Tag: egg donors

So it’s been a while……sorry :(

Gosh I’m sorry it’s been a while since I have written anything, I hoped to do it regularly but a wee thing called breast cancer just got in my way.. plus all the usual day to day stuff 🙂 I hope to get back into it more soon…

Thank you to everyone for all your support and patience, I have tried where possible to approve ads really quickly and reply really quickly but there have been days where I have just been too sick to do it 🙁 and it’s also been very difficult to do it from a hospital bed.

It’s been a crazy 2 1/2 years, since my diagnosis, I have had a mastectomy, FEC90 chemo x 4 sessions every 3 weeks and that was crap (nausea, vomiting, exhaustion, mouth ulcers, lack of appetite, hair loss and much much more), I was admitted for a week plus to hospital for low white blood cell count and infections after this first chemo, then I had to have a port put in as my veins collapsed in my arm and they couldn’t get a vein for the chemo, I then had another chemo taxol weekly for 12 weeks and that too was crap 🙂 (absolute exhaustion to the point I couldn’t walk or move, I lost my toe nails and my finger nails went extremely brittle, I lost feeling in my toes and fingers and it’s still as bad today which potentially no fix in site.. and again much much more), then I did radiation every weekday for over 4 weeks and that gave me a lovely tan, well actually really really bad sunburn with blisters… I also started a therapy called Herceptin through the port for a year as I was HER positive, I then had my reconstruction and 5 weeks later was rushed to hospital with massive infections and pain and subsequently had to have the implant removed.. then about 4 weeks later the wounds opened up and I had two lovely holes in my side where I could see inside myself :)… so my specialist got me to have them dressed daily for weeks, then sent me to Prince of Wales hospital daily for hyperbaric oxygen treatment to see if that would heal them, that was fun from Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains on the morning train to Central railway station then by bus to Randwick and back home again in the afternoon… when that wasn’t working after 12 weeks, they did a CT scan to find that I had Osteoradionecrosis, a rare condition where the radiation and infections had caused the tissue and skin and some of my ribs to die… so they I had to have a lat dorsi where they took skin, muscle and tissue from my lower back and pulled it through to my front to give that area circulation and skin to heal…. but wait there’s more 🙂 so then once that was healed I had the expander put in, another surgery, and then they inflated it slowly to stretch the skin out and then finally about 7 weeks ago I had the implant put in… so we are on the home stretch, yay!!

Sorry a boring lot of detail and I am sure I have forgotten lots of extra treatment and stuff…. but that’s the quick snapshot 🙂 of course there were weekly/daily specialist appointments, lots of pain and exhaustion and so much more…

So the great news for me is that my egg donor angel did another cycle whilst I was still going through treatment and we have 11 snow babies on ice waiting for us.  I have just had full scans and yes am cancer free, yayyyyy, we are full steam ahead on doing a cycle and a transfer.

This Tuesday I have a d+c to clear my uterus of all those nasty chemo drugs and other chemicals… then my body will heal whilst we go away to Melbourne to visit family and once we return we will do our first transfer, sometime around the end of September.

It’s been a long, exhausting and emotional journey for us and I hope that our dreams will now become reality and this Christmas I can celebrate knowing that the next one, we will have our own family.

So what about you?? I have had lots of wonderful news whilst going through all of this of babies being born through couples meeting their egg donor angels through here and lots of couples and egg donor angels currently going through the process.  Some sad news where the cycles haven’t worked or the couples have decided to not continue looking 🙁

I am soooooo very excited, every week this site is growing and more and more wonderful egg donor angels are placing ads or contacting couples offering to help, when I started there were so many of us looking and not many angels…. but now we are getting the word out there about egg donation, infertility we are getting many more successes., thank you to everyone for this and please keep spreading the word xox

I was in Springwood at my local shops the other day and typical me, found any opportunity to talk about egg donation and Egg Donor Angels and infertility, that I was chatting to a shop assistant and she said if she had know years ago after having her children, she would have donated her eggs…

But the most important message I had for her was to be aware of her daughters fertility and as they get into their thirties to get themselves checked out and if they aren’t ready yet or haven’t found the right one yet, freeze their eggs…

When we are young, we are told “don’t get pregnant”, “go on the pill”.

At school, we learn the basics of reproduction but no one teaches you about infertility and its conditions and how age affects it and how our fertility starts to decline after 35…. I am not saying all young women should get pregnant or have babies earlier, everyone is different and each person needs to do this when they are ready… but I want every girl/woman to totally understand how it all works, the issues and even the simple thing of how ovulation works…

Well that’s it from me…I would love to hear how you are going..

xoxox

The Big C!

There’s no easy way to start this post, so here goes… 4 weeks ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Now I have always said cancer scares me but just never thought it would be me. We had just said goodbye to a friend on the 27th January to cancer, she lived with us for over 3 months while renovating her house next door and then within two days of moving into her dream home, she was diagnosed with cancer. It was in her bones, her lungs and her breast and they didn’t know which was the primary and which was the secondary and which one to treat.. sadly she fought it for a while but her body was riddled, goodbye Nellie, you are missed…

We spent the last four months of 2011 doing our donor egg cycle and two transfers where sadly we miscarried. At the same time I had a really bad flu and had a some symptoms that I put down to the IVF drugs. I mentioned the scab on my nipple to my GP at the appointment I had with her re my flu and first miscarriage and she said to come back…. I went back in December about it and another issue and she looked at it, said “hhmmm, it’s probably the IVF drugs” and dismissed it. In the meantime I had googled “scab on nipple” and nothing came up, discharge, leaking etc came up but not this one.. so I thought it must be the hormones and trusted my GP. About 6 weeks ago I felt a huge lump in my breast and immediately booked into my GP to get it checked out. She said let’s do an ultrasound, I said what about a mammogram, she ummed and erred and then did the request. On the day of the scans, I knew they had found something being a Friday I had to wait all weekend, and of course when my GP was calling me Monday morning for an appointment to discuss the scans/results I knew that it was bad news. She said it appears to be DCIS, which was a better one to have…. sadly when we got to meet with our cancer surgeon 10 days later it was worse than that. It was high grade DCIS and invasive breast cancer and probably in my lymph nodes.

So here I am at 1am in the morning with only 9 hours before they operate and do a mastectomy on my right breast and remove all my lymph nodes. Sadly I say a fond farewell to a part of me that makes me I guess a woman but the learning I have is that it’s not me, what’s inside is me. I will start chemo in about 4 weeks for a few months or more where I will lose all my hair and probably grieve again, silly but it’s part of the process….. and then radiation most likely. So this speed hump is putting a pause on our dream of a family but it will not stop us from achieving that dream…

So I now have some work to do, hopefully get some sleep and then up at 6am to get ready for another journey in my life… will post again soon with an update…

Cherish your dreams and make them a reality… xox

Ok… Deeep Breaths

Woke up this morning with a brighter outlook after yesterday’s appointment.

We saw our IVF Dr and after this round of blood tests and ultrasound, he say’s there’s nothing that should stop us from having a successful pregnancy, yay!! Some minor immunity issues but when we do our next cycle, he will give me something to help that.

I still have to do a uterus biopsy, was meant to do it yesterday but stopped my progesterone pessaries last week as they came from a different compounding chemist and I had a reaction to them 🙁

He said my donor has good ovarian reserve for her age, looks like she got my share for the family 🙂

So it’s looking like sometime in March, my donor has a few commitments over the next month or so and we need to get everything sorted at the clinic as well as my biopsy to cover all our bases.

Since the last miscarriage, I stopped talking about having children, it was just too hard and even if I did, it wasn’t “when we have children” or “our children/child” it was “if”. Last night I felt I could have the dream again, might take a few more times to get there but…..

Re this website, I am getting some great feedback thank you xo And thank you to those of you that have advertised and that have enquired about being an egg donor angel xo

As some of you know or have read, I used to charge a small fee to advertise on the site but I have stopped that as I only had a few people willing to pay and in turn I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on advertising for a donor for them. As much as I am passionate about this, I can’t afford this kind of money, sorry 🙁
… so I dropped the charge on my site and now I just promote the site and the potential recipients where I can, the only cost to me is my time and that I am not earning money from my business when doing it, if that makes sense?!
In doing this, the potential organic egg donor angels to the site has reduced and the site is mainly attracting the ones actively searching for this.

I would love your feedback on the site and in particular costs, would you prefer it to be free or would you consider paying a fee to advertise on this site, where we can then pay for advertising for your search for your egg donor angel?

I personally in my own search for our egg donor angel paid for ads in many places. The one thing I wanted was a quick and immediate response and something that was quick and relatively easy. I know we all have busy lives and for some of us it’s harder to get online, scouring the internet and sites posting and responding to forums and conversations. While this approach is free and offers some fantastic support networks however it is also very time-consuming. Yes we are focused on realising our dream of having a family but sadly life must go on with or without this dream and importantly we need incomes to pay for the dream as well.

I would love your feedback on this, either comment on this here, or drop me a line at diannej@eggdonorangels.com.au

Here’s to 2012 being the year of realising the family dream for any of us on that journey xox

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Another Christmas without our own family to share it with… when does this heartache stop…

Sorry to start the post on a downer but I know many of you will know these emotions and feelings……

Sadly we had another miscarriage, this time we knew by the second blood test, my HCG levels dropped signficantly so I stopped the meds straight away. The great news is my donor is going again for us but it’s going to be a few months due to personal commitments and we have moved to another clinic. I will do a separate post on this later as finding and researching a clinic is really important and knowledge is powerful in this emotional process.

Since then I have done blood tests and further ultrasounds to help us with the miscarriages before we go again. I knew I had a condition called Adenomyosis but yesterdays ultrasound confirmed it which is not good as mine seems quite bad. Now I am dreading next weeks appointment with the Dr as I suspect he is going to say it’s not good news and our chances are slim or none of holding a baby…. fingers crossed that he has some ideas on how to manage or help it… unfortunately the condition is not fixable 🙁 Normally they recommend a hysterectomy!!

So another Christmas and we still don’t have our dream. How do I feel?? Unbelievably sad but then grateful for what I do have but then overwhelmed by the sadness… How do you turn the corner on this, is it acceptance of your fate and move on with your life, do I keep trying until there is no hope at all?? My TCM lady said to me recently it will happen for me as I am the most determined person she knows in regard to this, however now I am not so sure. Even when the Dr told me 6 years ago things were not good and even when we tried and tried and I came to terms with an egg donor, I was still determined to realise the dream… now I am not so sure it can be realised.

My fear is that while I am putting this in writing, many of you going through the same thing are going to worry that this will be your fate, please don’t xox. As many of you know this is part of the process and I am documenting this as its normal and we need to know that. Surprisingly I am quite a shy and private person and this post is especially hard as it’s not like me to admit some defeat, give in or let it get to me but I feel it’s important as if I am going through this, then many of you have, will go or are going through this and we need to support each other.

The hardest part is to pull myself out of it, normally I am really good at this, like any of us, you have a sad or emotional day and then you wake up the next day, smile and get on with it. This time it’s a bit harder, I bounce back for a day or week and then I have another “ho hum” day….. It may not help that I am on the hormones as the Dr is doing a uterus biopsy next week as part of his investigation into the miscarriages.

So what next for me.. well I need to pull myself out of this, I need to get to next weeks appointment and hear what he says and take it from there. Will keep you updated and please talk to me about this if you want to either through email or here on our Facebook page….

xox

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Here’s to a new cycle………

This week we start a new cycle, exciting but nerve-wracking as well! Thank goodness I am feeling much better, the nasty flu has gone yay…
I have been seeing my wonderful TCM and Accupuncturist Kathryn Taylor since the miscarriage. Both of us are quietly confident that this one will be the one.. fingers, toes and just about everything crossed it is…
What truly amazes me again is just how many people have been through IVF. Every time I talk to someone about it, they have done IVF, know someone etc… How outstanding that the current Govt changed the rebates for IVF almost 2 years ago. How is it possible that they can think its not necessary and the Doctors and clinics are not reducing their fees, so the only ones that are hurting are the couples going through IVF. They have made it out of reach financially for lots of couples. They were also quite sneaky in changing the rebates for donors. If you use a donor, you only get a tiny rebate, prior to the changes your donor made the claim and got the full rebate same as the person doing an egg retrieval cycle. We paid almost $10,000 for our donor cycle and only got back $1,480, yep that’s right! If you do a cycle on your own, it’s approximately $7,500 and you get around $3,000 to $4,000 back….. I even rang Medicare and questioned the description on the web site for that claim and she checked with the assessors and they confirmed that it was right. No reason as to why. Not sure why we are discriminated against for doing a donor cycle. However I do plan to write to the Health Care complaints Commission about it and put in a formal complaint about it.

There are so many unjust causes I wish I had money to fight for them including Child Support Agency and IVF recipients.

Anway off my soapbox now.. time to take the doggie for a walk, now it’s cooled down here…

Take care and baby dust to those of you that are dreaming the dream and thank you to those whom support us going through the journey.

xox

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Update

Ok, so I have been a bit slack, I am just not very good at “blogging” and we have been away for our holiday.

Had a great time, we relaxed, stayed in lots of free campsites, over half the trip was done free camping.  Some of the rest stops we camped in were just great, one of our favs was about 24kms out of Longreach.  There were dirt tracks behind the main rest stop area that you could park in, light a campfire and look at the stars – it was just wonderful, oh and we had mobile phone reception, not that we really had time or used it that much 🙂

We got all the way to Darwin, through outback QLD and up the main highway, stopping at some of our favourite places, Mataranka, Daly Waters and Litchfield.  We swam lots and the warm weather was wonderful.  At Litchfield, Wangi Falls were closed due to the high rainfall and the late wet season but we found a couple of new places to swim, one was Walker Creek – WOW.  We bushwalked about 3kms to get to it, it was a plunge pool at the bottom of small cascading waterfalls and we swam with fish and water dragons etc.  It was just wonderful.

We have been back a couple of weeks but it’s been rather hectic, catching up with stuff which we are still doing but getting there.

The most exciting news is that we have started our donor cycle – Yay!  I am calmly excited if that’s possible 🙂  The trip away gave me some time to truly think and reflect and let go of my demons and regrets, so now I am ready for this journey and the next phase of our wonderful life together. 

I love Shane very much and so glad that we are doing this together, he is a wonderful person.  I love my donor and can’t wait to also share this exciting journey with her xox

Will keep you all updated, thanks for your support, thoughts and wishes xox

hhhhhmmmm still thinking :-)

Yep still thinking about it….. though after last nights run where my feet were so cold I couldn’t feel them for the first 10 minutes, all I can think about is warm weather.  Of course it appears I have Raynauds syndrome which doesn’t help, in the past two years my fingers and toes are quite often frozen and go white with no circulation…

Speaking of the run, now I am not normally an gadget person personally, I love them for businesses but not necessarily for myself…. but on my HTC desire I have loaded Runkeeper and tried it for the first time last night and it’s awesome.  I don’t plan to share with the world my details on it but it’s just great for my goal setting.  I think I understand some of the hype about “apps”.  So then after I woke up when Shane got home last night, well this morning, I lay awake with my brain going 100mph thinking about work and then what apps I could develop for businesses and in terms of my favourite topic infertility.

So what to do about our holiday… another issue is that my cycles have been so erratic, well nothing for almost a year that I feel I need to use the pill to give me a couple of good cycles before we get a little embie to try to attach itself. They need nice snug uterus linings to attach to 🙂 sorry if too much detail!  I need to send my ultrasound report to my Dr and see what she says, once reading that she might suggest to wait a cycle or two for this reason.

So another wet miserable day in Sydney, but again the fires on and I have work to do.  If it was a nice sunny day I would feel guilty for being indoors so it’s probably a good thing.

Well I need to go and collect firewood, finish these presentations, do some filing, ring my Mum, do some housework and later do my dog walk, run and workout…

Thanks for listening xo

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The Rollercoaster ride this week

Phew, what a week, my wonderful donor had some health issues and I was firstly worried about her as she holds a special place in our hearts aside from her wonderful offer but also obviously we were concerned about her being able to continue with being our Egg Donor Angel.

My goodness the emotions are amazing, the love you feel for the person donating (if they are known i.e. friend, family etc), the desire to have a family, the stress, the grief at not being able to use your own eggs and conceive naturally, the OMG I am sooo selfish for wanting this person to continue and the ongoing question “will this happen for us, will we have our dream, a family?”

But the amazing person that she is, she is full steam ahead even though she has had a terrible time the past few weeks and it makes me cry just hearing her words, “I am so excited, we are almost there”.

So I spent two days sad and worried and the rest of the time now has been busy with work and in a protective mode, any of you whom are travelling this journey or have travelled it will understand… you are really really excited the first time you get a response to your ad for a donor, then you find that most if not all are not suitable after weeks of emails, phone calls, meetings.. then you find one that you think yes this is it.. then you find that they can’t do it for various reasons, we had two suitable and wonderful women offer in my first ad in the local paper but both had Hep C. I advertised on Bub Hub and Essential Baby forums but while I got wonderful support from people there, no substantial offers came through.  A few others offered via other advertising but they were in other states, got pregnant or just weren’t right for other reasons.  A friend’s daughter then offered and we started the process but she pulled out and we started again.  Another wonderful friend offered, now she is amazing, dealing with an illness all her life and yet she offers to help us but our Dr suggested it would not be good for her health and therefore we decided not to risk her at all… then my wonderful angel came forward and so far we haven’t looked back.. So while I am excited, there’s a reservation that is holding me back.. until we get to the day of egg retrieval and then when we can announce or should I say scream to the world that we are pregnant…

So this week’s looking much better yay xox

Would love to hear about your journeys…

So how did our journey start…

Evening…..

After a busy few weeks I am taking some time to write about our journey as promised.  As its bbbbrrrr very cold outside, the fire is roaring, the dog is asleep beside me, the cat is meowing at me (yes she’s been fed!) and Shane is at work…

I was married for many years to someone who I thought I was in love with….unfortunately he wasn’t the person I thought he was, and after finding about the lying and cheating, I broke free and started my life again.

The hardest part was that I knew I wanted a family and knew time was running out for me….you can’t really say on the first, second or third date… so…how about a family…. like now!

In looking for a housemate as I had to pay the mortgage and credit card debt on my own, I met this wonderful man through a friend that he worked with.  I can still picture him walking up the path to my front door for the first time and thinking to myself “this guy seems really nice and sweet”.  How right I was!

However it took us a month or so to talk again after one of my other housemates was moving out and suggested I ring him and see if he still needed somewhere.. so I did, he had a place but from that call we had our first date and we are still together six years later.

The saddest and hardest part for us as a couple was to overcome our fears and trust issues.  My distrust due to my ex’s lying and cheating.. his due to his ex taking his daughter from him at the age of two for no reason other than spite.  Stephanie is now 15 years old (about to turn 16).  He has paid child support since and spent years and thousands of dollars trying to find her.  Last year thanks to the internet, we found her and he got to speak to Stephanie.  Sadly she has been “brainwashed” by her mother and wants nothing to do with her father but thanked him for the spending money (child support).  The only reason the mother; Marie gave as to why she kept their daughter away from her father was that his mother had fed her cold vegetables and something about cold water.  If you knew his Mum you would know this would not be true and I would ask anyone, really is that a good enough reason to keep your child away from their father??

So Shane had major trust issues, understandably.  He wanted a family but was terrified that it would happen again.  So while I wanted children, he didn’t and so years went by until I finally went to an IVF clinic and got myself checked out.  The report was ok, so I waited a bit longer… and a bit longer as he just wasn’t ready.. then I finally said now!  Sadly for us, when I went back to the IVF clinic, the results were not good, it’s amazing how quickly things can change.  I only did SIUI’s, I never had enough follies (potential eggs) for IVF or so the clinic said.  I was too much of a risk to their statistics to try to use the one or two follies/eggs.  We went to another clinic and they were wonderful. They said lets just try that one follie/egg and see what happens but then it was well and truly too late! 

All along ” you need an egg donor” had been suggested to me, it takes a while to come to terms with this and I wanted to keep trying.  So I started the process of finding our egg donor angel but at the same time kept trying naturally and through the IVF clinic.

We then had a wonderful egg donor angel offer but she had to pull out due to health concerns…we had advertised originally in the local paper, on forums and on social media sites but no one was suitable.  There were a number of wonderful offers but for various reasons including health they were not suitable.

It was from that, that I realised that it’s really really hard to find that egg donor angel and from that came this website. 

As soon as I thought about this concept, I was ecstatic and started researching it and getting quotes to make it happen.  almost six months later, it’s finally here and I hope that it will help other couples find their egg donor angel as we now have, more to come on this….

That’s our story, and I can’t wait to share this journey with you. 

Thanks for reading and I look forward to helping you find your egg donor angel and for all of us to share our journeys together.

Take care Dianne xo