Our First Donor Appointment

T. is pregnant. A. is pregnant. These are two of my closest friends. I never know how to react to friend’s news that they are pregnant. It’s always a stammer of words that sorta sound like “congrats”, followed by feelings of jealousy and anger. I read somewhere that your reaction is based on their sensitivity to your situation, which I agree with. I have T. baby shower in two weeks. This is the first one I will attend since we lost the twins. I am not sure how I am going to feel. I am assuming my visit will be short.

The support of my friends has always been important to me. This is part of the reason why we decided to be open about our infertility. Looking back now after struggling with this for 3 1/2 years I still think we made the right decision despite some of the crossfire we did receive. It really is a double edge sword. But after 3 ½ years of telling the same story over and over friends must get tired. Friend’s lives go on….mine essentially has not. Friends are spending time with their kid’s friend’s parents, not the single couple who goes out every weekend. Friends are going to the Christmas parade with their little ones bundled up to see Santa, we are going downtown dancing at a Christmas party till early morning hours. Friends are discussing cloth diapers, swimming lessons and diaper creams; we are discussing fertility treatments, money and adoptions. It just doesn’t add up. Friday night I went to supper with a friend I had not seen in months. She is childless. She is focused and successful. K. keeps me grounded and is the most positive person I know. She brought a good friend of hers to join us. An hour later I was running out of that Sushi restaurant with tears streaming down my face. I don’t know what happened. Things were different. She didn’t acknowledge me throughout the entire night. She discussed old coworkers, where to have her Christmas party, her friend’s hot brother, how she fired a guy after an hour… but she never explained what she was talking about to me. I had no idea what was going on. Her friend that joined us, works with her. They have more in common.

With this in mind me and T.’s relationship has been very strained since her announcement. Our visits have been few and far between and my avoidance is recognizable to her and to myself. So sitting in my SUV, crying after a disastrous sushi dinner, I realized that infertility has taken so much more away from me.

November 11th we flew into Ontario for our first donor appointment. Our flight was cancelled due to weather but late into the night we arrived in Toronto. I spent the weekend with mom and dad. Sunday afternoon while gathering information on where we were going my mother told me she heard on the news that a doctor in our area was being charged with four counts of malpractice and had 50 cases being investigated. She told me to look it up online and sure enough there she was. Our doctor, who was going to be our last shot at having a baby, was staring back at us from a newspaper article titled: “Doctor charged with 4 malpractice suits”. I couldn’t believe it. I talked to Danny, my donor and mom and we agreed to cancel it. So in a panic Danny called the only other fertility clinic in our area and left a message asking for an appointment on Monday. We got it. Not a “real” appointment but we got to meet the doctors, nurses, financial advisor and psychologist. Later that afternoon we met our donor and her husband for a 2 hour meeting to discuss everything, over wine, of course. I left Ontario feeling good. In two weeks we have been in touch with the clinic in Ontario and my donor several times and everything is going well so far. In the next few weeks she’ll go in to get her screening done and within the New Year we will be having a conference call which will be the final step to the extraordinary gift that has been given to us. The transfer will take place end of February. Phew….. I still can’t believe this is happening to us.

It will be here before we know it!