A Good Egg: All She Wanted Was a Healthy Donor. With Good Hair.

By She Writes Press

She’ll do anything to become a mother—including stalking prospective egg donors’ profiles on Facebook. In this hilarious yet poignant memoir of one woman’s quest to conceive, the brave new world of artificial baby-making takes an unexpected turn when social media comes into play. As the not-quite-young-enough author obsessively examines the online antics of her nubile egg donor wannabes, she questions what it means to be a mother and, in the process, discovers the meaning of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Release date: Mar 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940838243

Book preview

A Good Egg

My doctor is tan and supermellow. He’s Malibu thin with swimming-pool-blue eyes and looks like Peter Fonda. You know—the kind of guy you could imagine hitting some tennis balls with on a Sunday, then relaxing afterward with a white wine spritzer. Let’s call him Dr. Ian. I adore Dr. Ian. And after five rounds of IVF, it was his job to tell my husband, Owen, and me that it was time for us to consider using an egg donor. In other words: I wasn’t going to get pregnant with my own eggs, like, ever.

I think this was hard for Dr. Ian to say. He looked like he was going to cry. I’d been his patient for five years, which means I’d been going to his clinic longer than I went to college. This was personal. Which is not to say that Dr. Ian had never mentioned egg donation before. He floated it once or twice. But my husband and I said no. First of all, it wasn’t going to come to that. Second of all, I wanted to consider adoption first. Third of all, it wasn’t going to come to that.

Every woman who has fertility problems has stats, and these are mine: I had two miscarriages, one at 37, another at 38. I had regular menstrual cycles and good levels of FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone, which can determine if you’re nearing menopause) and AMH (anti-Müllerian hormone, which measures egg reserve). Even so, our first IVF cycle didn’t work; neither did our second. On our third cycle I got pregnant with twins. This was amazing because Dr. Ian put in just one egg, and the little bugger split itself. I remember thinking, Yes! Karmic compensation at last! I would have not one but two babies for my pain and suffering! Thank you, God. But one embryo died at seven weeks. Its twin hung on until nine weeks—we saw the heartbeat—and then it died, too. I was devastated. After a break, we tried two more cycles, but I didn’t get pregnant.

Looking back, five rounds of IVF was two too many. A relative gave us a loan to help with the cost, so we were lucky that way, but still,