Hi - glad you're still around and still thinking about doing this.
We started by picking a clinic. Our IVF clinic in London couldn't name anything in the US, which was quite useless of them. We looked at SART (www.sart.org/) who are the US organisation monitoring fertility clinics. They publish stats on the various clinics and we picked the three with the best stats (most number of IVF procedures, most number of egg donor procedures, success rates etc.) in LA. We picked LA because my brother is based there, so it's easy for me to stay with him but otherwise we'd have looked at the East Coast and probably New York.
We then looked at these clinics and I was lucky becasue my DH happened to be over there on business and went and saw them as well. We ended up with California Fertility Partners because it's a long established but single site clinic which owns it's own facilities, has excellent stats and a good roster of doctors who are continuing research work. They also really made themselves available to talk to us and I thought their screening process was very thorough.
We then had to find a donor. We asked all of the clinics we saw to recommed three donor agencies and also got a list from SART. After looking briefly at 20, I registered with 10 and went through their databases to see what sort of girls they had on their books.
I have to admit that we developed a sort of weighted scoring matrix for trying to pick a short list of donors and I looked at the databases with our two highest scoring attributes in mind. From that we had a couple of girls here and there and then 17 girls we liked with this one agency: The Egg Donor Program. They also worked a lot with our clinic, so we just had to narrow down the shortlist with the rest of our scoring matrix, a lot of talking, discussion with the 'match co-ordinator' at the agency and some gut feel. You get a lot of information in the States: academic scores, three generations of family physical stats and medicla info, fertility history, a personal questionnaire, pictures etc.
Having picked a donor, she and we had to 'qualify', so tests for both of us, interviews with the doctor, the agency, counsellers etc. We also had to track cycles; ours were quite close together so we didn't have to shift one or both with meds, and complete contracts. We also had to deposit her fee and a travel budget into escrow accounts. And then it was just scheduling it in with work committments. In all it took about 6 months to arrange. Our donor's fee was about £3,500. Travel for her to go from Florida to California and back and stay in hotels cost about £3,250. Plus our travel but we did that on airmiles. The agency fee was about £3,250 and that included some of her tests and the lawyers. I also paid for her and my meds which was about £600 and the clinic fee was around another £4,000 (I think but would have to check). We did some extra testing on our embryos - you can test some genetics and for gender in the US - and waited for blastocyst stage.
It was a huge success right up until 6 weeks. Our donor (it was her first time so all a bit uncertain) gave us 22 eggs and we got 17 embryos of which we had 8 healthy girols and 6 healthy boys. We then got 4 good female blastocysts and 3 good male blastocysts, of which we used 2 and froze the rest. We're trying again with two of the frozen ones soon. I have to say everyone, including the clinic and the agency were absolutely fabulous and I wouldn't hestitate to recommend them. It also worked out well that they were starting work at the end of my business day, so it was quite easy to spend the time in the evenings emailing and calling them.
Egg donation seems to be the most reliable way to get pregnant; success rates are something like over 60% get pregnant and about 50% have a live birth. You do have to get adjusted to the fact that it won't be your gentic child but my view is that this is the only way I'm going to have a child other than adopting (I don't react to IVF drugs at all) and at least I get to carry and deliver it. In fact I feel incredibly lucky to have this option at all. my only regret is we wasted too much time before getting to egg donation; wish we'd done it sooner.
I've blasted you with a lot. Do you have any other questions ? Happy to tell you anything you need to know ...