I started a map of the issue over the past few weeks, drawing notes and tracking what was changing. I will help you visualize the issue too, by showing you what I did. This post doesn't look like a finished piece to me, but I think it is important to keep some kind of record.
Let me start from the beginning: A donor modifies us, not us the donor. We chose from a pool of donors curated by the clinic because that's the best pool for our preferences and our budget. Then we were told that the clinic had found the perfect donor for us. So we arranged the FET based on that donor.
When we got to Thailand, the clinic informed us that our donor was no longer available, although the same doctor went on to do the same cycle in the same hospital about forty-five days later, in a clinic in Malaysia.
The other issue is now, would you swap donor if it is obvious that the donor is giving you problems? Or simply wait for a better match for you from the same clinic? What if the next donor has the same issues and matching is an art, not a science, and no other clinic in Singapore or Asia has such a big pool?
This is one of those posts, where the more I research, the more I'm certain that it will take us longer to get there. The information that we receive is not always clear, not always clean and not always consistent and it is never merely "let's just proceed with things", although the change of donor can be. I have a gut feeling that the clinic, and especially the agency, will create a lot of trouble for us, and it will be an issue.
For now, I shall let the clinic and the counsellor work this out. Continuing to fight a fruitless battle with a Thai-hospital, and spending further money, is not going to help. We have to stop and think again on donor eggs, and look towards fresh eyes and a fresh perspective.
I have always wondered how many of the couples I know would have benefited from simply shifting their orientation, from 'I must have a baby', to 'I must have a family', or from 'I must be a mother', to 'I could be a mother and a wife'. I also wonder if the change in donor is a sign that God is opening up other possibilities for us, and asking us to be a little more honest with what we really want. I have not yet decided.
