Thursday, May 27, 2010

The Issue with Gattica

Just cause it looks good on paper doesn’t mean it is. And so our donor, who looked perfect genetically on paper doesn’t have good eggs. Whoa. Right? She just did a second cycle eleven eggs, two good. The doctor is not recommending her for further egg donation. Kinda funny, but not really.

The upshot is that we did have a back up who was our first choice but had said she couldn’t work with our time line. Guess what?! Now she can. So we are back on after a minor glitch that only took up about two hundred and seventy nine extra hours of thinking about it and stressing.

Enjoy the weekend.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Going Gattica

Do you know the movie? You know the one where “In "the not-too-distant" future, genetic engineering of humans is common and DNA plays the primary role in determining social class and ethan hawke plays a guy who fools everyone he being born without the help of genetic tinkering is discriminated against etc…anyway…where was I. Oh yeah, finding a donor.

As my husband and I looked at the donor selection – trying to minimize photos by asking the two agencies we were working with to send us PDF sans images…we started to get caught up in the stories – not the whole I like this, or eat that but the story of I paint, or I’m good at math, or I studied this and my siblings do X while my parents do Y – getting caught up in whose story is most similar to mine…and then the epiphany came…these are just stories and it really doesn’t matter what these people do (direction is so much determined by home life/circumstances/chance etc) – I see how much we influence our daughter now, see how different she is from her cousin of the same age in many respects because of how we are raising her and while genetics are responsible for a predisposition and her looks we help to guide that and foster or negate certain qualities which bring me back to this: in the end we threw out the stories of the donors just as we’d thrown out the images and went to who is the healthiest, who doesn’t have cancer, and has perfect eyesight etc (see Gattica above) and then it was easy there was only one who had such a clean slate. So we picked her. And in the game of pretending we can control anything we feel like we have someone who at least on paper will give our possible baby the best chance for a long disease free life. That and we had the nurse who chose our previous donor take a look at the photo of this donor to let us know if she thought she was compatible not with me but with the donor for our daughter. And she is. To back track I sent photos of our daughter to the agencies and had them select donors for us since we didn’t want to see the images.

And there we have it. We will do a cycle at end of August/September.

Fingers crossed.