Toronto Trip

At the time of writing we fly on 12 km altitude above Scotland, heading to Toronto. Tomorrow we have an appointment in the clinic to make our biological contribution. After this appointment we have an appointment for an obligatory psychological test.

For this trip it was important that our sperm is tested and that we have been tested on various STIs (Gonorrhea, Chlamydia, Syphilis, Hepatitis, HIV and herpes). Fortunately, the tests showed that the sperm of both of us is useful for the IVF threatments and we have been tested negative on all STIs.

Should our sperm tomorrow be of insufficient quality, we can do a second attempt on Monday.  The maturation process of the sperm takes About 3 months and every day a new “batch” will be available which survives for 3 to 4 days. This means everything (sickness, antibiotics, body temprature etc. etc.) may have an effect on the quality of a ejaculation you have at “the” moment. In the case of abstention of 3 to 4 days, the sperm concentration in your semen is the highest and you have the biggest chance of a good quality ejaculation. However, an abstention of more than 4 days may again have a bad influence on the quality of the sperm.

We have selected our egg donor, we now need to wait for the egg donor’s medical tests. They will test if the egg donor has enough eggs with sufficient quality for potential success.

If the egg donor is tested positive, her eggs are retrieved.  Then our frozen sperm gets merged with the eggs and eventually they evolve to embryo’s which can be placed in a surrogate, when a surogate is available, these embryos are frozen (they stay good for 1000 years!). This is all very bluntly, as soon as it is so far I will go into more details here.

Hopefully there is a lot of news to be told after our Toronto trip. Through our Instagram account @gaybiesnl I will share as much as possible of our trip with you!