Hi Weestar
I think it's fantastic that you are thinking of doing this. There is such a shortage of eggs for women who are unable to produce their own in this country.
To donate eggs, you have to go through the first stages of IVF.
1. Downregging i.e. supressing your natural cycle. There's a few ways of doing this such as sniffing something every day. I chose a one-off injection that I administered myself into my tummy. I think that phase lasted about 3/4 weeks. I was off sick the first day of the injection because it made me feel sick, but that could have been all the excitement and anxiety that went with actually starting IVF.
Some women get menopausal symptoms during downregging such as hot flushes, night sweats and mood swings. I wasn't too bad - a few hot flushes and a couple of night sweats but nothing horrendous.
You go for an internal scan - a bit like a wand where the sun doesn't shine and no hassle at all - to check all is ready for the next step.
2. Stimming i.e. encouraging your body to produce extra eggs. This is a daily injection into your tummy which again you self-administer. The injections aren't painful. The only side effects I had were that my tummy swelled up a bit as my ovaries swelled and it became too tender to lie on my tummy. This bit only lasts a couple of weeks.
Again you have internal scans to check on your ovaries and see how many eggs you are producing. They like to get around 10 ideally.
3. Final injection. You give yourself your final injection of HCG (pregnancy hormone) into your tummy to get yourself ready for egg collection. The timing of this one is critical and it can be late at night depending on when you are booked in. You also have some sedation to help you sleep and a pessary pain killer in the morning of the egg collection.
4. Egg collection. On egg collection day you go into hospital and they either sedate you or in some places give you a general. I had sedation and OH was able to come in with me to give me support. I'd also done some self-hypnosis and took a CD with me so that I could hypnotise myself into happy thoughts!
Egg collection usually takes around half an hour and they use a long thin needle which they put up you and through the wall of your vagina into your ovaries to draw off the eggs. They do each one separately and they are handed to an embryologist who checks it under a microscope to see if it is viable. If you are sedated, you'll hear them shouting back to the specialist a tally of how many eggs you are at.
The collection itself was fine, I felt the last couple being taken, but I did produce 22 eggs!
Afterwards you are taken to rest for a little while before you are sent home. With IVF you carry on with progesterone injections. In your case you won't. As I'd produced so many eggs, I had to have additional daily injections (tummy again) to stop me developing OHSS for about 4 weeks.
For a couple of days afterwards I felt pretty rough. A cross between being kicked in the stomach and having cystitis. Although, I think that was because of the number of eggs I'd produced. Most women seem to feel fine afterwards but want to take it easy for a day or two. I took some pain killers on the first day, but didn't take any more after that as I was paranoid about anything like that being in my blood stream when the embryos were put back in. You wouldn't have that problem. I had the eggs collected on the Tuesday and took the rest of the week off. I think I felt ok by the weekend.
I hope this helps and doesn't put you off, but it's important to be realistic about what's involved.
H
xx
but was to chicken to look into it more then got pregnant and it sorta went out my head 
when i sign in it tells me iv enterd an incorrect user name or password and i havent got any sort of confirmation email or anything 
