the main event

Preparing your body for egg donation is not for the faint-hearted. I repeat: not for the faint-hearted. For the next 10 days I was in a toss-up between asking my all-male housemates to inject my lower abdomen every morning with an ovarian-stimulation hormone or doing it myself. The latter won, though not by much. As if stabbing yourself in the gut before breakfast was not traumatising enough, I was told to look out for bubbles in the solution which could cause blood clots and kill me. I managed to dodge those successfully. But the side-effects? Not so much. My stomach swelled up to the extent that I looked four months pregnant, and then there were the bizarre food cravings: a full breakfast fry-up, pancakes and toasted cheese sandwich – all before noon. Just over a week later, the only thing that I could fit into were my stretchy tracksuit pants, it was not a good look.

After 11 days, I arrived at the fertility clinic, got undressed and lay on the

operating table. It was then, for the first time, that the panic set in. I’ve never been one to obsess over worst-case scenarios, so I wasn’t thinking too much about the complications. Although, my fear of the anaesthetic drowned out any other emotion I may have had at that point. (If you’ve ever seen the thriller Awake with Jessica Alba, you’ll know exactly where that fear stemmed from.) Then the anaesthetist asked me about allergies, I told him I didn’t have any – that I knew about. He injected me.

An hour-and-a-half later, I woke up and was told that the eggs were removed without difficulty. I’m not sure how many they took, but the average amount of eggs per extraction session is between 10-15, as they have to take quite a few incase the implantation of the woman who would receive my egg did not take the first time.