How Altrui found me a donor. And then another.

Is she Italian? Spanish? Indian? She's an ethnic enigma...

This is me. Don't be fooled by the Barcelona flag - I'm not Spanish. I'm English;  mixed race - with a blond-as-they-come father and a gorgeous milk-chocolatey mother. Finding a suitable donor for me, I knew up front, would not be straightforward.

The first step after contacting Altrui to start the search for a donor was the paperwork. There wasn't really an ethnicity tick-box on the 'I need an egg donor' form that 100% summed me up. So, after many detailed conversations with Alison (Altrui's founder) and some verbal diarrhea from me over email, Alison understood what our search required and she was honest about the difficulty finding donors with such a specific ethnic brief. My expectations were duly managed.

Choosing a donor is a strange thing. They are anonymous - so you receive a childhood photo and a couple of profile forms, with as much information as the donor is willing to give. It took a real effort to suspend my worries about this - like anyone making a life-changing decision, you want to make an informed choice, right? Not possible in this situation. All you can do is follow your gut instinct and take a leap of faith.

Altrui try to find donors they think the recipient will like. Similar outlooks on life, similar interests, similar temperaments. So the first two donors I was offered both had a passion for food and knitting, two of my favourite things! But, they weren't suitable visual matches and I just didn't feel comfortable. It got me thinking about why this mattered so much and the answer was simple. I was looking for some connection with my potential baby. Or, at least not an outright disconnection. I didn't want my future baby and I to feel like strangers.

While this must have been frustrating for Altrui (how picky am I?!), it was critical for me. After rejecting the first two donors, I had learned something important; it was time for another frank conversation with Altrui. After explaining to Alison that, actually, I was less interested in finding a like-minded donor, or a direct ethnic match, what I was after was someone who would be a reasonable visual match - similar colouring to me at the very least. So, with the third donor option that was offered to us, we felt we had struck gold - because, while this was a Caucasian lady of Mediterranean descent, she had similar (ish) colouring AND her profile really touched me. We had experiences in common. "Sign me up" said I, finally feeling a twinge of excitement that this might actually happen.

What no-one tells you about the donor conception process is that patience is a virtue. This donor took approximately 3 months to find (actually about average for Altrui, I believe); OK, I could live with that. Then the real waiting game begins. The first step is to get yourself in order; more forms with Boston Place, the clinic where we'd had four of our six IVF cycles, more visits to the counsellor (which is required before a clinic will proceed with a donor cycle) to make sure we're aware of the laws and, of course, support us through the process and then counselling and screening tests for the donor to make sure she is in good physical health, mentally prepared and suitable to donate.

While waiting for all of this to happen, weeks went by and intuitively I started to feel that something was wrong. Our donor had put off her screening appointment; alarm bells started to ring. Alison called to  explain that there had been devastating personal circumstances which meant our donor could not proceed. I could only be sympathetic - as this woman, who had been willing to offer so much to us, had endured a major trauma of her own and was understandably unable to donate at that time. Gutted and wondering how we could endure such bad luck, we agreed that Altrui should re-open the search to find us a new donor. Finding one donor was hard enough, how long would it take to find a second?

BUT, I believe that all things happen for a reason and, low and behold, only a few weeks later, the phone rang again - Alison had found us another donor - potentially a better match than before, she said. And she was right. For many reasons, the new donor was a perfect fit. Her profile didn't give me an instant connection like the first one but, as soon as Husb and I looked at her, we knew this was the right donor. LET'S DO THIS!

So that waiting began again. It took a while for our donor to have her screening tests - which all went well - but the results were a week late from the lab meaning that our cycle start-date had to be pushed back a month. So that takes us right up until today, FINALLY. We are currently in the syncing process, to align our cycles - I've had 7 days of jabs plus oestrogen patches every other day. We'll come onto the drugs another time, but, for now, the waiting is still killing me. My donor's period is now two weeks late (seems to be a trend!) so we're behind schedule and not exactly synced; all the while I'm patching up like a gooden'.

But it's OK, I now need to relax (easier said than done), keep my shit together and thank my lucky stars that there is an incredible, kind young woman out there ready to give me the hope of motherhood. So the least I can do is wait patiently.

So there we have it, I think you're all caught up now - next time, fingers crossed, I'll have an update on our cycle! Stay tuned...