A crash course in surrogacy…

One could argue, based on the dates of my old emails, that our journey started on February 17, 2016.  This is the date I first requested information from a random company regarding surrogacy and egg donation.  However, we really got serious on July 6, 2016.  You will have to forgive my lack of certain details, but seeing as we are almost a year later some of those said details are a bit hazy.  I know…I should have started this earlier.  Hopefully I can play some catch up and get you all up to speed to where we are now so moving forward I can give you the play-by-play as we live it.

So back to July 6….

Picture it…Los Angeles…2016 (I really hope you get that reference).

Our search began. We sent out information requests to what seemed to be some of the highest rated surrogate matching companies in Southern California.  Many of them also partnered with various egg donor companies, so I also signed us up to view the corresponding egg donor registries just to play around and see what was out there while waiting on surrogate agency information.

Agencies are pretty quick to respond.  On average it only took an hour or less to get a packet of information over to my inbox.  Despite having heard stories about them, my first OMG moment was when I received the first estimated cost sheet for the surrogacy process.  I mean…. holy crap this is an expensive process.  We’re talking an average of $120,000-$180,000 on average, all said and done…assuming minimal complications.  I’ll admit, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps this was going to be MAJORLY cost prohibitive.  But where there’s a will, there’s a way and I made a way for this to work out for us.  Sure, it took a re-finance of our mortgage, a new HELOC, and some movement of investments into high yield savings accounts to get us there, but we made it work.  That process alone took me almost 6 months to complete but the timing actually worked out pretty well.  Fortunately the costs aren’t an upfront sort of thing so we have some recovery time in between some of the large chunks of expenses.

While we waited for all of the financial stuff to line up, we began to interview surrogacy companies.  I had Skype sessions to start.  The case manager at Surrogate Company A and the case manager at Surrogate Company B were equally impressive with regards to explaining the process and making me feel incredibly at ease about this entire process (minus the financial aspects for which I had to come to terms with on my own).  I didn’t really see any point to interview any other companies at that time as I was confident that one of these two agencies would be the right fit for us.  For whatever reason, call it gays intuition or possibly even just the slight proximity advantage to our house, we decided to have an in-person consultation with Surrogate Company B, and say our goodbyes to Surrogate Company A.

In between the Skype session and our in-person meeting with Surrogate Company B on July 22nd, I was also able to sneak in a few Skype consultations with some of the Egg Donation companies just to get an idea of how they operated as well.  Any reservations I had about Surrogate Company B were alleviated by these egg donor Skype calls.  Every company I spoke to, despite their affiliation with other surrogate agencies, highly recommended Surrogate Company B. So YAY! I felt like I was off to a good start and was making good decisions so far.

Come July 22nd, we had our formal consultation.  This meeting was mainly about the history, stories, and success rates of their company as well as a reiteration of how the whole process works so Mr. Y could hear it all first hand since he wasn’t on my initial video chat with them.  This meeting was pretty quick, maybe about 45 minutes or so and filled us up with excitement and lots of information….but the REAL consultation was still to come.  August 30 would be the date and we were told to allot 5 full hours for that meeting.  More to come on that meeting in my next post.  xoxo