Cycle Delayed 1 week -Today is an important day.

Lupron is a self injected medicine that helps synchronize the donor and the IP's cycle. It also helps prevent premaure ovulation. In my case, I no longer menstruate so synching is not required and I'm on a non-Lurpon protocol. However, my egg donor has been on Lupron since April 13th, which is the official date of our D-IVF cycle. The Lupron helps suppress her ovaries (empty). She had to self-administer these injections for about 2 weeks. After 2 weeks they checked her for suppression.

Unfortunately, she had still not fully suppressed after 2 weeks of Lupron. My RE decided to have ED continue Lupron for another week before starting stim meds. I feel terrible for her. Lupron is known to have side effects like mood swings and nasty headaches. I hope she's not in too much discomfort. I think of her, what she’s going through and this truly amazing gift she’s giving us - hope.

Tomorrow she goes in for another suppression check. It's a big day for us. If she's suppressed it's the best news possible and we move forward to the next phase of the protocol. Donor starts stimulating meds and I start Estrace and Patches!!!!!! Fingers crossed for me PLEASE!!!!!!!

BTW ~ the nurse coordinator is very nice and clear when it comes to my protocol. But when it comes to giving me the 411 on the donor's protocol, not so much. I didn't realize the donor would be on Lupron the entire cycle :/

Cycle Tip: If you're like me, very analytical and need to know what's going on with all parties involved with your cycle, make sure you have your clinic/nurse coordinator outline a "draft" protocol: yours and the donor. It helps keep you on track, make markups on the protocol list when dates/meds change, and makes you mindful of what stage in the process the donor is.

Paid My Clinic $27K without Final Donor Approval

Hurry Up! Now Wait....
After accepting our egg donor, we had 2 days to "hurry up" and make the big fat full payment. Or, the donor would be released back into the donor pool. (If I had a dollar for every time we heard that.....). So, the credit card got the hit for $27,000. Yikes! It was a painful payment but for the opportunity to have a baby; worth every penny. Cycle Tip: Sounds trivial but, use your credit card and earn some extra miles. Redeem those miles for a gift certificate at Buy Buy Baby or Baby’s R Us!

Following payment, our donor had to complete a series of final tests and blood work for ultimate "Final Approval" to start the cycle. We were required to "hurry up" and pay before she started, but suffered through the waiting process of getting the results of the donor's final panel of testing. Some of these tests included fragile x and other genetic testing like, Cystic Fibrosis (CF) (the most common congenital disease; the child's lungs and intestines and pancreas become clogged with thick mucus; caused by defect in a single gene; no cure is known (from http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu). Since my DH tested positive recessive for (CF), the donor's CF results were critical. For several reasons, the donor and DH cannot both test positive for this: 1. increases chances of having a baby with Cystic Fibrosis and 2: Effectively cancels the cycle.

Why am I telling you this? These tests are extremely important and we almost made a terrible mistake. Because my DH doesn’t have medical insurance, our clinic suggested that we could save some money by signing docs waiving DH’s genetic blood tests for CF. If we did this, we would have never known he was positive, therefore putting our future child at risk for possible CF.

Cycle Tip: If your donor is NOT proven and has no previous genetic testing - your DH, Sperm donor, or partner’s Genetic Testing is Critical. This is not an area to save $$$. After 3 weeks, we received the news: donor was negative for Cystic Fibrosis. Final donor screening came back perfect! Waiting was difficult but an important part of the process.

Please look out for a future post on the importance of genetic testing.