Little IVF earthquakes

It was Friday.

Six days after our fresh donor egg cycle transfer. The official blood test would not take place until Wednesday. Hopes were still sailing high for our move to donor eggs. A hatching blastocyst had managed to give us our second embryo transfer in six cycles. We were grateful to our donor and to the clinic for providing this opportunity. Past issues with the clinic were laid to rest, and we began to look to our reproductive future with anticipation.

Then it happened.

Some would say it was no big deal.

But it was a big deal to me. The shock still reverberates even months later.

In the mail was another set of invoices from the clinic. I flicked through them quickly, I was about to go out. Yet at the back of the stack of standard invoices, something was laying in wait, about to trigger off a chain of events that still leave me distressed.

The typical invoice from my clinic takes a standard form. The information is predictable: the patient’s name, address, patient number, referring fertility specialist and more.

Yet a piece of A4 lurking at the back of this selection held a slight variation on the usual. My details were there, but so too was another woman’s: her name, address, referring specialist and so on.

It struck me all at once with a massive rush of blood to the head. I was looking at my egg donor’s details: my anonymous egg donor’s name, address and more.

The shock was awful.

Maybe it is something no one else can understand. However, I felt immediately ill, giddy and that the weeks of truckloads of progesterone were really catching up with me.

The clinic had offered us the chance to use the eggs of one of their clinic recruited anonymous donors back in January. We had jumped at the opportunity. Australian laws mean eggs cannot be bought, that they must be given altruistically. In our home state legislation ensures that any children born via anonymous donation can access the donor’s details on reaching the age of 18. By agreement of all parties, the information may be accessed earlier. In short: ART donors fall into one of two possible categories in Australia: known or anonymous. All are altruistic. We had long decided that the accessing of this information prior to any child reaching the age of majority would be a decision guided by the needs of our future child. We were prepared to have these details, but did not expect them for some years to come.

We had entered into an agreement with the clinic for an anonymous egg donor. That was the terms as specified by the clinic. There was never any suggestion that this would be retrospectively converted to a known donor agreement. It was utterly without warning, and the shock would leave me reeling for the days to come; through the news of our pregnancy and the miscarriage that followed four days later.

Whether it was a cumulative affect of years of problems with the fertility clinic and their various administrative errors, or just my finally reaching my limit I cannot be sure. Whatever it was, it was enough.

Rarely home before 7pm, I decided I would travel to Wobbles’ work place to tell him the news. I wasn’t going to be left alone with this ART bomb for hours. In typical Wobbles fashion, he quickly went about reassuring me I was mistaken. Surely, the clinic wouldn’t make such a fragrant abuse of the privacy of both us and of the donor, he reasoned. Not even they could make such a foolish error.

I was certain I was not mistaken. My suspicions would be confirmed the following week during those brief days of pregnancy by the clinic’s donor egg program co-ordinator. The miscarriage had already occurred by the time she called back with some attempt at an explanation. It was way too late.

The days should have been wonderful. They weren’t. They were confused and stressed. They took on an even darker tone when problems with a fellow IVFer emerged.

Over these years, I’ve formed online relationships with other travellers along this IVF highway. Some have endured and meant regular contact. Others are less frequent but no less important, and others are the casual or the curious types who for whatever reasons have turned to me for advice or support. Normally, I am happy to share but sometimes it can be a one-way process: demanding IVFers who expect much from others and give little in return. I’d been cautiously supporting an IVFer who seemed to be struggling with the process. According to her, I was the only one she could turn to. All others had rejected her. There was a lot of pressure, and I felt unable to tell her I was concerned about her attitudes. She was angry and her behaviour around our local infertility forums had been worrying. As our donor cycle had proceeded, I did my best to ignore my own concerns about this woman, and hoped that someone would support me if I ever got that low in my time in IVF Land. But things subtly shifted. During the medical emergencies of the week prior to the egg pick up I was spending my few lucid hours between pain killers and treatments responding to her emails. Despite my explaining our own situation there seemed to be no appropriate response or acknowledgement from her. I should have known better. I should have extricated myself from the situation the moment I suspect not all was well.

By the time the clinic’s letter had arrived I had been systematically worn down. I already had a sense of doom and that whatever the result of our cycle was, her response would not be good. The day I received that fateful invoice from the clinic I did not write to her. My thoughts were well and truly stuck in my own predicament. The response was immediate and my gap in communications lead to an onslaught of abuse that would later spill over into infertility forums and Facebook comments after I announced that we had finally scored a positive pregnancy result.

It was my own doing.

I allowed the anger of an unstable IVFer and the errors of a careless infertility clinic destroy those short but glorious days of pregnancy. Even now, I have to write this down to try to find some sense in it all. Probably there is no sense to any of this. Nor is it likely to make sense to anyone else. However, I do feel compelled to memorialise these events as a cautionary tale. My vision of news of a pregnancy being played out against a background of joy and serenity was crushed before the pee rained down on the first stick.

Still we had decided to rally and try – despite the circumstances – celebrate our pregnancy in our own special way, hence Wobbles’ surprise gesture of a romantic night away. However, it was not enough to change the events that would follow.

We vowed to keep the clinic’s error a private matter for the time being, and waited to hear some official response. My twin concerns were for the loss of all parties’ privacy and the future of the anonymous egg donor program. How could donors or recipients place their faith in a seriously flawed system? Privacy legislation operates throughout this country, yet this major medical organisation had made two serious lapses in this area in our treatment alone (the other being the time we were informed in the waiting room – in front of others – that our one embryo had expired, and that our transfer would not take place.) Something was clearly very wrong.

Ironically, somewhere in that time we received a further invoice – this time the receipt of an entire cycle intended for yet another woman. This time the clinic patient had no known connection to us. Yet we now had her name, address, patient number, fertility specialists’ name and more.

There was no follow up. We started to contemplate the unthinkable: legal action. It took some months before we could bring ourselves to write a letter to the clinic’s CEO and received an immediate response. He would investigate, he assured us. His follow up letter would take a few more weeks. While sympathetic, I found his response upsetting. They acknowledged the error, and had because of this incident – he claimed – changed their nationwide billing system. Their promise of a change in procedures, seemingly removed any liability. That was all they could offer. What did I expect, I ask myself even now.

Ultimately, there was no point in pursuing them legally. The process would be difficult and costly and probably unsuccessful. Most of all it would have been too distressing. We agreed to a lesser action of reporting them to our state’s Health Commissioner in an attempt to at least hold them accountable. It is negative certainly, but my sense of foreboding about the clinic has not diminished. Still we are reliant on them. They are free to unleash their unwitting hurts. Without us, there will still be thousands of other baby dreamers signing on each year. While in turn, we are reliant on them if we are to keep our family hopes alive.

I have held true to my promise to not Google or in any other way seek out further information about our donor, who as coincidence would have it only lives a few kilometres away. That doesn’t stop me from looking at every female I see in the street, the supermarket, in the car stopped next to me at the lights who vaguely matches the donor’s broad physical description and wondering; ‘Could that be her? Is that the mother of my future baby?’