Hello World!

Been thinking about starting a blog for a while to share my hubby and my IVF experience in the makings of our modern family.  Last Monday, the Agreement with our gestational carrier (GC) was finally signed. Our GC will start her meds tomorrow while our egg donor will start hers towards the end of this month. It took us about 8 months from making the first call, to our now IVF clinic, to get to this point.

Some of our decisions and observations along the way

Finding the clinic was easy since we went with Kaiser IVF because we are Kaiser members and I am existing patient of one of their REs. They had a list of suggested egg donor and surrogacy agencies they've worked with. I also did HOURS of egg donor and gestational surrogacy research via the Internet. But when I did Google searches for "Asian," "Chinese,"or "Japanese" egg donors, there wasn't much other than the egg donor agencies themselves or how expensive or how difficult it is to find an Asian donor for the various reasons many who are in our situation know too well that I don't need to go into this blog.

In the Asian community, there is stigma about discussing openly your personal health issues outside your immediate family or finding Asians, in general, who are willing to donate medically. I know there are many of us in our situation because the demand for getting an Asian egg donor is so great. Where do you go? Who do you talk to? Who do you trust?

There are support groups for egg donors and surrogates, but for us, Intended Parents (IPs), there aren't any in our local area who are actually going through this process. I've asked around -- our psychologist, IVF agency coordinator, surrogate agency coordinator and egg donor agency coordinator -- and checked RESOLVE. I have found some support and helpful information online via A Child After 40 and Parents Via Egg Donation, but again not specific with our Asian egg donor and surrogacy twist.

Our Kaiser IVF coordinator told us it could take, using multiple donor agencies, 6 months to 1 year to find someone (more on that in a future blog post) while juggling the process of finding a surrogate who is willing to wait for us because I am not able to carry. We never went down the "Ivy League educated $25K+" egg donor route because we're both 1st generation college graduates. I graduated from Cal and feel that it's the environment, or the nuture, that gets you to who you become in life, not a designer egg.

Why not share?

So I thought since we're embracing the IVF technology and using an egg donor and surrogate and had to be extremely open emotionally, mentally and financially to have our modern family, the logical next step is to chronicle our experiences electronically.  In future posts, I will include more about who we are, how we ended up here today and share with you all of our emotions, the good and the bad, and the dreaded costs--I used to joke about naming our baby, "Tesla," but it's now more of a reality when I see that we have just wrote checks totaling in the amount for the fully-loaded model to get us to this point!

Hopefully, our personal experiences can help other IPs who are in our special niche situation because we couldn't find any in one website or blog.

If you are going through this too, please don't be shy and share. I'm trying to form a support group.