I was an egg donor several years ago when I was 30. Years earlier, I had seen the ads when I was a poor college student, but had this notion that the drugs were going to mess with me and it wasn’t worth it. But at the age of 30, I was *really* broke (and miserable in my marriage) so it just seemed like a good idea when I came across an ad in the paper for a local fertility clinic. One could donate up to 4 times. At several thousand dollars a donation, that would pay a lot of bills!

I was near the top of the age range for donation, so I didn’t think I’d be selected while I sat there filling out all the paperwork. But I kept passing each test and milestone in the clinic’s process. My biggest worry was about how I might respond to the drugs - but once that started, I had no problems. Through the process, the fertility doctor liked to joke that I "had the ovaries of a 20-year-old" since my body and ovaries responded perfectly to the drugs I was given.

The day of the donation, they took 15 eggs. But the extraction procedure landed me in the hospital. They had accidentally stuck a blood vessel when they extracted the eggs. It took several hours for the doctors to figure out I was bleeding internally as I tried to recover in the recovery area. I finally was home after a two-unit blood transfusion and four-day stay in the hospital. The real recovery took a lot longer than that. A cyst developed on my ovary and had to be removed a few months later.

At the age of 30, I was not ready for or thinking about having kids of my own, so when the doctors told me that they couldn’t predict if this would interfere with my own fertility, I didn’t worry about it.

This was an anonymous program. I would not only not know the identity of the egg recipient, I would not even know if a pregnancy resulted from my eggs.

In the donation process, my clinic required egg donors to meet with a psychologist twice. The purpose of this meeting was largely to ensure that there was no red flag preventing anyone from being a donor. But they also wanted to ensure that the donors understood that, when donating eggs, a donor was not giving away her children - any resulting child was not hers. The clinic also wanted to understand how a donor would handle meeting any resulting children; while the rules are for anonymity today, lots of things could happen to change that in the future.

I am and have always been comfortable with the idea that any children resulting from my eggs are definitely not my children.

But I’m also comfortable with the concept that there will be a knock on my door some day and one, two, or more people who bear a striking resemblance to me will come asking questions.

And after what happened with my donation ordeal, I actually look forward to that day. Because of what I went through, I am very eager to find out if there were resulting pregnancies/children. I just want to know that what I went through was worth it! If there was an "open-Id" program at my clinic for egg donors, I would have signed up.

Five years later I chose to become a single mother by choice, and the irony is that the ovary that was hurt during my donation was the one that gave me my son.