Donor Egg at Shady Grove- Your experiences

[Anonymous]

Hello, have any of you used SG for DE? If so, how was your experience? I have had very positive experience there using my own eggs but am not having the greatest experience so far with the DE staff. How was your experienced with DE coordinator, De nurse, etc? did you get Pg on first try or have to do multiple cycles? Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Would love your thoughts! : )

[Anonymous]

We have had generally good experiences at Shady Grove but found their donor pool to be inadequate. You will find better donors through broker agencies. We ended up with a donor from Prospective Families near Boston. They have a some smart donors from the colleges in the area. Conceivabilties is another capable agency we worked with.

Our beautiful little boy is almost four months old!

[Anonymous]

I did not use SG for DE but do know a couple of people who did. They had a very good experience with them. One used a SG donor. The other a relative. Good luck to you!

[Anonymous]

Thank you! Appreciate the feedback very much!

[Anonymous]

21:15. Did you get pregnant with your child with your first donor?

[Anonymous]

I had very positive experience with the RE and his local monitoring staff but a negative experience with the donor staff. The coordinator was rude and dismissive of my concern over a test (and didnt call the RE as I requested) and then my first nurse was extremely rude, telling me I wasn't commtied to the process and refused to open the database to me even when i was done with testing (all successful). I had to escalate to the RE (he was angry at my treatment and supposedly took action)... got a new nurse who was very nice and facilitated the process. i got pregnant on the first try and my beautiful son is cooing next to me.

Yes, the donor pool was limited but so were my funds! I didnt want to spend many thousands of dollars because I wasnt sure it would work for me and I wanted to save money for adoption. But I ended up doing the donor share 3 to 1. It is risky because only half the eggs fertilized but I ended up with one good embryo, none to freeze. I picked a donor who had been used in the past. Agree that the pool is limited and if you are looking for an Ivy league gene pool it is best to go elsewhere. My donor did not have a college degree but I selected her because she looked like she could have been a close relative.

good luck!

[Anonymous]

21:49: Yes. On our first try we implanted two eggs. One became our little boy. Also, we have seven good embryos frozen to expand our family. We were so happy after two years of failed IVF. 21:15

Again I want to emphasize the good selection of donors from the better agencies. They usually have adult pictures of the donors, something Shady Grove and GIVF did not do when we were looking (maybe they have changed).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They usually have adult pictures of the donors, something Shady Grove and GIVF did not do when we were looking (maybe they have changed).

NP here. In the past month we have considered about 3 different clinics, and SG was one of them. Part of our evaluation process was looking at the donor pool. From what I saw SG still does not provide adult pictures. They are very big on anonymity, and not having adult photos is part of that. If you think you may want to leave the option open for your child to locate the donor or donor siblings after he or she turns 18, SG is not your best bet.

[Anonymous]

We had a positive experience with SG DE program. Became pregnant on the first try. The SG staff were pretty good, too.

[Anonymous]

When we did our investigation, most clinics had good and very similar success rates with donor eggs, I guess because doing IVF with a young woman's eggs is easier. Also, if you have frozen embryos left over from your first attempt, additional transfers are relatively cheap, (less than $5,000) compared to a full IVF cycle.

So if your donor produces a good crop of eggs and you get a number of embryos, I think your odds on the first try are about 65% and additional attempts costs ~$5,000.

[Anonymous]

Thanks everyone. Original poster here. We are considering an outside agency donor to be used at SG. I agree there donor pool is limited. Thanks again.

[Anonymous]

20.07 where have you decided on?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:20.07 where have you decided on?

20:07 here. We are going with ORM. Their stats are wonderful, although frankly I do wonder if there is cherry-picking or other gaming of the numbers on their part. For our purposes, we are assuming that their stated per-cycle take-a-baby-home rate of 79%-85% is closer to 65%-70%. It's good enough for us, and the odds are a damn sight better than they are with my eggs.

We liked their in-house donor pool better than the others we saw, and that's what sold us. We recently started the process, and we've already picked a donor. If this donor doesn't work out for whatever reason, there are at least 3 other donors we are looking at right now who would work just as well for us.

We checked out SG and SDFC for comparison purposes. I think both of those options are also good; ORM just really seemed like the best fit for us.

[Anonymous]

For the poster using ORM, could you please let me know which local clinic you are using for local monitoring? We are also going to use ORM and had been using SG before. We don't want to go back to SG for local monitoring if we can help it.
Thanks in advance.