Starting your journey as a Surrogate is very exciting, and things start off very quickly. What you might not have anticipated is the waiting time at each stage of the process. We are here to let you know that it is completely normal to feel anxious occasionally, but your time will come, so just be patient.
Requirements
Beginning your journey with meeting the requirements, you go through an application process by answering a series of questions to make sure you qualify for this exciting experience. If you qualify, a member of our team will contact you to give you more information, answer your questions, and schedule you for a series of phone interviews to review your application in detail.
Medical History
You will be asked to get all your medical records for all your pregnancies, including prenatal and post-partum care from your OB/GYN and labor and delivery records from the hospital. Getting all your medical records can take some time and we ask for your collaboration. It can sometimes take up to a month or more depending on several factors, for example length of last pregnancy, records being archived, etc. Once received, your records will be reviewed by our in-house nurse to make sure that you have had a healthy pregnancy history. Medical records will be provided to the IVF clinic prior to your being matched with Intended Parents.
Profile
Once your records have been received, reviewed, and approved, the recruitment team will prepare your profile with the information that they have gathered from you. We will be asking you for pictures and ask that you consider the quality of the pictures that you are providing for your profile. These tend to make a big difference in your waiting time getting matched. You can ask your recruiting coordinator to view your profile at any time to see if you need to make any modifications.
Now your profile is ready to be presented to Intended Parents and to get you matched. So exciting! Matching time varies for everyone from a few days, weeks, or months. We tend to get the good kind of nervousness waiting because of our excitement, but we forget that things take time; so please be patient.
In the meantime, the best thing to do is to keep yourself busy. Go ahead and pamper yourself. Go and get that manicure and pedicure done; feel refreshed. Go get your hair done and feel as pretty as can be.
You can get things in order before you continue with the process. You can get your family ready for it. You can explain it to your kids if they are at a young age if you would like to. You can be a spokesperson by letting people know about surrogacy. This is a subject that not a lot of people know about, and as you go through this amazing experience you can share it with the people around you. You can join the Omega Surrogate Stories group on Facebook, where you can share your journey and follow fellow Surrogates along on their journey as well.
Remember, you are doing this for another family, and bringing a life into this world is not an easy thing to do. And because of that you can rest assured you have all of our support whenever you may need it.
