle costs had soared, while refunds decreased. Donor egg cycles appeared to have been singled out for the highest level of discrimination. We were to pay $10,000 AU upfront in cycle costs, almost double the cost of our previous cycles. Unlike before, no longer would we have up to 80% of these costs returned. Somehow we’d have to make do with a mere 15% refund. Our IVF euphoria quickly lapsed into another one of sheer financial distress.

Thanks to some changes to state government legislation we would also have to submit to criminal history and social services checks. It sometimes seems the indignity of infertility knows no bounds.

The ART learning curve had steepened once again. So much of our past IVF experience no longer mattered or hardly seemed relevant. There were a whole new set of statistics, protocols and hopes to become acquainted with.

Could we believe this very sudden change in our IVF fortunes? Not for a moment! Were we nervous? No, we were terrified! Would things ever be the same again? Probably not……but it is safe to say this Lifeslurper and her Wobbles no longer feared the IVF unknowns.

Nothing could possibly be any worse than the dark places ART had already taken us….could it?

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