Monday, June 9, 2008

Narrowing in on a Donor

We've spent the weekend updating our Excel spreadsheet of potential donors. I have a few friends around here (ok, one) who knows what is going on and after speaking with her, we loosened up our criteria for who to choose. I am tall and I have been only considering tall donors. My friend is taller and said that although tall is nice, she reminded me that it wasn't much fun being the giantess we were in high school.

I also appreciated her comments (and yours) that proven is really the key thing. So of the 26 proven donors in our clinic's database (over 5'1"---there's short and then there's short! DE Daddy is 6'4" and I am over 5'8"), 16 are available in August. I printed out all of their information and DE Daddy took the first swipe and found 4 that he really liked. I really liked 3 of the 4, too, so we're starting with them.

We can't be officially matched until they get all our bloodwork and we're waiting for the final results. But we've let them know about our donor. I'm getting really invested in her so I hope she's willing to do just one more cycle! She's 5'4" (the same height as my Mom who had a 6'3 boy and a 5'8 girl), in a good university with a rigorous major, althletic, plays a musical instrument, pretty, with close to my hair, and, most importantly, she's had 8 cycles with 7 pregnancies. The one cycle without a pg ended up with 10 frosties, so that still sounds pretty good to me. (Yes, this clinic does let donors participate in more than 5 cycles, but at this point, that is a plus for me, not a minus.)

I actually hope that tomorrow we'll get the bloodwork in and they can make the match. And she's willing to do one more!!! NowI'm second guessing myself in that I should have called the coordinator to get a feel for this donor's likelihood to do another cycle. (8 seems like a lot to me!)

But the good news is that we have 3 more donors we'd "prefer" and about 5 or more donors who would be just fine. So, I guess I ought not get really worked up about this. It's going to happen, I think.

Yikes!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's so funny -- my husband used a spread sheet as well, and he assigned positive or negative points to different attributes. Then he added everything up and sorted on that column. I just kind of "experienced" the candidates, eliminating the ones that had traits I couldn't live with. Then we got together and discussed our choices and found that we had arrived at pretty much the same conclusion. Of course, we didn't have as many candidates to choose from (good for you!), so I don't know how well my radar would have worked with that many data points.

I hope that there's a match with the one that you want most.

Kate said...

I found it too exhausting to find everything I wanted, because I realized, I wouldn't ever be successful (because I'd be trying to find ME). I know one thing that helped me nail down a donor was knowing that just because the donor had a specific characteristic, it didn't mean my child would (height for example). I had that same problem, as I am 5'10", and the tallest I could find was 5'8". In the end, I knew height didn't matter as much as other things (for me)! I wish you much luck! I'll be following your story!

Kate said...

PS: What bloodwork did they require of you to move ahead?

Bee Cee said...

Sounds so exciting!! Hope things work out with the preferred donor.