The Biggest Mistakes I Made As An Egg Donor

Being a first-time egg donor can be lonely and confusing. When you’re searching for information online it seems like you only find two extremes: You either find horror stories from donors who had bad experiences (this is not the norm), or you find information from agencies or clinics who have a vested interest in getting you to sign up.

Stack that on top of egg donation being a topic that can make some people uncomfortable to talk about, and damn, egg donation can feel like searching through a dark room with a flashlight.

I’ve been there – when I first donated eggs, I was in the dark, and went in blindly. Luckily for me, I had positive experiences. Even still, I made some big mistakes. Here are the four biggest ones: 

I didn’t shop around for the best agency or clinic… 

The first agency I donated to was completely random. I did little to no research, didn’t compare it to what other agencies offered… I simply did a Google search and went with one of the results. Thinking about this today, I absolutely cringe! 

Luckily, I had a safe and care-filled experience. But by not doing more research, I was really leaving that experience up to chance. 

Beyond the basics of safety, failing to do my research likely led to getting a lower fee. For this first cycle, I earned $6,000, which wasn’t bad, but could it have been better? Likely, yes. 

I ate too many hotdogs and went shopping… 

It sounds silly, but that’s because it’s exactly true! My retrieval ended up being scheduled for the same weekend that my parents were in town. Since my parents already had weird feelings about me choosing to donate eggs, I (read, my ego) didn’t want to let my donation interfere with our plans together. 

That meant that I tried to act like everything was 100% normal after my retrieval. When I say “after my retrieval” I mean just HOURS later. My mom drove me back to my house from my retrieval appointment and we relaxed for about 2 hours, during which time I ate a big lunch of chili dogs and potato chips. 

Then, my mom and I went to the mall to go shopping for the start of the next school year. 

Needless to say, this is overdoing it! The meal I ate would have been hard on my body on a normal day. After my retrieval? It was like an added gut punch, on top of an invasive procedure. And walking around at the mall gave my body zero time to rest. 

The effect of these decisions was 2 days of the worst bloating I’ve ever experienced and worse constipation than any other procedure. It was painful! 

And then I got high (yikes!) 

Yep. The worst mistake I made was getting high during my cycle after taking a weed gummy. I had gotten a migraine – a head-splitting, debilitating migraine that nothing helped. Living in California where weed had been legal for years, it was so natural to try it as a remedy for my pain. It didn’t occur to me until the fog of the pain had lifted – OH SHIT. I was going to fail my drug test. 

After lots of anxiety and trepidation, I did the only right thing: I called my agency and confessed. They were gracious, but understandably had to contact the intended parents. After an emotional phone call with the IPs, it was agreed that we would go through with the cycle – thank goodness! 

If the IP had wanted to call it off, based on my breach of contract I would have been on the hook to reimburse them for significant costs for the cycle. Bullet, dodged! 

But the mistake with the most lasting consequences: I didn’t know how to make the most of my fee.

When I was 23, I looked at each fee as a way to just keep myself afloat while I finished graduate school. I was working a couple jobs that I hated (shout out Dave and Busters!), and a few thousand dollars in my account meant that I could work fewer hours, and possibly take out fewer student loans. 

If you’d asked me back then about investing, I would have said that I wasn’t interested. If you’d asked me about retirement accounts, I would have said not right now. And if you’d asked me about my debt, I would have said I’d worry about it later. 

I simply didn’t have the foundational financial knowledge to know any better. 

What I’ve learned since then though, is that with even a basic understanding of these principles, I could have turned my $6,000 into tens of thousands of dollars or more – and that’s without even factoring in the subsequent donations I made. 

What I learned from the mistakes I made as an egg donor: 

Mistakes happen, and being honest about it – honest with yourself and others – is always the right move. When you’re able to do that, you can learn from the past and grow into a more competent, confident future. 

Eventually, I learned how to advocate for myself and ask questions, do my research, and use my fees to finance my future and create the life I want.