if you could pass on a message to the recipient(s) of your eggs, what would that message be?
A few years ago, a woman I've never met had my child, but that's not exactly true; she had our child, or something like our child. My Deoxyribonucleic acid is fringed with her hubby's Deoxyribonucleic acid inside a baby who was carried and birthed by this anonymous woman.
Some couple has a kid that I am somehow scrunched within of.
This was the winter of the Panicky Manhattanite. They scuttled around in Chanel coats, swiping at quarters on the sidewalk, whispering Madoff! while watching their IRAs and 401Ks and mutual funds implode on their phone'due south banking app, finally drowning their worries in $15 bottles of wine instead of over a nice dinner out, which now seemed, regrettably, indecent.
I had a good job as a wealthy family'southward melt and assistant, health insurance through grad school, savings, no debt, and a lot of optimism. Just I knew I was a luxury employee, my hours were existence cut back, and my weekly payments were given with more unease than they had been in 2007, when wads of money simply looked cute.
My optimism hadn't blinded me: I knew a 'Real Job' would likely not be on the other side of this penultimate semester of grad school; even if it did, information technology would likely sap my writing time, which was every bit essential to me as claret and air and h2o and the whole reason I had gone to grad school in the showtime place. If I wanted to keep writing I was going to have to be artistic about financing it.
Using the $8,000 to write would justify the ambiguous health risks of selling my eggs, I idea.
* * *
The first morning at the agency I noticed a large framed affiche showing a magnified photo of a human ovum repeated 9 times in a grid, each i in a different colour -- like Warhol'due south Marilyn, the idolized (and maybe unattainable) thing.
I had an appointment with someone named Dr. Greene who asked me questions I'd already answered in the 30-page written application and the previous week'due south phone interview. The answers were easy: a small town in Mississippi, then Tennessee, and so Louisiana; a B.A. from the Jesuits; an Ivy League M.F.A.; scoliosis, history of anemia, vegetarian, recovering Methodist; siblings, parents, and grandmother, all alive and well; three dead grandparents: cancer, cancer, stroke.
Dr. Greene, equally if reading a cue menu, said it was her job to make me not desire to do this, to outline the risks, physical and emotional. Have I considered the risks?
I said I had.
We moved on.
Dr. Greene asked near my parents' and siblings' bodies: average-height, average-weight, fair skin, and blue eyes, and she makes an approving expression at the last fact. This is like a sunroof on a car you might buy or a washer-dryer in a potential flat. Grad school is a leather interior, a pool in the backyard.
Afterwards blood was taken and a cup peed in, I was sent to an part where I took a personality test and a mental health exam (Everyone is trying to sabotage me. Always, frequently, sometimes or never?) then I met with another female person doctor who asked me most my own potential desire to exist a mom; I was 23 and had never met anyone I accept wanted to brand more of, then I smiled and shrugged.
We signed a few papers and I left.
* * *
A few weeks later a woman chosen to say I had passed all the basic health and genetic tests they'd run and a nice couple was already offer me the job of Ancestor, of Genetic Donor, of Family unit Member They Need Not Run into. They liked the fact that I am a writer, and were pleased with my score on the Myers-Briggs. And though they hadn't seen a photo of me and never would (the agency's policy) they thought my genes said I looked nice.
I knew what they really meant by this was that my genetic make-upward was similar enough to the eggless mother for them to pretend that I never existed, but the agency couldn't tell me annihilation about the couple (some other policy) other than the fact that they were "nice."
Prissy.
I imagined the couple sitting in Dr. Greene'due south function, their hands joined in white-knuckle fist, her eyes glassy, his afar, both of them in suits, maybe even on a lunch break, as they made a choice. Donor number three-one thousand and whatever. Her. We'll take her.
* * *
The next day I went to the clinic and a nurse read a contract to me. For the next two to three weeks I couldn't drinkable, fume, have sex, or accept drugs except for the ones they give me. I couldn't stay upwards too belatedly or become to bed as well early, equally this would disrupt my injection cycle. I also needed to avoid spring-roping, pogo-sticking, or jostling up a flight a stairs also speedily, especially toward the end when my ovaries would feel every bit heavy equally umbilicus oranges and tender, like fresh scabs.
I was also reminded that I had no right to the contact information of the recipients and I would have no right or obligation to any potential offspring, and, in fact, I will not even be informed if a kid did event from my donated ova, or how many, or of the nature of its (or their) health.
I signed, initialed, signed once more, and initialed again.
And then the nurse gets out a box of syringes and tiny drinking glass vials.
These ii I have to keep in the refrigerator. This one I'll accept to mix myself; ii powders to one cc of saline. This is the 1 you'll take every night for the first five days, and then you'll add this 1 and this one in the morn. You utilise the orange needles on this ane, the pink needles on that one, and the 1 y'all take in the morning has it's own little needles that twist on the height.
She sticks a needle into a pouch of silicone meant to mimic the fat of my thigh.
See? You won't feel a thing.
* * *
Egg donors and women undergoing in vitro fertilization take the same drugs (in varying doses) and the same extraction procedure. The divergence, of form, comes later on the extraction, when the donor's lab-fertilized eggs are implanted into the recipient and the other has them implanted into herself.
The injections began for me with a low dose Lupron, an drug that greatly reduces the sex hormones estradiol and testosterone and has been used to treat prostate cancer, precocious puberty, and has fifty-fifty (in very high doses) been used to chemically desexualize pedophiles. Afterward a few days, a dose of Menopur was added, an injection is made from the urine of post-menopausal women that stimulates multiple ovarian follicles to produce eggs instead of the unmarried follicle that typically matures and ovulates each month. The nighttime before the retrieval I took a final injection of Gonal-F, a mega-follicle-stimulating-hormone that is bovine-derived, at a precise hour the bureau had assigned to me so that I would ovulate while on the operating table. With Gonal-F RFF circulating my blood that night, I considered the slight hypocrisy of ever again buying organic, hormone-gratuitous yogurt.
Co-ordinate to studies that accept been performed since IVF became more widespread in the mid-'80s, taking these drugs does not deplete a woman's supply of eggs as the extra follicles stimulated to ovulate would accept naturally withered instead of maturing that month. But that doesn't negate the fact that taking huge doses of hormones is a revenue enhancement on your body, and what it could potentially trigger isn't completely known. Despite anything any study could tell me, I knew it was still a gamble.
Afterward existence on the drugs for a week, I didn't notice whatsoever of the side-effects I'd been warned of -- hot flashes, nausea, bloating, etc. -- except 1: I was intensely and irrationally emotional.
In seminars I had to routinely resist the impulse to pause form for a grouping hug or slide under the table to weep about how much I loved The Moviegoer. I run into a plastic purse globe-trotting in the wind one afternoon and beginning crying, then realize this is like that scene from American Dazzler, then I cry over American Dazzler, so I cry over the fact that I am crying over American Beauty.
But none of this crying was from really being sad; I simply felt too connected to the lives of others, to the vulnerability I could hear in someone'southward vox or hanging apparently on his face. If I made eye contact with anyone I immediately wanted to mourn and rejoice them. Subways were incommunicable. Strangers were emotional landmines. I was the menopausal, meaning, and postpartum female parent of the earth.
I realize at present that information technology sounds dramatic. It was dramatic, even to me: I'thousand not the weepiest woman who ever was. I'm known mostly for well-intentioned sarcasm, level-headedness, and an power/susceptibility for detaching. So I found the over-emotional side-effect strangely enjoyable, like I was renting some more than emotional woman'south brain. I learned showtime-hand that a personality tin can exist deeply contradistinct by a medication, that our brains are ever at the mercy of hormones and enzymes.
Even so, I was glad to get dorsum to my normal, semi-jaded self once the injections were over.
* * *
The forenoon of the surgery I arrived at the clinic exactly on time with an empty belly, dry mouth, and my long-suffering boyfriend. It was his job to ensure I didn't fall asleep or absently step in front of a taxi while the anesthesia was wearing off on my way habitation. It was my task to go dorsum to being normal once this was all over.
The procedure lasted about twenty minutes during which I was nether full anesthesia, though the bureau refers to this equally a "retrieval," never "surgery."
I woke up feeling quite good -- well-rested, even -- and someone gave me a graham cracker and a glass of water and a few days after I get a bank check in the mail.
* * *
Sometimes the ova don't make it out of the Petri dish. Sometimes the sperm only swim frantically around this strange egg, refusing to plunge, finally dying. Or else the wife's uterus rejects the zygote that is half her husband and one-half a mystery -- thousands of dollars shaken off with her claret. About 60 per centum of the time everything goes fine. Either way, the donor is never told what happened, but a few weeks after the retrieval, I got a telephone call.
It was uncommonly successful, the nurse tells me, you ovulated twice as many eggs as a the average donor.
She wanted to know if I'd exercise it again.
I did non consider information technology. Instead I said, thoughtless, that I would. Several weeks afterward I go through the exact same procedure -- needles, hormones, retrieval, graham cracker, a strangely large check in the mail. My beau, this time, is understandably pissed I didn't talk to him before re-committing. On the day of the retrieval he doesn't come with me since I felt 100 percent fine after the surgery last time. Information technology is Valentine'due south Day.
Aaron Amat/Shutterstock
A few weeks after the second retrieval Ellen calls again, congratulates me every bit if I've won a gold metallic in ovulation, and asks if I volition practise another wheel.
Again, I don't consider it. I just tell her, No.
She asks why and I say I'm busy. She asks what my schedule is, tells me that she can piece of work around it, merely, really, I just don't want to do another round of hormones, to button my luck with the retrieval surgery, to experience like a luxury guinea sus scrofa, to be a part of the cosmos of another mystery child, to feel somewhat criminal when I deposit 8,000 dollars that could have been better spent on adopting a child instead of this elaborate luxury performance that may toll less than a purse this female parent could conceivably own and that I've go complicit in all this and why didn't these people just prefer because it obviously wasn't the money and yes, possibly the mother really wanted to experience childbirth and who am I to tell a stranger that she shouldn't desire that simply is being a parent actually near giving birth and if I say that it isn't about giving birth, does that make me, somehow, a parent?
I don't tell the nurse any of this. I just tell her I don't want to take the risk right at present.
She says she understands merely that I should phone call if I modify my mind. When she asks if they tin can keep me on file I just say, That's fine.
* * *
For the next year I used a clamper of the egg money to live on while I do an internship and work on a second draft of a book, then another couple thousand to buy plane tickets to New Zealand where I spent virtually no coin, hitch-hiked, wrote, and worked on farms in substitution for food and a identify to slumber. When I get back to America I end upward starting a bed and breakfast with a few friends. Betwixt working on another draft of the book and renovating our eventual B&B I didn't have time to earn any significant amount money aside from an odd tutoring gig. Everything that yr was an deed of faith in the eventual success of the concern and selling a manuscript, just nothing was guaranteed.
I was iii hours into refinishing a hardwood floor -- Did I actually know how to do this? No -- when I got a call from the agency. Another perfect couple had come around -- would I reconsider?
I had been steaming a questionably toxic glue off the floor of a building that was concluding renovated in the era of asbestos. The hormones, in this context, didn't seem similar much of a hazard and the $eight,000 would take been a gigantic relief to me, as would a free wellness exam since I was without insurance. The long-suffering boyfriend was no longer effectually.
I didn't need to consider anything. I said, When can I come in?
Tomorrow, she said. They'll need to do some bones blood work and 1 more new examination. No big deal.
A week subsequently I got a call about when I am supposed to starting time the Lupron except the nurse doesn't say annihilation about Lupron. She says, Well, I'm afraid I take some bad news. You know that new blood exam nosotros had y'all practise? Well, as it turns out you are, in fact, a carrier of Fragile X.
I'm a what?
Delicate Ten. It's a gene. And you acquit information technology. It's a depression positive, just it'due south a positive.
What does that hateful?
Well, there's not much I'one thousand trained to tell y'all about information technology, honestly. Just that you lot're a depression positive carrier for Fragile X. I can refer yous to a genetic counselor if you similar.
No, that's OK.
Adept luck, she said.
I thought, immediately, that I needed to Google "Frail 10" (Seriously, could they come up up with a scarier name for a cistron sequence?), but I knew if I started Googling then I'd autumn into an Internet wormhole and start assuming the worst, so I laid on the flooring of my room and thought of millions of tiny, crumbling, frail Xs twisted in my Deoxyribonucleic acid, doing some mystery to my trunk or the future of my torso or the future of whatsoever children I could e'er have. I thought, again, that I should get upward and Google it, find out what information technology really means, only too that I shouldn't play the role of my own, uneducated, alarmist genetic counselor.
I won't Google it.
I might Google it.
I could just run into what information technology is, quickly?
No -- I shouldn't start. I knew I shouldn't offset.
* * *
Existence a carrier of Delicate X, or whatever genetic mutation for that matter, isn't as elementary as having it or non having it. By and large, genetic testing can only reach broad conclusion: you carry an ignorable amount of mutation, you carry a lilliputian fleck, you carry a lot of it, or yous have a full-diddled permutation. Whether or not information technology is expressed or passed on is up to chance and epigenetics, which is the whole other mode that genetic traits are expressed or not due to methylation or other factors that affect the transfer of genetic data into corporeal symptoms.
But the scary reality about Delicate X syndrome (which is distinct from simply being a carrier) is that information technology is the most mutual known cause of autism and other cognitive disabilities. Though the syndrome rarely affects women, being a carrier means about a 20 per centum chance of early on menopause and premature ovarian. As a woman entering her tardily 20s who couldn't excogitate of condign a parent earlier thirty-something, I was floored. Even if donating my eggs hadn't caused some kind of unseen damage, I may have to eventually face the unnervingly modern predicament of not existence able to have my own children while knowing that someone else already did.
* * *
A few weeks afterwards I got another call from the agency and I feared the worst. Mayhap they're offering me free genetic counseling out of compassion or breaking their ain rules to tell me that my ova produced a child with autism or maybe they've discovered information technology's even worse than previously idea.
Nope. None of the higher up.
They're asking me if I want to donate once more.
We take a couple here that doesn't retrieve your depression positive for Fragile X is really a gamble.
Instead of answering, I stammered out a confused questions virtually what being a Fragile X carrier really meant. Slowly, after a series of emails I got some critical information I didn't take when I savage into that Google blackhole:
I am an intermediate carrier, meaning that somewhere I have between xl and 55 CGG repeats on the FMR1 gene. Technically, this made me not a "Frail 10 carrier" (they take 55-200 CGG repeats) but an intermediate or "gray-zone" carrier. The main gamble an intermediate carrier faces is that the permutation would be passed down the line, resulting in a grandchild or great-grandchild with autism. The chances of this are murky, simply not uncommonly high.
But the difference between an intermediate carrier and a regular carrier is a unmarried CGG repeat, the tiniest sliver of data on a gene. Knowing that I was less than pilus's latitude from early menopause (which carries unpleasantries aside from only making childbirth difficult) didn't make me feel fully exempt from information technology. Genetics and epigenetics are new and not entirely verbal sciences and having way more information about my own Dna was at present stirring up more worries than the original test back in 2008 had calmed.
The agency called me a few more times before I finally told them to take my name off their listing.
* * *
It's hard not to wonder how those possible kids turned out, but of course I signed away the correct to know. I used it to buy time, to finish a volume that I did terminate, which an amanuensis is shopping around now. More often I just imagine my presence as a running joke in those two families, the perpetual scapegoat for anything the parents didn't want to rise out of their mess of Deoxyribonucleic acid. She'southward e'er picked last for softball teams -- blame the donor. She has ADD -- blame the donor. She caught a common cold, has a pimple, doesn't like pineapple -- blame the donor.
The mother will laugh every time, maybe a little likewise long, later her daughter has already left the room. You didn't get that from me, she'll say. Nope, not from me.
We desire to hear what you recall about this article. Submit a letter of the alphabet to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
Catherine Lacey runs 3B, a bed and breakfast in downtown Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in The Laic, Fourth dimension Out New York, Blackbook, and HTML Giant, and elsewhere.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/mothers-helper-a-shocking-thing-i-learned-after-giving-up-my-eggs/253625/