‘Was it supposed to feel like that?’: My experience donating my egg in Nigeria

This piece is the second in a two part series on egg donation in Nigeria. To read the first part in this series, click here. 

After my first visit to the hospital, I went back on Wednesday, November 25, 2020. This was after a back-and-forth with my agent. One of the things that annoyed me about the process was that they rarely gave more than 24-hour notice before you were expected to show up at the clinic . It was inconsiderate. Did the staff of the hospital seem to think that the donors didn’t have jobs? Or lives? You were told to show up the next day and if you didn’t your spot was given to someone else. Most of the hospital visits were on weekdays and some days we waited hours to be attended to. It was insane. I had to cancel when I was told to go to the hospital on November 24 because it was a busy day for me. I couldn’t possibly leave my job and spend all day at the hospital. They insisted I had to come the next day or lose my spot. Luckily I had very little to do that day so I went. 

At the hospital, they saw me for 15 minutes, asked me about my cycle and gave me Levofem (the birth control I was taking before I decided to be a donor, which the head nurse had berated me for taking). They opened a file in my name with the forms I had previously filled, gave me a card with a number and for the rest of the process I was referred to as that number, never by my name. I was 2643. I was supposed to take the pills for 21 days and return to the hospital on the last day. I set a reminder and took the first pill in the hospital. Day one was gone. I had begun the countdown. 

Taking the pills was easy. The pills were small and yellow, easy to dry swallow and my body had no immediate reactions. I knew the drill: take them once every day, preferably at the same time for best results. By December 15, I was done. I went back to the hospital. This time I met the doctor in charge. I had only dealt with nurses before and this was my second interview. 

I waited a bit before I could see him. I was annoyed because the cubicle where we — the egg donors — stayed was hot and stuffy. Some of the girls had been interviewed the day before and didn’t know what to expect. Others were waiting for varying things like scans, their pills or a blood test. As we sat in the sweltering heat, we talked about everything but the egg donation process. We talked about how badly people reacted to the news that women were donating their eggs; some of the girls had to hide their participation from their parents or their partners while some had partners who actively encouraged them to do it for the money. For girls like us who were just starting the process, we had no idea exactly what the process entailed. Finally, one of them broached the topic. She was light-skinned and beautiful with a full figure. She announced to us that she had just started her period and intended to skip the pill phase and go straight to the next thing, which was injections. 

“I’m going to use the money to get a passport. I know it’s going to finish after but I don’t care, I’ll get a passport and go abroad like my brother,” she said. “My mother doesn’t know I’m doing this sef. I’ll have to hide the drugs so she doesn’t find out; if she does she won’t like it and she’ll try to take the money.” She had an accent that made me put her state of origin as Anambra in southeastern Nigeria. When the girls teased her about it, she grinned and proudly announced her village. My assumption was correct. 

But our moods dampened as soon as she got quiet. One of the girls voiced the thing that was on our minds. 

“If you’re going to do anything in this life, you have to zero your mind say you go do am. Everything is hard so if you say you no wan do am because e hard na your own be that. This thing, we go carry mind do am.” The girl spoke with such conviction that others around her nodded in agreement. 

Shortly after, I was called in to see the doctor. We had a brief conversation where he covered what I had written in my form. He asked for my name and age and then other questions to do with my degree, last period, the regularity of my cycle, if I had ever donated my eggs before and my relationship status. He then sent me to the office to get my injections. The nurse gave me a vial of Buserelin injection. When I asked what it did, she said it stopped my body from producing eggs to get my ovaries ready for stimulation. She showed me how to inject it. I was given those smaller insulin needles and told to measure 50 ML of Buserelin . After I did, she told me to inject myself in my lower abdomen. Anywhere on the lower abdomen was fine but I had to avoid my navel. My hands shook as I held the needle. I didn’t have a phobia for needles but I don’t find the experience of getting injected or having blood drawn pleasant either. I gritted my teeth, slanted the needle and tried to inject myself. 

“No! Never slant the needle, stick it in straight,” she cautioned. I nodded and injected myself with the needle straight. I felt the needle go in and I felt the drug sliding in after I pushed on the stopper of the syringe. I braved  the pain. I sighed in relief after I was done. I cleaned the injection site and threw away the used needle. In the following days, the first thing I did after I woke up was take my injection. I didn’t want to  take it lightly or else I might chicken out. After  the first five doses, I went back to the hospital for a refill; I took the dosages from December 15 to December 24. My breasts became tender and sensitive and I began  to feel tired. My lower abdomen was sore but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t power through. On December 24, I went back to the clinic. That day,  I got there late because as usual, they didn’t inform me on time that I would be needed on a public holiday. 

I was given another round of Buserelin injections with Follitrope added to the dosage. Follitrope had two vials – one was fluid while the other was powder. I was told by a different nurse to mix the two every day into one injection. That means I was injecting myself with two separate drugs per day. My body started feeling the effects. My breasts were swollen and sore to the point that I could not wear a bra. I was lethargic, light-headed and hungry all the time. I had moments of nausea. One of the girls had said the symptoms resembled the early stages of pregnancy. That same day, I did my first scan to check how the egg production was going. It was my first ever trans-vaginal scan and it was horrible. 

I lay on the hospital bed while a nurse and a female doctor yelled instructions at me. The doctor was not patient. She slid the ultrasound wand at the tip of a gold circle condom and slowly rolled the condom onto this long penile shaped thing. It was cold, long and she manipulated it against my cervix and pressed it there. I made a sound before I could help it but she merely dismissed my discomfort with a sneer and shoved the instrument more against my cervix. My legs instinctively close when I think about that incident.  I took more injections- enough for another week and went home. After about a week of taking foliotrope, I had another scan to check how my body was responding to the hormones. The doctor counted about 12 or more eggs and was ecstatic they were big ones. 

I celebrated the holiday by injecting myself twice a day. The countless hormones in my system made me feel miserable and I could pinpoint exactly where my ovaries were just by how sensitive they felt. I went back on January 2, after my Follitrope and Buserelin had finished and did a final scan. Afterwards, I was ready for the final stage before extraction. 

I was given a final medication of a human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) injection on January 2 with explicit instructions to keep the drug refrigerated and taken at exactly 10:30 pm. As the nurse gave me and the other girls instructions, a woman in the next room started weeping.  

“I can’t believe it.” She screamed those words over and over like a mantra while the other women murmured, “Madam it’s okay.” 

She sounded so heartbroken I thought her treatment failed and she hadn’t conceived or something equally devastating. I felt it as if her wails were echoing somewhere in my chest. I had always wondered whether or not I wanted children but it hit me at that moment. I had never considered the choice of motherhood being anything but my own. I had never been told I might not have a choice in the matter, that my body might be incapable of it or that I might want it and never have it. What did that feel like? Especially for a lot of women who hinged their sense of self on the ability to procreate? Until that point, the other girls and I had been separated from the women who wanted to use the eggs; they had seemed like rich faceless people whom we knew would someday carry offspring from our eggs. But what were their struggles? What led them to the clinic? How long had they searched for children? How heartbreaking would it  be if your last hope was dashed after years of searching? All the answers were in that woman’s cries. 

The woman made her way into the room we were in, still crying. She hugged the nurse and I realized the nurses behind her were smiling. I had been mistaken. She wasn’t crying in sadness or pain but from the sheer relief that she was finally pregnant. The nurses ushered us out to our hot cubicle to wait while they attended and fussed over her. It was satisfying to watch. Perhaps I can make somebody’s lifelong dream come true, I thought to myself. 

I got home and set an alarm for 10:30 pm. At the appropriate time, I took the hCG injection but made an error. The drug had two vials. One of the vials was cone-shaped and contained  liquid. I had failed to get out all the liquid into the syringe because my room was dark. I entered a state of mild panic. Was my error going to affect the outcome? I was scheduled to go to the hospital on the evening of the following day. I packed my bags and went to sleep. 

When I awoke the next day, I was overcome with nervousness. I didn’t know how exactly my eggs were going to be extracted, only that I’d be given anesthesia during the procedure. I knew they were going to go through my cervix and it was going to take anywhere from 15 minutes to one hour. As evening approached, I wondered what could go wrong. My imagination gave me the answers in different gruesome versions. There were stories of women’s wombs “bringing out water”, immense pain after the procedure and inability to give birth afterwards. What if something went horribly wrong in the procedure? It didn’t help that I was going through the extraction as the second for the scheduled three happening the next day. 

By 9pm, I was at the hospital, already in bed and distracting myself with some work on my laptop. The first girl to go in before me the next day was nervous, she was fidgety, telling me all about the ways it could go wrong. Her fear was infectious. She eventually settled down. They lay around me in their beds as it got later. Afterwards, I curled up on the crinkly mattress and tried to sleep but I couldn’t. The night was cold and I was thirsty. We had been told not to take any food or drinks after 10 pm. A nurse came into the ward and told us she would give us drugs so we stayed awake, waiting. She didn’t come back and eventually, I fell into a dreamless slumber by 1 am. 

Before I fell asleep, I had set my alarm for 5:30 am because we were told to shower and be ready before 6 am. I woke up shortly before my alarm rang. My body was tired but my mind was racing a mile a minute. I showered with the cold water provided and woke up my roommates who had failed to set alarms to do the same. By 6:30 am, the nurse from the previous night visited us. She brought cannulas to insert in our arms for the anesthesia and other drugs we might need. I had seen cannulas before but I had never needed to be put on a drip so I didn’t know what to expect except more pain. I watched the first girl – there were only three of us in the room – flinch as the needle was inserted into her arm. Soon it was my turn. I went  and sat next to the nurse. 

“Hold out your left hand,” she ordered. I did. She slapped my hand a few times, inserted the needle and hissed – something was wrong. She had missed the vein. She ripped out the needle and patted my hand with a cotton ball soaked with methylated spirit. I drew a sharp breath at the pain I felt. She slapped my left hand some more, gave up and moved to my right hand. This time the needle slid home into a vein but the pain was worse. Immediately, my arm grew heavy, as if I was carrying a small bucket of  water. My elbow hurt too. 

“Was it supposed to feel like that?” I asked, but she didn’t deign to answer. Instead, she fitted the third girl, gave us post-procedure drugs and told us how to take the pills without actually telling us what they did. I deduced from a quick Google search that it was a combination of some antibiotics for a possible yeast infection; they were after all going in through the vagina and vaginas are primadonnas when it came to reacting to foreign bodies. Amongst the drugs were Panadol tablets and white vitamin C tablets.  The nurse told us to wait for the extraction. Nobody spoke; instead, we went back to sleep. 

We were woken up when one of the nurses came and yelled, “10:00 pm! Go and use the restroom and prepare yourself.” She turned and left. 

10:00 pm was a girl named Goodness (not her real name) who lived with her boyfriend. She had brought Golden Morn as an after-surgery meal. She caught my gaze and I saw fear and worry in her eyes. 

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “They said the procedure doesn’t take very long so you won’t waste any time.” She nodded and went to pee. While the air conditioner hummed, I stared at the walls that were painted a color that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be yellow, brown or cream. After the nurses  came to escort Goodness out, the two of us in the room couldn’t go back to sleep. We could only stare at each other or the TV on the wall showing some grainy old action flick. 

When Goodness returned, she was in a wheelchair and passed out. The nurses heaved her up and set her in her bed. I saw a pad on the  seat of the wheelchair stained with brown blood. Goodness was spotting. Her hospital gown had ridden up her thighs and the nurses made feeble  attempts to cover her up. 

“This one is very stubborn,” one of the nurses said. “She gave us trouble. Can you imagine she ran away and started screaming?” The nurses hissed. I felt sorry for Goodness. She was just scared; wasn’t it obvious? 

“10:30 pm, go and ease yourself and get ready,” one of the nurses said. I answered to the moniker I was given the day before and did as I was ordered. 

By now, the back of my right hand was swollen and I couldn’t move my elbows or  fold my fingers. The needle hurt. I sat on my bed, texted my partner that I was about to go in, added a joking but not joking “if I die, I love you” and took a deep breath. 

I’m going to be fine. I repeated the mantra until I walked into the theatre. It was the male doctor who did my second scan that was going to do the extraction. He encouraged me with a smile as I scooted up onto the gynecologist chair. I wondered why the equipment of gynecologists had to look like medieval devices of torture. As I lay back, I put my feet in the stirrups and the doctor did a scan to make sure the eggs were where they were supposed to be. He stood up and gave me an injection through my cannula. I tasted it in the back of my throat. 

“This is going to hurt,” he warned as he approached me with another injection. As he pushed the injection into me, it produced a sensation that burned through my hand and up to my shoulders. Later, the pain turned into lethargy and I hung between wakefulness and sleep. In a drug-induced haze, I wondered if this was the twilight zone. I heard conversations floating over my head. Somebody was saying something about her marriage and about how her husband treated her well. Then the ceiling began to move. It grew and grew until it pressed down against my chest. Then it moved up again. I saw free-floating shapes in the air, cubes that grew in sizes from the ceiling where the tiniest cube lay to the floor where the biggest one stood in descending order. The cubes moved like a tesseract would. My sister had always been obsessed with the fourth dimension and it felt like I was peering into it. I stared at those fascinating shapes until I felt the echo of a sharp pain breaching what I assumed was my cervix. Then everything went black. 

I woke up at about 1 pm, still hazy from the drugs and feeling nauseous. My arm had swollen some more but I didn’t  feel pain. I texted my partner to let him know I was done with the extraction and that I was fine. Then I fell asleep. I woke up again by 3 pm. This time, I was lucid. My vagina felt sore but it was nothing compared to the pain in my right arm. I couldn’t even lift it without a lot of effort. The girls around me were up, the nurses were there. I checked my bed; I wasn’t bleeding or spotting. My vagina felt fine and I was hungry. But I felt a little woozy as I struggled to sit up, using my left arm for support. Another nurse came in to take our account numbers and I sleepily reeled off mine. 

Goodness was mixing Golden Morn. She mixed up half and passed the remainder to me because I had forgotten to pack food myself. I gladly took it and mixed it up. The first bite was torture. It tasted like sawdust and immediately I felt my gag reflex awaken. I felt I was going to throw up if I took another bite. 

“That’s the anesthesia. It’ll go away once the drugs leave your system,” one of the nurses said. 

I nodded and ate  another spoon of food. The nausea receded. I finished my meal and felt a bit  energized. I texted my partner that I was going to try to get a cab. The girls around me had finished their meals when the nurses came in again. 

“If you’re going to sleep in this hospital, you have to move to the other building so people can use this one,” one of the nurses said. “You can’t stay here, others will soon come. If your stomach starts swelling, come back to the hospital [and] let us check you. Only if it starts swelling and it is strong oh. Some of you will come and waste our time when there’s nothing wrong with you.” 

I didn’t feel strong enough to go back home jumping buses but I didn’t want to stay at the hospital. So I ordered an Uber ride and went downstairs to get my cannula removed with Goodness. She wanted to leave too so I offered her a ride to the nearest bus stop she could use. As the nurse ripped out my cannula, I screamed. The pain lessened a bit but it traveled from my right hand to my right elbow to my right butt cheek. 

I got home in the evening, tired, sore and still groggy from the drugs. I managed to shower, and then I crawled into bed and fell asleep. The next day the pain lessened but my arm was still useless. I lay in bed and took stock of my body. Besides the pain in my arm, the soreness in my vagina had disappeared  but I felt wetness there; that meant I was either spotting or had contracted a yeast infection. I checked and confirmed it was the latter. I sighed, took my antibiotics and other meds and remembered the nurses insisted we stayed hydrated. When I decided to have a meal, there was a tightness in my belly, as if my stomach was straining against muscle. I was uncomfortable and my stomach was bloated. It took a few days of staying hydrated and eating smaller meals before the bloating went away and I became good as new. 

I got paid on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, two days after the procedure. Was it worth it money-wise? I don’t think so. I think many people consider  it an easy way to make money but it isn’t. Your body is put through a rollercoaster with barely any  thought and there is no adequate way to prepare yourself because people react differently to the drugs. But to give women a chance at motherhood, especially women who can’t have children, is worth it. I think of my mother and how she was made to feel inadequate because she didn’t  give birth to boys. How much worse would it have been if she’d been unable to have children at all? 

I also think I was one of the lucky ones because I went through the process and turned out fine. Many  women are not as lucky as I am and end up with complications. A girl told me her stomach had bloated and she had to return  to the clinic in Ikoyi  where she did the extraction. She said she spent more than she’d earned treating herself. But there she was with us, donating again. It was a scary reality that I had to grapple with. 

Since I went through the procedure, I have told only about four other people minus my partner. The last man I told, my boss, stared at me in shock. “But do you know what eggs are? Those are your children!” he said  and I shrugged. 

I think Nigerians attach parenthood to only biology; if you didn’t give birth to children, they aren’t your children. If they didn’t come from your eggs or sperm, they aren’t your real children. No matter how much you love them. It’s why women will only whisper to their friends who are passing through similar things about the possibility of egg donation or in vitro fertilization (IVF). Having children through  other ways than the “normal” way is taboo, even to the most educated individuals. 

It takes more than eggs and sperm to make a child, just the same way it takes more than shared genes to make a parent. If Nigerians accept that, perhaps egg donation would be less of a shameful secret for women or a get-rich-quick  scheme for both the hospitals and the donors. 

I believe egg donation is a gift and an opportunity for those who truly need it. 

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Edited by PK Cross, Uzoma Ihejirika, and Caleb Okereke.