In the summer of 2008, a young woman called needing assistance in finding her ideal egg donor. The woman was in her mid-thirties, her husband not much older. The diagnosis was Premature Ovarian Failure. The woman had very specific and quite detailed criteria, she would settle for nothing less than a donor who offered all of the characteristics she deemed as “must-haves”; the list was long. Tried as my team and I did, we could not satisfy this client and so, she moved on. She moved on to two other agencies, she matched three times, financially, emotionally and with respect to time investing in donors that for various reasons, did not work out. In the summer of 2009 she came back to Prospective Families…she needed our help.

To say that it is rare that a client with very stringent and non-negotiable donor characteristics comes back to Prospective Families following (what I believe to be) an unnecessarily elongated donor search, or a failed cycle, or a go-round or two with non-qualified donors who never should have been accepted by an agency in the first-place (but they looked good on paper) would not offer the staff at Prospective Families the kudos they deserve with respect to our matching services. Today, as we now do every Tuesday and Thursday, we will meet to discuss challenging matches. We like challenges, we do well with challenges, but most importantly, we like and do well with making families.

I have chosen to write this morning about the client who spent a year of her time and energy searching for what she perceived to be perfect donor candidates only to then have the universe jolt her into a re-prioritization that led, eventually and in quite a miraculous way, to her and her husband becoming parents. When Kate (not her real name) returned to Prospective Families in July of 2009, she emphatically shared: I NEED A DONOR NOW! She told us she needed to cycle, immediately, with Prospective Families’ ‘best donor’, the donor with whom she was most likely to get pregnant. Her 37 year-old husband had been diagnosed with cancer, the prognosis was not good, she wanted to have his baby, she needed our help.

I wish I could tell you that matching proceeded smoothly, that we made a recommendation for a donor with proven cycle success and that Kate jumped to match, but she didn’t. It was hard for Kate to let go of her “wish-list”, she is, herself, an attractive, academically and professionally accomplished woman and felt that she could best embrace collaborative reproduction if she identified, in tangible ways, to her donor.  We were both inspired and somewhat frustrated, we knew we could help her, we just had to be patient while Kate found the courage to detour from what she perceived to be the only path she could comfortably navigate with respect to donor egg…and we were worried, we knew that time was of the essence.

Thankfully, and this is the case with most of the successes we celebrate, Kate had the support of licensed mental health providers. Kate and her husband worked with therapists who specialized in fertility and, given their special circumstances, they also worked with oncology specific therapists. We gently but firmly pushed, we waited for feedback, we remained uncertain about whether or not Kate would ever become a paid client at Prospective Families, we just weren’t sure about how this would all turn-out. We kindly asked the donor we felt strongly would give Kate her best shot to be patient, as well.

It is the summer of 2010, Kate has had her baby! She sent a birth announcement, a warm thank-you and baby photos to our office. She shared that her husband was given a promising but still experimental treatment and that he had become qualified for that treatment just one week before the birth of their child….”their child” so said Kate, without question.

Kate had eventually come to match with a donor who is now retired. A mom herself, donor JT had completed 6 cycles, all but one of them successful. She was endorsed, following every cycle she had completed, by the physicians, nurses and mental health professionals as most appropriate for a next match. We and the clinical teams found her to be beyond compliant and so very impressive with the thoughtful, mindful approach to egg donation. She was a sweetheart to work with, she is a lovely woman and not only are we thrilled that Kate came around to see how much hope a cycle with JT could offer but we know, too, that JT is just thrilled to have helped this family come to be.