I’ll get to the specimen tomorrow (because there is a whole, absurd story there) but let’s start with meeting the carrier. For confidentiality, I’m going to call her by her first initial: B.
B.’s flight was delayed by 9 hours. She was supposed to arrive the night before, stay in a hotel and arrive fresh and rested at the clinic the next morning. Instead, she had to get up at dawn, catch two planes (one from a local airport the size of a small Costco) and then find the car service to take her to the clinic. Our surrogacy agency handled most of the arrangements; another reason not to do this without professional guidance and administrative coordination.
She happened to arrive at the clinic at the same time we did. When we saw her get out of the car, we thought it was her but we weren’t sure. I called out to her, with a question mark at the end of her name.
I wonder if we were what she was expecting. Skype is a great tool for our time, a great advance over the telephone, but it doesn’t give you the sense of someone like being in their presence. In our weekly video chats, B. had been shy, but gradually more open. In person we found her easy to talk to. Despite what must have been an exhausting journey already that day, she was friendly and warm. I think we were all more at ease than we expected to be, at least with each other; I think we still found the clinic to be a bit daunting.
We entered the drab, concrete-block building and were taken to a conference room where a nurse explained what we had to look forward to that day and in the days to come. I’ll talk more about the medical procedures in a future post, but we were able to clarify some things that I had been unsure of.
- We confirmed that the egg donor will be anonymous. We know an extraordinary amount of information about her, more than many people know about the people they make babies with, but we will never know her name.
- We learned that the specimen I was about to produce would be frozen and would be sent away for testing before being used to create the embryos that we will transfer. I thought that a “fresh” transfer meant that the egg would be fresh from the ovaries and the sperm would be fresh from the testes. Apparently though, according to FDA rules, the sperm must be frozen and tested no matter the type of transfer, fresh or frozen. A fresh transfer means that the completed embryo was never frozen, but either of the two source cells could have been previously frozen.
- We will definitely be using intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) so I don’t have to worry that my sperm is too gay to find and seduce the egg in the pick-up bar of the petri dish.
- The transfer will occur in four to eight weeks. We don’t need to be present for the transfer, but we would like to be. Even though everything important will take place in labs and exam rooms, it will be nice to be able to see B. again and to hear first impressions of how everything went from her and the IVF Doctor.
After all of the tests were done, we still had a couple hours before the car would return to pick B. up to take her to the airport for her third and fourth flights of the day. We walked a few blocks to have lunch at a nice place the nurse recommended. At lunch we talked about B.’s kids and her job and if she likes to cook. We talked about our families.
It was nice to be able to spend time with her. Our lives are intersecting with her life in such an unusual way. She’s not really a friend, or family or (yikes) an employee. And yet she will turn out to be one of the most important people we will meet. Since she lives so far away we will probably only see her in person twice more – once at the transfer, and then at the birth. I guess Skype will have to suffice.
