Lesser Known Facts

"Hi, I'm Andrea.  I'm wondering if your clinic would perform an embryo transfer with embryos donated from another clinic?" 

Who'd have thought that finding a fertility clinic would be so hard? 

In Virginia, there were three local fertility clinics that shared one cryogenics lab - all embryo transfers were performed at the same facility.  Lucky for us, they did accept embryos from another clinic.

I'm running into a slight problem here.

There are no clinics in our city.  The closest is through a major central Texas hospital chain - two clinic locations each 45 minutes away in opposite directions from here.  However, they do not accept embryos from another clinic.

I move on to the closest big city and continue with the phone calls.  We're now looking at a 1 to 1.5 hour drive to these clinics.  I've been told we're not far enough away to merit local monitoring (ultrasounds), so we'll have to make appx three trips in a single cycle.  If they answer yes to my original question, that is.

I continue down my list of clinics.

"No."

"Yes, probably."

Left message.

"I have no idea."

I'm going to wait a day and see what responses I get back.  I have three avenues left if all the "local" clinics don't pan out.  Option A - radiate my search out further to the two major cities that are about 3 hours away and see if I will considered a "long distance patient" so we only have to travel a minimum number of times in the cycle.  Option B - Look at the cities where my parents and my in-laws live.  Be considered a "long distance patient" and tie the embryo transfers in with a family visit.  Option C - Travel to the clinic where the embryos are currently stored.

While Option C supposedly knocks off $1000 to $2000 from our adoption costs, it will incur unknown travel costs (depends on where the embryos are located in the States). 

On one hand, all this research is a little premature since we won't even enter into the matching stage with our embryo adoption agency until some time after Christmas.  On the other hand, my type A brain needs the rough details so I can build some plans.

For the moment, I'll have to be patient, and just wait for my calls to be returned.