Monday, June 22, 2009

How to Choose a Doctor

One of the questions Intended Parents ask often is “Can you recommend a good doctor?”.  Other variations of that question are “Should I stay with my current doctor?”, “Should I move to a doctor closer to where the egg donor lives?", and sometimes “I’m not sure if I should move doctors or not - what do you think?”.

Here are the answers to those questions, in my opinion…

1) “Can you recommend a good doctor?” Yes, we can provide recommendations to you.

We have been fortunate enough to work with many of the top Reproductive Endocrinologists (”fertility doctors”) in the country, and from those experiences (and client feedback) we have a good sense of who most of the better doctors are.  We base our recommendations on a number of factors, including:

  • General reputation and feedback from past patients
  • Quality and professionalism of the office staff (front office, nursing, etc.)
  • General compliance with current “industry standards”, including information such as number of embryos typically implanted, compliance with common testing, administration of medication, etc.  (Note that since we are not physicians, we cannot comment, and would not deign to comment, on any particular doctor’s medical protocol.  However, when we see a lower success rate and highly unusual protocol used, we get concerned…)
  • General office “vibe” (for example, many clinics with in-house programs are very negative towards working with egg donor agencies.)
  • Specific success rates (sometimes per SART, sometimes per our own information or in-house statistics.)

Note that we do not limit our work to any particular group or clinic, but as we gather first-hand information, we will use it to help our clients make the best choice for them.

2) “Should I stay with my current doctor?” “Should I move to a doctor closer to where the donor lives?”  That all depends…

I believe that the most important criteria in choosing or keeping your physician include:

  • Your comfort level with and trust in your doctor.  If you love your doctor and totally trust him or her, as long as they are supportive of using an egg donor from an agency, definitely keep that doctor.  I think that if you are calm during the process, and are willing to do what your doctor says because you trust in that doctor, you are more likely to have a successful cycle.  This is only said from anecdotal evidence and other’s opinions, but being in a good place psychologically as you’re on buckets of hormones (and going through a somewhat surreal process) can’t help but benefit you.  Does statistical research confirm that?  I don’t know - but it sure seems logical.
  • If finances are an issue (as they generally are) and you choose an egg donor from another city, you might want to consider moving to a doctor in that city.  However, if you love your current doctor, the difference in dollars is probably irrelevant - certainly in the long term.  If you do choose to use or keep a doctor in a city far from where the donor lives, make sure that you’re aware of the outside monitoring costs as early in the process as possible.  (The finance person at the doctor’s office, along with our cycle coordinator, can help you with that.)  The less surprises that happen in this process, the better.

All of BHED’s clients are assigned a Cycle Coordinator - a senior member of our staff who follows your case through from the time you choose your doctor until retrieval (and often, beyond.)  The Cycle Coordinator will be in regular contact with your doctor’s office from the time you sign your contract with us, and she will alert you if we have any unexpected challenges with the doctor’s office.  Most of the time things work out just fine.

Note that we stay with you until you become pregnant or you decide to discontinue trying.  Your choice of doctor is certainly an important part of this process, and is one of the keys to the success of your pursuit to begin or build your family.

We look forward to helping you realize your dream through egg donation!

-Lisa Greer, BHED Managing Partner

For the BHED Donor - What Can I Do While I'm Waiting to be Matched?

Once you’ve reached the end of the application process and had a successful interview with a member of our donor team, our staff will add your profile to our database of donors for recipients to peruse.

Congratulations, you’re now an active donor with BHED (Beverly Hills Egg Donation)!

There can be quite a lot to do leading up to this point - gathering pictures and transcripts, doing your own research on the donation process, putting together information on your family’s medical history, and scheduling your interview - that it may seem like the flurry of activity tapers off slightly after you’ve finally been made active.  One of the questions we get a lot is, “how long will it take for me to be matched?”  To tell the truth, there’s no way of knowing.  Some egg donors are matched within a matter of days, and for others it takes longer - sometimes even weeks or months.  It’s really all a matter of the right recipient coming across your profile at the right time, and for some donors, that doesn’t happen right away.

The most important thing to do during this time is to make sure to keep your profile accurate and up-to-date.  Review your profile occasionally and contact us with any changes in contact info, updates/successes in school or work, or new information regarding your medical history.  Also, we always love to have new pictures to add to your profile so feel free to keep them coming!  We store the extras on our server in case a potential recipient requests to see them.

Another big thing to keep in mind while you’re waiting to be matched is to make sure you’re easy to get in touch with.  Sometimes a recipient has a couple of donors they’re interested in, and wants to make a decision quickly, so make sure to respond to any phone calls or emails that you get from us as promptly as possible.  You’ll also receive a phone call from our team every three months to confirm your availability.

Finally, a great thing to do after you’ve been activated is come to one of our photo shoots!  We hold these shoots every 4-6 weeks in West LA.  It’s a wonderful way to get beautiful, professional photos to enhance your profile and it’s totally free to you.  It takes just 15 minutes of your time, and you get a high-resolution jpeg of your favorite shot to keep.

Of course, you can feel free to contact us at any time with questions or to see if there’s been interest in your profile.

We look forward to seeing you matched!

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Homebodies Are My Heroes!!

I have gained a new appreciation for my life as a homebody.  I have always been one—I prefer to be in sweats over jeans, flats over heels, on my couch versus a bar stool.  All the way back as far as I can remember.  But over the past year, it’s gotten to be a much more appealing way of life.  When I’m going through a cycle (about to begin my third), I don’t consider my body mine for the time being.  A couple picked me out of a pretty amazing lot to be the one to—hopefully—give them a child.  I don’t take that lightly.  I am humbled to even be considered, and it’s an honor to be chosen.  For the month-ish long timeframe that I go through a cycle, my homebody routine goes into an extreme mode.  And I look forward to it every single time. 

I go to work.  I tend to the 80 employees and all their hopes and dreams all day long and I leave promptly (and happily) at 5:00.  By 5:30, I am in the park for my run.  Around Day 6 of injections, I turn the run into a power walk because things start to jostle.  By 7:00, I am at the market getting dinner, usually a salad from Gelson’s.  If it’s a Friday, I’ll get cornbread, too, because it’s a Friday, and well, it’s cornbread….  I’m home by 7:15, I’m showered and seated on the couch just in time to watch the news (and by “the news” I, of course, mean Access Hollywood).  I eat, I watch a little Law & Order and I’m in bed by 11. 

Because of the routine of nightly injections, I can’t very well go out, I don’t go to friends’ houses, I put myself under house arrest and I cannot tell you how amazing that time is.  It’s time for me to focus on keeping myself in the perfect, uninterrupted state to ensure that everything that my body goes through is a benefit as opposed to a detriment.  I look forward to having this time.  I look forward to getting back to some semblance of a routine after the craziness of the holidays—and even when it’s not post-Holiday season, it’s amazing how great having a routine feels.  It’s like a vacation.  But at the end of the vacation, you aren’t tan, you don’t have pictures; instead, you have an amazing sense of accomplishment and an overwhelming sense of gratitude for your couple’s having chosen you, for being able to experience something so incredible and participate in something so great. 

I’m gonna have a t-shirt made:  HOMEBODIES ARE MY HEROES.  Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.


-Kate, BHED donor

Monday, January 5, 2009

L's Story: Part Two

We went through donor after donor with this particular agency, and they kept flaking out on us.  If they didn’t change their minds immediately, they would string us along and then quit on us.  Or, they would take 2 months to return the contract and say it must have gotten lost in the mail.  Just what you need to inspire confidence after you go out on a limb to use an anonymous stranger’s DNA to start a family.  And if the donors from this agency weren’t being difficult, the agency was.  Their follow up was abysmal and their attitudes even worse.  It was very discouraging.  Then, late one Friday night I noticed a donor of interest posted on the BHED website.  She was the first donor that had caught my attention before we were strongly encouraged by our clinic to work with this FL agency.  She had been unavailable at the time, some months earlier, and I just happened to notice that she was posted again.  So I sent an email and Lisa called me shortly after.  This donor had become available almost mid-cycle due to some strange circumstances and it became possible for us to jump right in, so we did.  

While that cycle didn’t pan out for us, it brought us to a wonderful clinic in VA and to BHED.  We have found BHED’s donors to be educated, responsible, and pretty much all-around wonderful girls.  Their staff is supportive and extremely diligent and they go above and beyond to make this experience as smooth as possible.  They know a lot about their donors and they spend a great deal of time selecting them and teaching them about the process so they are ready, willing and able to see it through to the end, no small feat.  For those of you who have not been through a cycle yourselves, it is not for the faint of heart.  And to go through it to help an anonymous couple start a family is pretty remarkable.

Now, onto the remarkable part of our story.  After a year of trying to cycle with various donors and then finally finding BHED, we were matched and the donor was cleared and we were ready start.  Well, almost ready to start.  The donor had gotten her period and was on the pill waiting for me.  I returned from a business trip expecting to start my period early the next week and for some reason, I decided to take a pregnancy test.  Not sure why, I don’t normally take them.  Well, imagine our shock to find out that a little stick was telling me that I was already pregnant.  I think we were in denial at first and since I had gotten pregnant once before and it didn’t take, we knew it was still a long shot.  So, we made the decision to go through with the donor cycle as well and to freeze the embryos.  It had been such a long, hard journey to get to this point we just couldn’t risk having to start all over again.  Our donor did wonderfully, with 19 eggs retrieved, 11 fertilized and ultimately 4 blastocysts frozen for future use.  We are very grateful to BHED for their support and really cannot say enough wonderful things about their organization and its dedication.  I hope our story provides you with some encouragement to press on when things look bleak and some hope, because despite a diminished ovarian reserve, a blocked fallopian tube and sperm that doesn’t survive 24 hours, anything can happen.  I wish you all the best of luck.



-L, Recipient

Sunday, December 28, 2008

L's Story: Part One

If you’re thinking about or trying to use an egg donor, you’ve probably already been through a lot.  I am 34 years old and I was told about a year and a half ago that I suffer from a diminished ovarian reserve and it was very unlikely that I would be able to give birth to my own child.  

While I knew there was something wrong very early on, I never expected to hear that it was very unlikely and that it probably wouldn’t happen.  My FSH was only borderline in the beginning so we decided to hurry up and try an IVF cycle first.  We got 6 eggs (a miracle we thought), 5 fertilized, 4 survived the first 2 days and 3 were viable for implantation.  They weren’t a very high grade and they didn’t have the best cell count but all 3 were implanted anyway, there’s always a chance.  Well, I couldn’t help but be elated to find out on the first attempt that I was pregnant according to the first blood test.  Within a week though, my levels dropped, instead of doubling every day, and I was told that I had a chemical pregnancy but it wasn’t viable.  My eggs just weren’t strong enough, healthy enough.  Encouraged by the fact that I thought they were wrong and I DID have eggs, I wanted to try again.  We tried a different protocol the second cycle and I ended up getting canceled this time before retrieval.  We finally gave in and decided to go the donor route.  We’d like to have more than one child and recognizing this could take a long time, felt we should get moving on to the donor process.

We’ve now worked with two clinics in two different states, 3 different agencies and I’ve lost track of how many donors, probably a dozen.  I’m sure there are recipient couples who’ve matched quickly and had a successful transfer on the first attempt, however, that was just not our luck.  We, unfortunately, suffered a very miserable experience with a terrible agency in FL that really highlighted the importance of a good agency.  At first, I didn’t care which agency we selected because I was so picky about which donors were an option for us.  It will save you a lot of time if you are selective about both.


-L, Recipient


Editor's Note: L's story will be continued in part two of this installment.  If you'd like to share your story on our blog, please contact Katie at katie@bhed.com!

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

On the CNN story “Egg Donors on the Rise”:

I am a donor with BHED and anytime I catch the words ‘egg donor’ between diaper changes and operating my business on the TV I turn to look.

Women are flocking to agencies (per CNN HLN) because of the economic crisis for the need of money and the high level earnings made from cycles.

So I called in and got to speak for about a minute!

I advised that prospective donors should not just get involved with the egg donation process because of desperation in a failing economy but because they truly would like to help out the families that are in need healthy eggs. Infertility is a disease! I worry that a woman in a desperate circumstance may not be able to handle the commitment it takes to be a donor. I added that money is disposable where as helping to create life is not.

I am so happy to be a donor - the families I have helped are able to have what they wanted so dearly, a family of their own. This Christmas I know there is a couple I helped that will be sitting around the tree with their little one (as I will be) and that is something more rewarding than any dollar amount.


-Suzi, donor

Friday, November 21, 2008

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to Beverly Hills Egg Donation!  

BHED is a nationwide egg donation organization that helps to guide prospective parents and qualified donors through the egg donation process with care, professionalism, and respect.  We strive to maintain a donor database of exceptional young women, and our experience in the industry drives us to provide the best possible experience for our clients.

This blog will be a place for you to connect with us on a more personal level.  We'll answer your questions, as well as post pictures, success stories, and news from the fertility community.  

We look forward to getting your feedback and hope this blog will serve as another great resource in your journey to have a child.