Thursday, November 6, 2008

A whole new kind of online shopping

I did some donor and clinic shopping tonight and it is all just so exhausting. I was looking at one clinic in particular that seemed all friendly and Pro-everyone but good grief the hoops that I would have to jump through just seemed ridiculous. First you would need to attend a 2 1/2 hour orientation session that appears to go over the basics of TTC and charting (this seems like a waste of time and it doesn't look like free passes are given if you can quote Taking Charge of you Fertility line by line), then you have to attend a counseling session to talk about safe behaviors while pregnant, a check up where they review your last 3 months of charts, standard fertility tests... and on and on. No thanks on that one.

The donor picking is slow going as well. I wish the banks would magically jump ahead 10 years in how they do things because I really do think that the changes that have to be on the way will make this process much more transparent. Isn't it crazy that they can't manage to keep track of the donors and get updated health information. Or that they do such a poor job of tracking offspring and being proactive with health updates. The open id or willing to be known policies vary from bank to bank and are just not good enough. I feel so much responsibility to make a good choice. I need to make sure that I minimize the down side of using a donor as much as I possibly can for my child. To me that means having as much information as possible on the donor and choosing someone who is id release.

2 comments:

Jo said...

Meg, take a look at this website :

http://www.newlifemidwifery.com/fertility.html

I haven't spoken to them yet but they look pretty interesting at least online.

Pepper said...

I remember choosing my first donor was hard. Picking the bank seemed to be the toughest part, but I wanted to go with one that had open ID donors and adult pics and that substantially narrowed my choices. I also read up on banks on TTC boards and felt comfortable with my choice because the one I ended up going with got good reviews. And now I can vouch for them too.

From there, choosing a donor got much easier because I knew which qualities I wanted and the pic + open ID requirement narrowed the field dramatically.

Best of luck with your search!