After years of failed IVF cycles and heartbreaking miscarriages, Lisa and her husband made the difficult decision to pursue donor egg IVF. In this story, she shares what the process was really like, from finding a donor to navigating the emotional complexity of donor conception.
In this article:
- Meet Lisa & Frankie
- The Gut Feeling She Couldn't Ignore
- A Long & Winding Road
- Navigating the Cycle of Hope & Grief
- The Practical Side of Donor Egg IVF
- Affording Donor Egg IVF
- A Life-Changing Decision
- The Kind of Loss No One Talks About
- Finding the Right Donor Match
- A Little Miracle, Years in the Making
- Forging Your Own Path to Parenthood
Born in the Bronx to Italian immigrant parents, Lisa and her family moved from New York to Italy during her middle school and high school years. She decided to return to NYC to attend college – which is where she connected with Frankie, the man she'd eventually marry.
"I met my husband senior year of college and we've been together for over 14 years," Lisa shares. "We have supported each other through so many stages of life, including various career changes and going back to school."
The couple have built a full, adventurous life together: taking snowboarding trips to Jackson Hole and carving out a community of fellow paddlers along the Hudson River in Dutchess County. They've kayaked to NYC, Rhode Island, Cape Cod, and the Jersey shore together.
They are, by nature, people who figure things out as they go.
But finding their path to parenthood would require four long years of persistence, heartbreak, and an unexpected willingness to let go of the plan they'd imagined.
Lisa first reached out to Illume Fertility in September 2021, following a recommendation from her OB-GYN. She was only 32, and her monthly cycles had stopped unexpectedly.
"This likely isn't typical of a fertility clinic patient, but I didn't even know if I wanted children at the time, so we'd never tried to conceive," Lisa shares. "I had been thinking about freezing my eggs just in case [we wanted children in the future], and in hindsight, I feel like that was my gut telling me something was wrong with my ovarian reserve."
After undergoing diagnostic testing at Illume, Lisa was diagnosed with Premature Ovarian Insufficiency (POI), a condition in which the ovaries stop functioning normally before age 40, often resulting in irregular or absent periods and a significantly reduced egg supply.
It explained her sudden cycle changes, and it reframed everything.
In October 2021, Lisa and Frankie were living in Harrison, NY and ready to take the next step. They met with Dr. Alexander Kucherov at Illume's Harrison office to discuss their options.
Together, they formed a plan: attempt in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preserve as many viable embryos as possible. What happened next was much more complicated.
Dr. Kucherov was able to restart Lisa's cycles with the help of medication, but she didn't respond to the IVF stimulation drugs in the way they had hoped. The goal of these medications is to coax the ovaries to develop multiple eggs at once. For Lisa, that response simply wasn't there, even after multiple IVF cycles and several different medication protocols.
"We must have tried 4 or 5 times, which meant hundreds of needles," she says. "But we were unsuccessful with every attempt - it was such a frustrating and heartbreaking experience."
Then came the heartbreaking losses. Lisa and her husband conceived naturally in 2022, but ultimately miscarried between weeks 7 and 8 of pregnancy.
They decided to try intrauterine insemination (IUI), a procedure where sperm is placed directly into the uterus to increase the chances of fertilization. After multiple attempts, the couple achieved two more pregnancies in 2023 and 2024 - both of which ended in loss.
Three miscarriages. Many years of trying. A diagnosis that made every protocol a long shot. Lisa and Frankie knew it was finally time to explore other options. With Dr. Kucherov's support, the couple began to consider IVF with donor eggs.
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Donor egg IVF success rates are consistently higher than IVF with a patient's own eggs in cases of diminished ovarian reserve, because embryo quality is largely determined by egg quality.
Unlike traditional IVF, where outcomes shift significantly with age, donor egg success rates hold steady at around 45 to 55 percent per transfer across all recipient ages, according to CDC and SART national data. That consistency reflects a core truth about donor egg IVF: it is the donor's egg quality, not the recipient's age or reserve, that drives pregnancy outcomes.
For Lisa, who was younger than many patients who pursue this path, the obstacle wasn't age; it was what her body was no longer reliably producing.
The costs associated with donor egg IVF can be significant. Each cycle typically ranges from $25,000 to $50,000 or more depending on whether eggs are fresh or frozen and whether an agency is involved.
While most insurance plans don't cover donor egg costs specifically, some components may qualify under infertility benefits, including the recipient's monitoring and transfer cycle and, in some cases, medications.
Employers offering fertility benefits through platforms like Progyny or WINFertility sometimes include donor egg cycles, and organizations like the Nest Egg Foundation offer donor egg IVF grants to help offset costs.
Credit: Beautifully Captivated Photography
Making the decision to pursue donor eggs is often the result of a long and difficult journey. But while it may feel like the end of one road, it can open the door to a genuinely promising path forward.
Finding the right donor involves navigating matching programs or egg banks, reviewing detailed profiles, completing psychological screenings, and making deeply personal decisions about genetics, physical characteristics, and values. It is rarely a quick or simple process, and having a knowledgeable team in your corner can make an enormous difference.
That is exactly where Lisa and Frankie found themselves.
"We ultimately made the decision to seek an egg donor because nothing was working, no matter how hard I tried, and my reserve was dwindling," she recalls. It was a choice that offered real hope, but also required them to grieve one vision of parenthood while opening themselves to another.
For many intended parents, moving to donor egg IVF involves a deep sense of loss that doesn't always get discussed openly in fertility spaces.
There can be grief for the genetic connection that won't exist, for the version of the family-building journey you had pictured, and for the pregnancies already lost along the way. It can feel like giving up something monumental, even when it's ultimately the best path forward.
"This process was even more difficult because I had to come to terms with the fact that none of the donors really looked like me," Lisa says. "It meant I had to accept that my child would likely not look like me." That realization, as hard as it was, became a turning point.
Perspectives on Donor Conception
Lisa recommends exploring the DCP (donor-conceived person) and RP (recipient parent) communities on Reddit as a way to better understand the full range of perspectives that come with this path. Hearing the lived experiences of others, even the complicated ones, is a vital part of the process.
Lisa searched Illume's in-house egg donor pool and reviewed hundreds of profiles across multiple egg donor agency sites. The sheer volume of profiles, each one representing a real person, a real choice, made the process feel both overwhelming and oddly intimate.
She spent hours reading responses, trying to understand not just who these donors were on paper, but who they might be as people. Over time, something shifted in how she was approaching the search for a donor: she stopped focusing on physical resemblance and started looking for something harder to quantify.
"This realization helped me focus less on looking for similar features, and more on personality and whether I thought my donor was a good person based on her responses," she says. "This was important to me because we would be forever linked to the donor via our child."
Ultimately, Lisa and Frankie found a donor that felt like the right fit, and the couple began their first donor egg IVF cycle. Thankfully, this cycle resulted in multiple viable embryos, and they decided to proceed with a fresh donor egg embryo transfer.
After all the failed cycles, losses, and heartbreak, the couple were elated to learn that their first transfer was a success. "Since we hadn't genetically tested this embryo, the baby's sex was a complete surprise to us, which was also exciting!" Lisa shares.
Donor conception creates a bond that doesn't end when the baby is born; intended parents, donors, and donor-conceived children are forever intertwined in ways that evolve over time.
Illume's experienced mental health professionals and genetic counselors support families in thinking through these long-term considerations as part of the donor conception process, from the initial matching stage through the complex questions that arise as a child grows.
Credit: Beautifully Captivated Photography
On September 15, 2025, almost exactly four years after Lisa first contacted Illume Fertility, she and her husband welcomed their son, Frankie.
Frankie is, by his mom's account, exactly who she and her husband had dreamed of: already funny at six months old, perpetually happy, and absolutely adored. "He really is the best little boy we could have ever hoped for," Lisa says. "We have so much love for him now that he's here - just being together as a family brings us joy."
The couple is looking forward to getting back out on the water this summer, this time with their little one in tow, as they soak up each new milestone as a family of three.
And while needing a donor certainly wasn't something she expected, Lisa and her husband are eternally grateful for the very special person who helped them become parents. "I hope to be able to thank her in person one day for the gift she gave us," she says.
"The path we took led us to our little boy, and we could never imagine a world without him now that he’s here," Lisa says. "He completes our little family and we love him more than we could possibly ever describe."
Through the hardest stretches of her journey – the failed cycles, the miscarriages, the protocol pivots, and decision to utilize donor eggs, Lisa stayed grounded the best way she knew how: getting outside and moving.
"Paddling, swimming, hiking, snowboarding, and yoga helped me a ton," she says. "I did internalize my experience a lot, simply because that's how I cope and deal with challenges, but getting outside and doing what I love really helped."
"If you're going through fertility struggles right now, know that you are not alone and that everyone has different challenges they are dealing with," she says. "Trust your doctors and nurses, and know that Illume can and will ultimately help you build your family."
Lisa emphasizes her gratitude for the many Illume team members that helped her and her husband throughout their family-building journey: "It really does take an entire village!"
Lisa and Frankie's story is a reminder that the road to parenthood rarely looks the way you expect it to – and that the path you didn't plan for can still lead somewhere beautiful. Whether you're just beginning to ask questions, processing a difficult diagnosis, or considering donor conception as your next step, you don't have to figure any of this out alone.
Illume's Third Party Reproduction team provides guidance for intended parents through every step of the donor conception process, from donor matching and genetic counseling to legal, psychological, and financial support.
Every path to parenthood is different. We're here to help you find yours.