My wife and I were told yesterday,by the doctor, that he does not know what our problem is. After several IUI's and 2 IVF's he said it may be time to look at other options. He did do a DNA structure test on my sperm and that came back ok. He said he thinks there is a problem with the eggs, but there is no way to say for sure. He said he would do 1 more IVF if we wanted to, but not a 4th one. He suggested using a egg donor. We already filled the paperwork out and are waiting for them to find a match. The cost is around $15,000 which pays the donor and her medicine, egg retriveal, doctor visits and also for the embryo transfer. Has anyone used a donor egg? What can we expect? Thanks

That's very interesting you should bring up this question b/c I started a thread about the price of adopting an embryo- that's been previously frozen. I heard that the Snowflake? organization deals with adopting an embryo.

Sorry, I was unable to answer your question. I'm sure there are people out there with some info. Good luck

My DH and I used an egg donor. We had the transfer done in February. It was successful and I am now almost 5 months pregnant. The Lupron shots were nothing to endure. I administered them myself. We also did 10 weeks of intramuscular progesterone injections, every other day. I had my doctor's office give these shots since I am very needle-phobic and they are a little more complicated than the Lupron shots. After we found out we were pregnant, our follow-up care was awesome. Because I was at the doctor's office every other day, they were able to continously check my blood hormone levels. I even had 4 sonograms over the 10 weeks time period which allowed us to view the growth and development of the baby. The total process from finding the donor to the day of transfer was exactly 2 1/2 months. I wish you the best.

I forgot something. We looked into embryo adoption and found that it isn't usually as successful since the embryos may not survive the thawing process and your wife will have undergone almost 30 days of Lupron injections and supplemental hormones to find out it was for nothing. We were fortunate enough with our donor to get 12 eggs. Eleven fertilized, 3 were transferred on Day 3 of development, the remaining were allowed to continue to divide for two more days, after which only two survived for freezing. Even knowing that the remaining two may not survive the thaw, we are going to try again as soon as I get the ok after having this baby.

Thanks for the input, Janine Marie and congrats. If I may ask, what was the cause of you having to use an egg donor? Have you done IUI's prior to this?
Again thanks.

At the age of 39 I was diagnosed with premature ovarian failure. After 3 successive high FSH levels my doctor advised us that an egg donor was our best bet. Our doctor could have used me as a guinea pig, trying many different protocols to bring about quality egg production in me, but we were too impatient, given my age, to wait it out through the testing. So we decided to go a quicker route, one with proven results and a greater pregnancy rate. Keep me posted.

Hi Mike! I am 26 yrs old and had an egg donor as well. I was diagnosed with pre-menopause which is POF. Fortunately our donor was a good friend of ours and all we did was pay her meds that's it. I would suggest that you try and gear yourself to someone that you think would want to do something special like that for you. If not then I guess you would have to go through the embryo adoption. We wanted my husband's jeans therefore we asked my friend if she would be our donor that way there we have her jeans and my husband's .....it depends what both of you want. We went through 4 transfers 4th one was positive but ended up in a miscarrriage which was kinda the clinic's fault because they took me off the Estrogene and I needed that to maintain my pregnancy! Hope I was some help!!!

Take Care

Mindy