Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Egg donation is one of those things people have heard of, but most really don't understand.
It's often talked about in medical terms, but for the people going through it, it's personal and it's emotional and it can change everything. For many families, egg donation becomes the way forward when other paths have closed. And while every story is different, what they all share is the courage it takes to keep going.
Welcome to the Fertility Cafe, where we explore the beautiful complexity of modern family building.
I'm your host, Eloise Dr.
And this is a space for honest conversations about surrogacy, egg donation, and the journey to parenthood. With expert insights and real stories, we're here to guide you through the medical, legal, and emotional aspects of third party family building.
We believe that love has no limits and neither should parenthood.
Welcome back to Fertility Cafe. I'm your host, Eloise Drain. Egg donation is one of the most impactful paths to parenthood today. Yet the experience of the recipient parent is still so often misunderstood. It's not just a clinical process. It's emotional, layered, and deeply personal. It brings up questions around identity, grief, and what it means to create family in a way that not everyone talks about openly.
Today I'm joined by Erica Ferraro, who knows this journey well. After nearly 20 years of living with undiagnosed endometriosis and facing years of fertility challenges, Erica became a mom through egg donation. That experience changed her, not just as a parent, but in how she shows up for others.
She created Moving Mountains for Motherhood, an online space and resource for people navigating infertility.
And she just released a book by the same name, the first professionally published fertility survival guide in the US well, thank you, Erika, for joining me. I appreciate it.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Thank you. It's great to be here.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: First, tell us about just a little bit about you and then also about your experience with endometriosis and how long it took to even get a diagnosis.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Sure. Yes. So my name's erica Ferraro. I'm 32 years old. I am a mother through donor egg IVF. And. And that path to parenthood came to me because, of course, my partner and I at the time were trying to get pregnant naturally. And when that did not happen, I was looking for answers. And I had seen many different obgyns through my life. Nobody had ever brought up the word endometriosis to me. I did have every telltale symptom of it, Honestly, from the time that I got my first menstrual cycle When I was 11, I had very Very painful periods. I was hospitalized for period pain at different points in my life. I would, like, switch sweat and feel like I was gonna vomit. Like, I can't even explain what that was like. It was basically like just being sick every month. I thought that was normal because any doctor or, like, adult female that I brought this up to, whether it was my mom, somebody at school, the nurse, whoever. Like, that was a normalized thing. Period sucks. Just take more Advil. And I saw multiple different OBGYNs through my teen years and early 20s, and it was always like, are you on birth control? And then I would say, no. Birth control makes me kind of nauseous. It gives me a headache. And they'd say, okay, then just take more Advil. Like, nobody said endometriosis. It wasn't until I was trying to get pregnant that I actually sought out a new OB GYN very organically. The person I was seeing had left the practice, and I just needed someone new. So I went to see a new OB GYN and he was like, do you have endometriosis? And I had no idea what he was talking about. And then he educated me, and he explained that, you know, you have a lot of symptoms. You're having infertility. The only way we can actually formally diagnose you with endometriosis is to do a laparoscopy surgery. He said, you know, if we can. We can't really see it on scans. And if we do see it on scans, it's typically pretty progressed at that point, which she was saying, you kind of can see, like, some gunky scar tissue on your skin. So we're probably gonna go in there and find a lot. We did the surgery, and I was very scared because we had been trying to get pregnant for at least a year. And now I'm having a surgery where I'm being told I could wake up and maybe not have parts of my colon, maybe not have. I was told I would probably lose my appendix, which I did. I was told that my ovaries might have to be taken out. Like, that's how the laparoscopy surgeries are. They're used to diagnose endometriosis. But if they have to cut and remove the endometriosis out of your body, it can affect other organs, depending on where it is. And they just don't know until they, you know, they go in. So that was about two and a half years ago that I had that surgery. It was a pretty rough recovery. I had 32 internal stitches. I did lose My appendix, they were able to drain a bunch of lesions that were on my ovaries to try and I guess maintain the integrity of those organs. And then we went right into IVF because the OB GYN said, look, you were pretty progressed. You're like stage three, stage for just go see, you know, fertility clinic. So we went to a fertility doctor who actually is one of the featured doctors in my new book, Moving mountains for Motherhood. And I'm sure we'll talk about that in a minute. That's was my doctor Steven Palter out of Woodbury, New York here. He moved me on to IVF immediately, which I was appreciative of. You know, we didn't have to do the merry go round of IUI because that really wasn't going to solve for my particular problem. He needed to get the eggs out of my body and at that point, point really just determine what their quality was. Because a lot of endometriosis patients do not have good egg quality, unfortunately, especially as they age. That condition, it kind of cooks, roasts, puts pressure on however you want to say it on the reserve that's left over. And so you do tend to have a lot of people with diminished ovarian reserve at a much younger age. And so, yeah, we did multiple rounds of egg retrieval. We could never make an embryo. I did platelet rich plasma therapies, I was on every supplement. I did acupuncture, I did red light therapy, I was on the Mediterranean Diet, I took Coq 10, DHEA, everything. Like I did everything for a year to try and increase my egg quality. There is, in my opinion, nothing that scientifically and statistically can truly do that. And I talk about that a lot in my book. I think there is a, unfortunately quite a marketing ploy out there for people of the diminished ovarian reserve community to try to like fix your egg Reserve in 90 days and take these supplements. And there's a book out there and I won't, I won't name it, but it's a very patient shaming. Do this to fix your fix your eggs reserve book that's actually not even written by a physician or anybody that has anything to do with medicine. I read that book and I was following all those dietary like recommendations and supplements and it never did anything except drain my bank account and honestly give me quite a bit of false hope. But I felt like I tried. I threw everything at the kitchen sink. And so eventually we decided to move on to using an egg donor, which was like grieving the fertility process all over again. And that's when I kind of started to feel out loud, as I say. So I started blogging and doing some advocacy work around third party reproduction, quite honestly, because I think if I hadn't done that, I would have probably lost my mind. It was very therapeutic for me to feel like, okay, I'm going through something unique. I'm 30 something years old. I can't really have genetic children. Let me see if I can at least connect with others, maybe not be so alone. And that grew over time to now like a free support group I run on Instagram. There's over a hundred women in my donor ed IVF support group and counting. A blog that was very focused on female health conditions as well as third party reproduction. And ultimately a book that launched yesterday. And it's very timely because obviously June is World, World Infertility Awareness Month. So it's very full circle now to have a one year old son through donor egg IVF during this month and to be launching this very unique resource. So, yeah.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Yes, Very, very timely. Wow.
I mean, I knew about your story, but I didn't know it was like that extensive.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: It was pretty dramatic. Like I'm, I'm glad.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Going back to all of these doctors, all these obgyns or the. Not just all, because you said, you said you saw several that nobody ever even thought, like, maybe there is something wrong. It should not be normal for somebody since 11 years old to be having this many problems with having their period. And this is what frustrates me about medical care in general. Everything is, let's just throw medicine at it.
Let's not find the root of the problem. Yeah, let's just throw medicine at it and see if it fix it. And if not, we'll just throw something else at it.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: First of all, endometriosis is a very misunderstood, misdiagnosed condition. I think it's becoming a more understood condition and there's a lot more research now behind it. I mean, it's very common. It's one in eight people and it does tend to run in families. And it is not something that young girls hear when they are in like health class or sex ed in school? You know, like you're talking about how your body works. Why are you not talking about the two most common female conditions that will impact the future fertility of adults that if managed at a young age, could potentially be mitigated, not cured, but mitigated early on, and that's polycystic ovarian syndrome, PCOS and endometriosis So I talk about this a lot in the book, that we have this like educational and cultural environment where we're more focused on preventing teen pregnancy than protecting fertility of future. That's all it is.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that's all it is. It's sex ed. It's not reproductive health ed.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Right, right. And so when I went to the doctor at that young age, and even throughout my teen years, because I wasn't trying to get pregnant, I wasn't married, I wasn't trying to get pregnant, it wasn't being taken as a fertility issue, it was being taken as a pain management problem.
And so had I had the laparoscopy surgery when I was younger, had the endometriosis cut out then and then maybe been put on some birth control or suppression medications like Lupron Depot or something at that point that could have kept me suppressed until I was ready to do egg retrievals or I was ready to have children. I may have genetic children today. It is because the endometriosis was not managed and got wildly out of control that I ultimately became sterile. And so that's something that, like, I'm very passionate about is also too, like, if you don't know that this is a common condition and what these symptoms are, then you don't really think about at 16 years old, like freezing your eggs. But that would actually be the perfect time to do it. So, you know, I think there's a lot of pieces to protecting the future fertility of adults. But I think it starts with understanding that there are two very, very common female health conditions that run rampant among the population. And it shouldn't be that you don't hear about them until you're 30 years old and trying to get pregnant like they're common. Because even with pcos, and I talk about this in the book, you know, unfortunately, that condition, although it can lead to infertility, it also can lead to a lot of other just health conditions. And one of them is diabetes. That is something that can be managed and mitigated through diet and medication at a younger age too, which would have longer lasting impact on someone's overall health as well. So it's just like they're very common and they're not spoken about. And I hope that my resource becomes one, hopefully many resources that like a parent or an adult caregiver would read it and then be able to think differently about the young women in their life.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: It's high time that we start talking about fertility and reproductive care as a whole. Not just like it's a segment of a piece, because it's not. It's a holistic thing, not just one piece because of when you're trying to get pregnant. Because there's a lot of things that has to lead up to you trying to get pregnant, especially nowadays where the infertility rate is increasing at a substantial rate. So clearly there's something going on with everybody. And it's not just in the US it's all over the world at this point that are having all of these issues. So you went through the IVF process and you went through all of this stuff trying to create your own embryos. It didn't work. How did you really learn about egg donation as an option for building your family? And when that was the option or what seems to be the only option, like, what was your reaction when it was presented as a path forward?
[00:11:46] Speaker B: What I do really appreciate about the clinic and the doctor that I worked with is that he was very evidence based and he was very realistic. I take this approach in my book. I think that if people went into IVF treatments with the understanding that IVF does not work for everyone.
Infertility does not equal, I do IVF and get a baby. IVF is a diagnostic tool to stay, see if it can help you get a baby and to determine if you can even have genetic children. IVF is a tool to determine diagnostically what your options are. And so I think when you look at it through that lens that it's a step to figuring out what your path is going to be. You have a little bit more of a true understanding of what the outcomes actually look like. Because based on your medical diagnosis and your age, that can be very different. I heard about egg donorship after my first egg retrieval because I only got two eggs. And he was like, yeah, we're probably not going to make embryos. Like, I'm just letting you know because you hear two eggs, you're like, great, two babies. But that's not, you know, the attrition rate of those eggs, which is not something people are educated on upfront. So, no, we made nothing that round. We did a platelet rich plasma therapy and he said, like, there are some good stats with these therapies right now, but there's nothing statistically significant. So, you know, understand that we're kind of trying something and it may or may not work. And what I have to say is that the PRP therapy worked in the sense of quantity. So I did platelet rich plasma therapy, waited the three months, which were the most brutal three Months of my life just waiting to see if it would make a difference. And then did as my second egg retrieval. And we got nine eggs. The problem is that it didn't fix the quality. So I still made no embryos. And that's the thing that, like, there is no quick fix. There really is no fix. There is no fix for egg quality. I don't care who says there is. I would love to see the data.
Your egg quality is what your egg quality is. You're born with them. Everything you've ever been exposed to, they're exposed to. And they kind of live and die with you. It is not like sperm that regenerates itself. Maybe people do a bunch of rounds of egg retrieval and they find one or two golden eggs. And I think that's wonderful for them. But for me, every time that I'm doing an egg retrieval, I'm spending thousands of dollars. And so it became kind of a conversation with my doctor after the second round of like, risk versus reward. And I talk about this again in the book too, because you have to understand your odds and statistics and what you're willing to.
And I like, I say all the time, like, it sucks. It sucks to be so business minded with something that's so vulnerable and so personal. But if you have an end goal in mind and you have a finite amount of resources, time, emotional capacity, money, whatever it is, then you do have to kind of figure out how long you will stay on the merry go round until you get off, you pivot, you change course. You have to know that going into it, because, I mean, people drain their entire savings accounts, they put liens against their home and their mortgage to do this. You now, you're like hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. And yes, you have your one genetic child, but maybe it took you five years to get there. And a lot of trauma and a lot of medication and a lot of lost time and a lot of grief. And if that worked for you, I think that's wonderful. But there are other ways to get to the same result quicker, cheaper. Not that egg donorship is cheaper, but I definitely saved a lot of time and money by only doing my two retrievals. Kind of like cutting my losses, understanding what my personal odds were, and then making a choice that was best for us.
So I always say that to people like, don't feel like going. An alternate route is giving up. It's not giving up, it's pivoting. And you have to make choices based on your capacity and what you were able to handle. Again, both from a resource standpoint and an emotional standpoint. And so for me, it was more important to have a child, however, that looked, without drowning my entire financial, like, stability and situation, so I could at least bring a child into, like, a good financial situation. I also didn't want to wait five years and 15 retrievals later for the chance that I would. So I think that's what's tough about my condition is, like, when you have diminished ovarian reserve and they're telling you there's like a 2 or 3% chance you can have a genetic child, it's human nature to think that you're going to be that 2 or 3% chance. And then you see these success stories from the person that was. And it gives you, like, this false sense of reality around your odds and statistics. And so I always kind of challenge people that I mentor or I talk to in this space that if you want to keep going, keep going, but be very grounded in reality and kind of know with your partner what your limit is.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: So you said your doctor was sharing information and statistics. So what kind of information did he share? And, like, as to what to expect? Because obviously you have endometriosis. You've gone through the surgery, you've gone through ivf. It didn't work. I mean, how were you going to know that even donor eggs were going to work for you?
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think what they do is they look at your age and your medical diagnosis after, like, one or two egg retrievals, a doctor can pretty much, like, if you've made no embryos. For me, it was two eggs and then nine eggs the second time. So I was 30 years old. We had 12 eggs. If I couldn't make a single embryo out of 12 eggs at 30 years old, that's not looking too good. Because I have friends that go through IVF for other issues, or maybe it's their partner and they're 30 and they're pulling like, 40 eggs, like. Right. And they're making.
I have a friend that made 29 embryos out of 40 eggs. I mean, she's my agent. Right. And they were doing it for different reasons. But the thing is, is, like, we had 12. You can see that there's an egg quality problem, and there's really nothing that I can do or take or whatever that's going to change that in any significant way. So it's just a matter of do we keep trying to find the golden egg or do we pivot? I had never heard of egg donorship before at all. IVF didn't work, then there's adoption, or there's just not having children. And then my physician introduced me to the concept of donor eggs, which then also opened my mind up to embryo adoption as well, which is not something I'd ever heard of before. Honestly, my reaction to it was not good. What the hell? Like, I'm gonna carry another woman's baby with my partner? Like, I was, like, horrified, to be quite honest, because I had never heard of it before. I had known nobody that did third party reproduction at all. It sounded very sci fi, scary, terrible. I was, like, very confused why this would even be offered to me. And then when he started to share with me, like, just how many people kind of do follow this path. And I started to do some research, and I actually found a couple, very few, but a couple, like, egg donor influencers online.
I was like, oh, okay. So there's IVF, then there's IVF 2.0, which is for the people that, like, IVF doesn't work, and then they have to do this, like, whole other piece of third party reproduction, whether it's donor gamuts, you know, surrogacy, whatever it is. So I always say, like, I got the IVF special because I did the IVF thing, but then I had to go kind of the extra mile to, like, get the baby, which is where the Moving mountains for Motherhood title for my book came. Because it just felt like anywhere I got in the summit of my journey, like, there was another peak I had to overcome. And honestly, you don't know how the donor eggs are going to work for you, but what you do know when you're in my position is that your eggs likely are not working. And this is a young, healthy. In my case, she was considered a proven donor, meaning she had her own children, as well as other successful live births from the donation of previous lots of her eggs.
So that's a lot better than what I'm. What I'm offering, right? So it's a gamble. We took a loan and did a big fundraiser to raise the money for the eggs. We bought a lot of eight eggs, and we made five embryos. We were advised by our doctor not to waste the money to genetically test them since she was so heavily proven as a donor. And I got pregnant on the first transfer, and that's my son. So it was insane how, like, for so many years we couldn't figure out what was wrong. And it ended up being an ingredient problem. And the second we watched the ingredient, I ended up with the Most beautiful baby. And it's so weird because he looks like me and I'm not like, promote. I always say to people, like, expect that if you have a child through the use of donor anything, that they could come out looking like anything. Right. And honestly that's also true for people that have genetic children. You can't control DNA.
I just feel like this baby was meant to be mine because he actually does look like me. It's very bizarre. We also have the same coloring and his father and my donor don't have that coloring.
Like we go out all the time and people are like, oh my gosh, your baby looks so much like mama. You guys are twins. And I'm just like, I laugh because I process. Agreed. The fact that I would probably never hear that and that was part of my healing process, that I'll never hear that and I don't care.
And now I hear it all the time and I'm so like healed that like, it makes me laugh that like, I thought this was going to be such a big deal and it honestly turned out like, it's so weird. He looks so much like me. But even if he didn't, I healed that part of me that needed that. And honestly, he's just my baby. He's my son. I carried him. I had a rough pregnancy. I had an emergency C section after a failed induction. Like if it could have happened from start to finish, it happened to me. I'm just grateful that he's here and I'm grateful for the options of third party reproduction. And honestly, what it has done for me as a person, it is, has opened my mind to embracing different paths for all things. And so what I mean by that is like, there's more than one path to motherhood, but there's also more than one path to like everything in your life. There's more than one path to getting that promotion. There's more than one path to the way a marriage or a family might look. There's more than one path to happiness. There's more than one path to whatever your goal is. I was a very regimented person before this experience that felt that if things were not done in a specific way, then it didn't hit the mark. It was a miss. It was a loss that probably comes from a little bit of my high achiever, like personality. And I feel like this situation, it restructured those thoughts where now like, I'm a lot more open minded to just different ways of accomplishing almost anything. And I can see how that is like benefiting me in other parts of my life too.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: Couldn't agree with you more on that. I'm curious, how did you go about doing the donor selection? Like, what mattered to you most when you started looking for a donor? And I'm assuming that you worked with your clinic's donor bank?
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Yes, yes, and I do. It's so funny because I get this question all the time. So there's like a very large chapter in my book around, like, what this process looks like. If you're selecting a donor, basically you work with your clinic to get signed up for different, like, national banks that are affiliated with your doctor in your clinic. There was a couple of them that were affiliated with my clinic. Specifically Donor Egg Bank USA and my Egg bank were the two that I was affiliated with. So I signed up, created a profile, spoke to the customer service reps. They're the sweetest people because they know that this is a hard process and nobody wants to be like, hi, I'm looking for eggs. Like, it's, you know, so they walk you through it, you send photos, they help match you.
It's kind of like a dating profile. Like, you basically just swipe through every day. You, like, refresh your computer and you swipe through profiles. There's new women that are coming onto the site basically on a daily basis. And yes, the very attractive, accomplished, proven, educated ones go very fast. Like, if you're not on in the morning, reserving your lot, that donor could be gone by the evening. And so it also depends too on if you're doing fresh or frozen. And I think that there are benefits to both. And I talk about about that in the book. But ultimately I am went the frozen route because they are available now. It is a bit cheaper. And in my case, I was able to purchase eight, which usually there are lots, lots of six, but I was able to purchase eight. And I felt that if I got at least two embryos out of those eight, you know, I would be happy. And I ended up with five, which is why I always say to people, I do think proven donors, if you can find a proven donor, is probably a better spend of your money. But I had plenty of friends that are pregnant through the use of donor egg IVF that their donor was not proven, or in many cases their donor was like a family or friend. So it's more of a known donor situation. And that person was just donating out of the goodness of their heart, not because they were like vetted egg donor and they have their children and they're fine too. So I think it just depends on, like, what you're looking for, what you can afford. But yeah, it's very much like a dating profile.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Yeah. How did you make the decision around anonymity, known donor or open ID or. Because obviously, as we know, truly, there's no such thing as anonymity anymore. I mean, that just doesn't really exist.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Look, I think it's how you look at it. This is a very controversial topic. I don't fully understand why, though, because I look at this through a bit of a different lens. So if somebody doesn't like what I'm going to say, okay, this is my opinion and my experience, but there is no such thing as anonymity to your point. So any person at this point that's donating, at some point, they're probably going to get contacted by somebody. Maybe it's not necessarily your child, but maybe somebody else in that, like, donor sibling pool at some point may contact them. And I do believe that most of these banks, when you donate now, you're kind of signing off on like the understanding that, like DNA, DNA and me or 23gen, whatever it is, like those sites, like, it's a thing. It's safe to say that anybody that's donating understands that at some point this could happen. But I think the piece of it is that this to me is organ donation. This is organ donation. This is. This is not. I'm donating my eggs because I want to be your mom or your best friend. This is. I want to give a part of my body to a stranger to help them thrive and to live their best life with the family that they were always meant to have. That for whatever reason, they can't. It's like when somebody gives a kidney, they donate blood, whatever it is, they're not doing that because they want to be your best friend or your mom. They're doing that because they want to give back in some type of way. And also for egg and sperm donors, there is a financial incentive there, I think, to say that, like, everybody needs to be open ID and everybody needs to be willing to have a relationship. To me, that that's not really then the concept of organ donation. And I think you're going to deter a lot of people from wanting to donate if that's the expectation. What I do think is really important is if you are going to be a donor, that there is some level of openness around family history, medical history, things of that nature which most of the egg banks today, I can't speak about the sperm banks, but I can say about the egg banks for sure, they're definitely a lot better. So when we got the information of our son, we went with the frozen anonymous route. That's what worked for us. And there really wasn't any other reason other than I really liked that donor. She was proven we looked very similar. I liked her health history.
I loved her profile. I felt like I would be friends with her in real life. And it just spoke to me. If she had been a known donor, I probably still would have picked her. I didn't choose her because she was anonymous. I just liked her profile. If my son ever wanted to find her, I'd help him. I probably would give the woman the biggest hug in the world. And we probably would end up being friends. Like, it wouldn't threaten me at all. So I think sometimes people think, oh, I want to go the anonymous route because I don't want this. But they're not looking at it that way. And once you have your child, I promise you're not looking at it like that either.
But I do think that if you were to completely cut the anonymous piece out of this process, you probably would alienate a lot of people that just want to do this out of the goodness of their hearts. And it's not like egg and sperm donors are flying in out of the woodwork. Like, it's. There's actually a shortage in some ethnicities and nationalities for donors. So I think they have to make the process what's going to work for the donor as well as the recipient and offer lots of options. I don't think there's anything wrong or right either way. But I think the key is you have to have access to medical information. And I think other piece is that if you are a donor, and I'm not sure if this is a law or it will be soon, but if you have a major change in medical history through your life, I do think that should be reported to the bank and that should be reported out to any children and families from that donor. So, like, if you were to get cancer later in life or like something major happens, like medically, I think it would be important to report that back. So, again, like, this is my opinion. I know there's a lot of strong opinions out there about this. I think you have to do what works best for you and your family and you have to be confident in your choices and the why behind what you're doing. Because at the end of the day, you're the one that's going to explain this to Your kid, you're the one that's going to own this and you're the one that's going to navigate. And like I tell everyone I mentor, you don't know how your child is going to interpret your decisions. And that is true for genetic children, too. Yeah, you don't know. You make the best decision based on what you can do, what you can afford, what you have the ability to access at the given time, and then you consistently work to address that for the rest of your life. But it's not to say, like, just because your donor conceived, you're going to have this major hurdle. And it's also not to say that if you're not donor conceived, you're not going to have any hurdles. Like, you don't know how kids are going to react to anything. So you kind of just have to, like, do your best.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: Yep, absolutely. What was your timeline from, like, when you decided, okay, this is my donor match to, like, embryo transfer? Because obviously now it's a completely different experience.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: So fast. I literally, like, I said to my doctor, I'm like, we should have done this from the beginning. Like, it was quick. It was like three months. Oh, yeah. No, it was very fast. Like, I remember we found our donor around, like, Easter time. So it was like April. I was pregnant in July.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Well, that play, it's so great when you go the frozen route, the frozen eggs, and that could be known or unknown. It doesn't matter. There's options typically for both. But if you go frozen eggs versus fresh, they're ready, they're sitting at the bank, it's a matter of signing paperwork, making sure genetic compatibility is there with the genetic counselor, and then they ship them, and then they fertilize them, and five days later, you're typically doing a fresh transfer. Like, it's very quick. Yes. With frozen eggs, some of the drawbacks are that they, some of them may not dethaw, some of them may not fertilize, but that's the truth of any IVF cycle. And you're probably not going to end up with 10 embryos if you're only buying lots of six to eight eggs, but one or two children, then that might be okay. Also something that I was very comfortable with is if we want to have a second child, but we don't end up with enough embryos out of this donor cycle to do that, then I was okay with finding a different donor for a sibling in the future. And I think that if you are not okay with that, like, truly not okay, with that, then you might want to go the fresh route. It's more expensive and it's more timely, but you'll probably end up with more eggs and more embryos. In my case, it. I took a gamble and it didn't matter. Eight frozen eggs, five embryos, like that was plenty to potentially have maybe two children. But for some people that really feel strongly that they wouldn't want a different donor for another child, they may want to think about even buy maybe two lots of frozen eggs to get enough eggs from the donor that's obviously more expensive. But again, you have to think through what your goals are. For me, I didn't really care what the genetic component was going to be of the child because I already let it go. This child already is genetically not linked to me. So to me it was just like, I'm buying a blueprint. I'm buying a blueprint from somebody, but I'm raising them, I'm growing them, they're my children. So I don't really care where the genetic piece comes from, I think, because I let it go. I'm now very open. Like, I'm like, oh, maybe I'll do embryo adoption or maybe I'll do like adoption and even maybe I would adopt a child of a totally different like nationality or background. Like that's something that's been on my mind because I let it go.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: I hear you, you let it go. And for everybody that has to go through this route, you do have to go through a mourning process. You do have to let it go.
And I venture to say that you're probably one of the strongest individuals that I've spoken to in a long time that have had the emotional strength to be very strong in your. I was okay with letting it go and I've moved on and I was able to open up so many other options for myself because of that. But that wasn't, I'm sure, something that was just a snap in the finger and.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: No, no, no, no. It was a very traumatic, like year long process. So what I would say is I have learned how to practice radical acceptance. And that is something that I'm practicing currently in my life in other areas is just that like you can be upset that something is not the way you want it to be. And you need to, you need to cry, scream, grieve, go to therapy, talk to your friends.
You need to, you need to find the outlet and you have to get those feelings out. But it's all in the purpose of radical acceptance. I'm crying, I'm grieving, I'm journaling, I'm blogging. I'm going to therapy. I'm talking to friends. I'm doing all of this because I want to accept this, because I don't have any other choice but to accept it. So I'm doing things to help me process my emotions so that eventually I can. Because I want to be somebody that can accept reality. I don't want to be somebody who's going to let the things that happen to them ruin the rest of their life. Like, I'm 32 years old. This isn't my fault that this happened. But now how I react is going to shape the rest of my life. And I can either choose to embrace motherhood in a different way and. And still be a mother, or I can just drown in it. Maybe choose not to have children, and there's nothing wrong with that. Maybe go a route and then be, like, resentful. But, like, who does that benefit? I really hurt. It's. It really just further punishes me for something I didn't ask for. So I think all of the things I did, between the blogging, the support groups, reaching out, trying to find examples of people that were okay. All of the different therapy and, like, support group things I did, I signed up for a lot of them. I found a lot of that online.
It was all because the end goal was to accept something different. I think the other part of this, too, is that there's such a community of people out there that are doing this. Like I said, I have over a hundred women in a support group and counting that are using egg donors or sperm donors or embryo adoption or whatever. Like, for so many things, whether it's I got married later in life, I got divorced and then got remarried. I have a medical diagnosis. I was born without eggs. It's like, all varying ages, all varying reasons.
And outside of, like, say, they have a support group and maybe their close inner circle is, like, out there, like, touting it on the front of the New York Times, right? Or really, like, hey, my kids don't are conceived and they shouldn't have to and they don't need to. But for me, as somebody who does heal out loud and knows that I need to find significance in the things that I go through because I know myself and I know what will get me to that radical acceptance. I wanted to turn this into something else. The trauma and the pain can't be for nothing because, again, I know myself. And I think you have to know yourself and what you need to do to Heal. And so I chose to heal out loud because I know myself and because I did that, I found even more connection because now I'm kind of like one of the very few faces of donor egg IVF in this community. But I'm also probably the youngest. I have a couple really great mentors and folks that are donor egg IVF influencers, you know, if you want to call us that, but they're much older than me. I think I was one of the, if not the first to come out with, I can't have genetic children. I'm barely 30 years old. I think most people think about needing to use an egg donor through the lens of like, having children later in life. But my story is more around, like, having a medical condition, which there's just not many people in general online talking about using donor eggs. And then if they are, my story is a little bit unique, I think, because of that, that piece of it. Just because of how young I was when I discovered this problem.
And there's not many of us. There's like four or five accounts. If you look this up to try to find, like, mothers that are out there using donor eggs, there's like four or five of us that I think about. I think two of them are not even in the U.S. it's a very limited pool of, like, resources in the United States. So when I realized that there was a true opportunity to help others, I took it and it helped me heal. And I didn't intend to write a book, but because I just kept blogging and connecting and doing advocacy work, it kind of like led to that. And now I look back and I'm like, oh, my God, like, I'm so glad in a sense, like, my own eggs didn't work because I wouldn't have this book. I wouldn't know half the people that matter to me in my life. I wouldn't have made these connections. I would not have this specific child. And he is like, perfect beyond like I. He's just like my angel baby. And I would not have become the individual I am today, which is like so, so, so, so much more, I think emotionally just elevated and I don't even like, aware, like, yeah, how did.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: You share or maybe not share your decision with others, especially, you know, family, friends and all of that? Because again, to your point, you're young. It's not the norm for somebody so young to be need an egg donor. You know, how did you share that information?
[00:36:15] Speaker B: So my family and friends knew that we had been trying to have a baby. For a while. And they were. They knew that I was having this surgery for endometriosis. And I was very open with the fact that I had a diagnosis that could result in infertility. Like, once I knew that I was stage three, stage four, starting at the IVF clinic. So I kind of just kept friends and family abreast with what was going on in the moment. Like, it wasn't one of those things where, like, no one knew we were trying, and then no one knew there was a surgery, and then no one knew there was ivf. I'm an open book. That's my style.
So whether there was a problem or not, I was always just gonna be open with people about the fact that we wanted to start a family. And then, so as things were kind of happening, I was just kind of sharing. First time that I felt like, oh, I don't. I feel weird, I feel shame. I don't wanna share it is when I had to tell people that we're gonna use an egg donor. And the reason why I felt that way was because I wasn't sure if they would interpret that as a lesser than path to motherhood.
And that, like, my child and my family would be, like, less legitimate. That is actually in my mind, like, when I really reflect on why I didn't want to tell people right away, I felt like, oh, God, I already went through so much, and now I'm going to take this path to have a baby. And are people going to think it's less than? The reality is, that was a projection, because until I healed, I think I thought it was less than.
And I think I was putting that out there. And what I always tell people to do is just practice telling a couple trusted people first and watch their reactions. Because when I picked up the phone and called, like, four or five of my closest friends to be like, listen, we just made this decision and we're going to go down this path. They were like, oh, that's so cool. Oh, my God. Wait, like, who is she? Where are you getting the ex from? Like, they were so interested because it sounds so unique. And they were, like, happy that there was a path for me. And the more I did it and the more I practiced, it got easier and easier and easier. And I also practice a little bit with strangers because I wanted to see what stranger, like, unbiased reactions would be, because, again, it was challenging myself and my own perception. I felt badly that I maybe had to take a different path. And so. Because I wanted to accept it, but I knew that I hadn't yet. One of the things that I did was, like, anytime I would be like, kind of out the bagel shop, the gym, whatever, and, like, it would come up like, oh, we're trying to have a baby. Or I would proactively share this information and just pause and just see what their reactions would be. They were never bad. Like, the reactions were never, ever bad. I think there was one person who was like, oh, I'm sorry. And then I took it as an opportunity to be like, no, don't be. Like, this is going to, like, lead us to the child we were always supposed to have. And even that was, like, practice of how you respond. And she didn't do that to be insensitive. She was just ignorant to the experience. Like, she.
So I think practicing putting it in front of people and responding is like, it helps you accept it and how you're going to talk about it.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: How do you intend to plan to share your child's origin story to him?
[00:39:12] Speaker B: I mean, I tell him now that he's my special egg.
He KMP's my. What do I totally tell him? Like, he's my golden egg. He's my special egg. We're so grateful to his donor so that Mommy could be your mommy, because I was always supposed to be your mommy. I tell him that there's a really great book, actually, from one of my mentors, Victoria Nino. She's a donor at IVF Influencer in the Space, and she has a children's book that came out called Our Hearts Match. So I say that to him all the time. I'm always like, our hearts Match. Like, you and Mommy have the same heart. He looks a lot like me. So it's kind of like it's in my situation. It's like, oh, we actually also have the same hair color, too. But even if we didn't, I wouldn't have needed that. Like, I tell him all the time, like, you're the baby that was meant to be mine. It took us so long to find each other. I, like, have this little story I tell him about how he had to jump over the moon and bounce along among the stars. I have little cute ways that I explained to him. He was out there and I was here. And the vessel in which he came to me is just the vessel. The soul was always destined.
There's a lot of great children's books, like the one I just named, but there's others, too, that are really good for explaining donor conception that I'm just going to read to him.
And like, there isn't going to be a day where I tell him it's just part of it. It's just, he always knows. Yep, it's a part of it. And that's how I believe if you're going to go this path, you should probably approach it because then there's no like, aha moment of traumatizing your kid, like, oh, wait, you lied to me. You didn't tell me you're not my mom, quote unquote. And it's like, no, he's just always going to know that I'm his mother. That had to go this unique path to have him. And as he gets older and he puts pieces together, we'll continue to have conversations. And honestly, when he turns 18, I would even say to him, you know, if you need some extra money for school, you want to help somebody out, you could be a sperm donor. I mean, that's probably not a conversation most parents are having with their kids, but because you were conceived through donorship, it's something maybe you would consider now paying forward. And that's like a conversation we would have in our family. So I don't know. I think for me, like, I've totally accepted that this is my path to parenthood. So how am I going to talk to him and others about it is a moot point. But I can tell you, getting to this point was like the most transformative, traumatic experience I've ever had. And it really plays out in the book. And I think if I had the resource that I created, if I had my book as the patient, I think I would have had a very different experience, like, mindset because there were really no resources at that time that highlighted a lot of different examples of third party reproduction and actually walked you through everything. You ask, like, what is it like to find a donor? And fresh versus frozen, known versus non, like all of the things. And that's just one component of the book because the book is not specifically focused on third party reproduction. That's just the one chapter. But I didn't have many resources. I feel like I was flying blind and crying a lot and just very like out of my own body through this whole experience. And I hope that, like, a resource like this maybe can help somebody be a little bit more grounded from day one of what to expect and what their options actually are with examples of how it will be okay no matter what way you go. So that hopefully it's not as maybe traumatic of an experience as it was for me.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: So let's talk about the Book Moving Mountains for Motherhood. How did it all come about? I know by the time this airs the book would have already been dropped, but I'm curious. As you know, before we even started, I was like, yeah, I don't know about me writing ever of a book. I'm just not a writer. I can talk all day long, but that's about it. So how did that come about?
[00:42:39] Speaker B: So you'd be surprised. People that are good with verbal communication are probably better with written communication than you'd even think. Because I was always the same way. Like I've had people tell me that I should have a podcast because, like, I guess they like my voice. I'm like, I don't have time for that. I do have a full time job, but I do love to read. I've been running a book club for many years. You can see my little bookshelf behind me. Like I'm a big reader and my grandfather was a published author and so when I was younger I did like light editing work for him and I just always had that in me. And I just never knew what I was going to write about. Like I always wanted to write a book. I just didn't really have a topic. And then when I was going through all the infertility stuff, I started blogging. And part of the reason why I started blogging was because it was a great outlet. It was actually a lot cheaper than therapy. But also I felt that there was this just like unrepresented opinion out there around endometriosis and egg reserve and how that can affect fertility. And then of course that led into third party reproduction. So the blog was really just to promote more education. I set my Instagram to public and I just started writing and releasing articles and they started to get picked up by like different, like, you know, smaller advocates, if you will, in the infertility space. And then it really wasn't until pregnant. Ish. Like 2 Thanksgivings ago picked up my article that went a little bit viral on TikTok. It's called so you need to use an egg donor how not to spiral or jump off a cliff by someone who has contemplated all of the above. So that article got picked up by them and they released it around Thanksgiving like two years ago. And once that happened, my Instagram kind of blew up because again, like, this is an example of a real person using donor eggs and there's not many of us out there. And then once I started to get a little bit more of a following, then I had more content and honestly More even just motivation to want to keep putting articles out. At one point, right before my son was born, my mom said to me, like, what are you going to do with this WordPress? You have over 75 published articles. Are you going to like maintain this website forever? Are you going to keep blogging? Doesn't this need to live somewhere like put it, you should like write a book. And so I started looking through my blog and I'm like, wow. Like it's kind of, it's giving survival guide. Like the book is very, like the blog is very top to bottom. Like what, why, when, how, where?
Like it's, that's how the blog is kind of structured. And so it was actually very easy to put a table of contents together because it kind of already existed that way on the blog. And then I had to just fill in the cracks to make it flow. But of course like once I started working with a publisher and actually had more of a professional like gusto behind it, then we start involving experts, therapists. I've partnered with four different big name fertility doctors, A therapist who used an egg donor herself to have children. Elise, the embryologist who's been like featured on buzzfeed and she's done a ton in the community and then 15 different advocates that all have unique ways to parenthood and like also have really great following and a really great like advocacy piece around what they're doing. Then it started to kind of blow up because now all the people that are in the book that are providing quotes, editing, auditing, you know, adding their stories, whatever it is, they have their own followings too.
So like it's really cool because if you read my book and you're very ingrained in this community, like you're going to see like a lot of names that like you recognize, kind of intentional because it helps also spread the word about the resource and it makes the resource more integritous to have people with a lot of experience as well as their own platforms involved in creating what is now the very first professionally published infertility survival guide in the United States. There is nothing like it, at least not from a professionally published standpoint. There are a lot of like self published memoirs that are out there, but there is nothing that is fully comprehensive from top to bottom. It's technical, it's emotional, tactful, it's like the only guide you would need. If you're going through infertility and you buy this book and you read the entire thing like you're, you probably don't need to Buy another book. Like that's kind of the point. It's like the one comprehensive guide to go to get all your information in one place, supported by a lot of experts and a lot of people that have been kind of through this and have that hard earned wisdom. It definitely became much bigger than I had initially intended because I was going to self publish the book and I'm so grateful to my publisher that that did not happen because now that I've learned what actually goes into publishing a book, I. Yeah, I'm glad, I'm very glad that I did not do that on my own.
[00:46:58] Speaker A: Well, as we wrap up, like a last question that I would want to ask. What do you wish more people understood about egg donation? Because obviously your lived experiences and then of course the people that you're connected with and have conversations with and all of that knowing, especially, you know, you wrote a book specifically about this experience, how important it is to get that information out there. You know, what do you wish more people understood?
[00:47:23] Speaker B: I think more. I wish more people understood how common it is. I wish more people viewed it through the lens of organ donation, because I cannot tell you how many people that immediately feel better when I use that word, that terminology about the choice they're making. I think there's a lot of ethics that get tied up in this that I think what we have to remember at the end of the day is like, we're all humans. I don't care what you look like, I don't care where you're from. We came from like an origin, so we're all kind of sharing similar DNA anyway. And it's really not about your genetics. It's about the family that you're born into. It's about the life that you're brought up into. It's about like the people that raise you. That epigenetics piece I think is something I wish more people knew about. And there's a lot of studies out there now about the influence of epigenetics on a person. You know, the idea that you could take two people, put them in different homes in different parts of the world, and they would be two totally different people based on how they're raised, not necessarily based on the genetic component, although genetics play a part. They certainly are not everything. And I think that people that are going through this process feel like they're making some kind of like ethical horrible decision and they feel guilty. And then you get online and you read a lot of things about donor conceived people that are very upset. And what I always Say to that is like it's very good to be educated and to understand the different viewpoints of everyone. I'm not upset that I read those things and that I was exposed to stuff that wasn't always easy to hear. I think you have to know that so that then you can know how to go about raising your own child in the ethically, most ethically responsible way that you can. I think that starts with being open and honest from the beginning and building a lot of pride in their individual spirit story, but also remembering that a lot of times the loudest voices are the ones that we hear. I've met many donor conceived people and the parents of donor conceived individuals who literally don't care. They're not trying to find the donor, they don't care the intended parent even offered. They don't want to. They are totally satisfied with the parents that raised them. They view them as their parents, they view their siblings as their siblings and they have no interest in getting on DNA whatever and finding somebody. I've also met people that needed that. They really needed that. And I would say that if you're going to have a child through these means, you have to be open to both possibilities and let your child kind of guide you with what, what they're going to need when the time is right.
[00:49:45] Speaker A: Absolutely. Erica, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your story and really for being real and honest because unfortunately it's not always the case. Right. So invulnerable because so many people aren't willing to be this open. Like hey, I'm just going to put it all out there, take it however you need, pull whatever you need.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: The New York in me might come out a little bit there. That's probably.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Quite all right, what you get. Yes, quite all right. Quite all right. I rather that honestly than anything else. So before we wrap up, can you let listeners know how they can get a copy of your book Moving Mountains for Motherhood and the best way they can reach you if they want to connect. And of course we're going to put everything in the show notes too.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: Yes. So the book is available through Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It is also available for direct purchase through my publisher's website. But Amazon is probably the most efficient way to get the book. Also a patient advocacy companion to the book called Empowered Fertility. It's about a 30 page ebook that builds on patient advocacy. I work in the pharmaceutical industry. I have for over 10 years. So I have a unique perspective on how a patient can best advocate for themselves. In a healthcare setting where they may feel vulnerable and not comfortable going toe to toe with a doctor. I've done that my entire career in sales and marketing and then also being a patient. It's a unique perspective. And so that ebook also available through Kindle as well as an epub or digital download on my publisher site, there's the main print book and then there's also this supplemental ebook that can, you know, go along as a nice companion, which again, everything can be found through Amazon or my publisher site. And then as far as connecting with me, my Instagram is Eri Ferraro F E R R A R O and then Moving Mountains for Motherhood does have its own Instagram, but if you want to connect directly with me, and if you're interested in my support groups for anybody using Donor Egg ivf, I would suggest following and connecting on my personal page because that's where I run the group out of.
[00:51:41] Speaker A: Okay. And like I said, and we'll make sure we put all of that information in the show notes anyway, so. But thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.
[00:51:49] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:51:50] Speaker A: Thanks so much for listening to Fertility Cafe. If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an interview. Leave us a review and connect with us on socials. We're fertilitycafe. You can also watch the full video version of today's conversation over on our YouTube channel. Until next time, remember, love has no limits. Neither should parenthood.
