An Idiot’s Guide to Egg Donation

[Football61]

Hi,

I’ve recently started looking into egg donation, but have a million questions about the practicalities. I wanted to see if you lovely ladies might be able to help.

My preference is to have the treatment in the UK, but I’m looking for an egg donor of a certain religion - which means I’ll probably need to go abroad. It looks like most ladies of my religion used to travel to the Ukraine - which is out of the question now. So it looks like my destination would be Batumi in Georgia.

I have *so* many questions about the practicalities of having treatment abroad. If I was having treatment in the UK, I assume that my clinic would carry out a transvaginal examination to check I was good-to-go; and then they would provide me with the necessary injections and pessaries to thicken my womb lining - and carry out scans to monitor progress; there would also be blood tests, etc.

How does this all work if you are having treatment abroad? Where do you have all the examinations and blood tests, etc? How often do you have to travel to the clinic overseas - can it be just the once - for the embryo transfer?

And then if you’re lucky enough to find out that you’re pregnant after the two-week-wait - who takes over your care then?

And the overseas clinic stores any remaining embryos?

Sorry for question bombardment! I would be hugely grateful for any advice x

[Orangeflowers]

Hello, I just wanted to offer a quick bit of reassurance. All the questions you have were flying around my head before I had treatment abroad and I wanted to plan out a timeline with military precision, I was one step short of a gantt chart.

I think the main thing is to find a reliable clinic and good coordinator. Not the same but I had a fresh cycle with my own eggs abroad in Greece and in the end I found it super easy and better in some ways than the UK. I would expect a frozen transfer to be even simpler.

Basically, there are places you can have your pre- scans and bloods with in the UK (there are 2 big chains in the city where I live, and no doubt more in London). You just do that and email the results to the clinic abroad.

Clinics arrange meds in different ways, but the clinic I used abroad used the same company as my IVF clinic in the UK - stork, so that was super simple.

If you're using a donor and having a fresh transfer or frozen transfer you'll just need to book a date in.

In terms of aftercare, you'll just need to make sure you get a prescription for any meds you need to 12 weeks. You can arrange a viability scan with one of the private scanning places in the UK. At 12 weeks you'll be under NHS midwife care.

Hope all goes well x

[Football61 in reply to Orangeflowers]

Huge thanks for coming back to me - you’re vv kind. I’m exactly the same as you re military precision. I had a detailed spreadsheet for each of my IVF cycles, plus daily planners 🤣🤣

[Doodlebug23 in reply to Orangeflowers]

Can you please pm me where you used to have bloods and scans. I’m using a clinic in Spain but struggle to get bloods and scans done in the uk x

[Babytocome]

Hi,

At that time, I was looking into different clinics abroad as my experience in UK has not been the best, for one reason or another and inclusive in different clinics.So for me UK was no no. I had a couple of online meetings with some clinics abroad, process and time that I would have to be in those places due to work commitments.

It ended up that the process is really simple (better than I have expected). You need to do some blood tests in UK ( you can use medicheck) then you need to have a scan in UK (ultrasoundire t) you send results, and the process starts.

There are two options, your partner goes first to fertilise the donor and then you go after 5 days for the transfer, or you go together and stay 5 days there for the transfer.

Whatever number of embryos left from that donor, they are stored for 2 years for you to try again.

Then you go back to UK and wait 2 weeks, once you are pregnant, you call your GP and they will treat you as NHS patient ( as normal pregnant woman in UK

I am in the process of that journey, but so far my experience with the clinic has been amazing! Not only the clinic but the place too! Also cheaper.

Hope this has helped!

[Doodlebug23 in reply to Babytocome]

Can you please pm me where you used to have bloods and scans. I’m using a clinic in Spain but struggle to get bloods and scans done in the uk x

[Football61 in reply to Babytocome]

Thanks so much for coming back to me - it’s much appreciated. Glad to hear that your experience with your clinic has been great! I’ve got online chats with two egg banks in London tomorrow (just to hear what they’ve got to say), and then I’m going to try and get a chat with the clinic overseas 🤞🤞x

[Hidden in reply to Football61]

Hi I’ve PMed you as I’m seriously looking at double donor ivf.