Bun Without an Oven

“I’m afraid I don’t have good news”

It’s November 17th, my 32nd birthday and I’m in the Canary Islands with my parents and husband to celebrate. 

110 days have passed since our agency reached out about our potential carrier #3. The past weeks have been really frustrating to say the least. With our carrier being in California and having Kaiser insurance, it’s taking much longer than expected for her to get a doctors appointment to have her A1C tested. 

Around October 16th, she had finally had her A1C tested with her doctor, and her STD panel done at planned parenthood (to speed up the process). Weeks passed by and we still hadn’t heard anything about the results. Our agency kept reiterating “it can take up to 30 days for the doctor to release the results in an electronic form that can be sent to our clinic in Omaha.” Crazy, but fair enough. A month passes, and we still have no updates, with frustrating explanations like these from our agency: 

On Fri 18. Oct 2024 at 18:30, our agency wrote:

Hi Kate and Jan,

Happy Friday! Just a quick note that your candidate did have her appointment that we were waiting on. As soon as we can get the results and records of that appointment, we will submit them to the clinic for their review and, hopefully, final pre-approval. I will keep you posted and let you know as soon as we have more information.

Thank you and have a great weekend!

On Wed 30. Oct 2024 at 20:37, our agency wrote:

Hi Kate,

Thank you for your patience, I wanted to get the most up to date information for you before I responded!

As of right now we are still working with the candidate to get the results of her appointment. Sometimes the record process here can be difficult, but the candidate is working with us to try to get them available electronically so we can send them to the clinic ASAP. As soon as we have them in hand, we will send them over and let you know the clinic has received them!

    Respectfully,

On Wed 30. Oct 2024 at 21:33, our agency wrote:

Hi!

The doctor’s office has the results, we are just working on obtaining a copy of them. It’s difficult to get access to your medical records in some cases, and the office legally has 30 days to release them once they’ve been requested. We are hoping to get access to them much quicker through an online portal. That is what we are working on with the candidate right now!

    Respectfully,

Since the last mail from our agency, it was turning to mid-November with still no news. We scheduled a call with our case worker to finally get some answers, which we did November 18th. 

We waited all day for the appointment, but I had this feeling in my gut- this was not going to go in our favor. 

Our case worker joined us on the Teams call with “I’m afraid I don’t have good news.” Turns out, our OB’s concern about this candidate’s blood sugar being too high was spot on. The results of the test led our carrier’s OB to advise the carrier against electing to be a surrogate. So she took time to consider and ultimately backed out of the journey. That explains why it took so long before we heard anything. 

So. Heartbreak and disappointment again. Back to square one. Sitting there listening to our case manager explain what we hear over and over again. “It’s just a set back, we have new surrogates applying all the time, you’re the top of the list, it’s so unusual because your preferences are super open and flexible, just a bit of bad luck, blah blah blah”, as if we aren’t hearing this for the third time already. 

I’m pissed listening to this bullshit again. At what point will the agency owner reach out to us with a solution? I want to know what their plan is to make this happen for us, to which the response is the same, get back in line and see what comes. That’s just not good enough anymore. 

When we spoke to the owner of CFC during our initial meetings before signing up with the agency, she said that the potential match who is presented is almost always the one that couples move forward with. That it’s suuuuuper rare to have to be re-matched. They pride themselves on their initial potential match being THE match. Now, the rhetoric has changed considerably. “It can happen, it’s not abnormal for there to be 3-4 potential matches before we find the right one” – when I point out this serious flaw in expectation management to our case manager, she just tries to gaslight me in to explaining, “oh, I’m sorry that’s what you expected, I don’t think our owner meant that, you must have misunderstood.” Oh really? You’re dashing our hopes for the 3rd time, again failing to deliver on what we are paying you to do, and WE are the ones with wrong expectations? With each disappointment, my confidence with this agency is decreasing and decreasing. 

So. Where do we go from here. For now, we just need to keep our heads straight and make smart, informed decisions, rather than emotional, desperate ones. The rest of this holiday will be great time to heal and take time to really think about what we do next. And the waiting game continues…happy birthday to me.