Our "Passage to India" ...

After several discussions with the clinic in Mumbai, we felt it best that we needed to travel to India to view the facilities first hand. A friend of ous had agreed to be the egg donor, and her half-Pakistani parentage would have fit right in with our desire for a Hispanic/Mediterranen donor.

We were arranging a trip overseas anway, as we had planned to celebrate Trevor's 40th birthday with a group of friends in Bali, so we added a trip to Mumbai before we went to England and onto Bali.

Okay ... first lesson learnt ... make sure you have a visa!!!!! We were two-thirds of our way to India, when we realised that our travel agent had not organised a visa, and Qantas in Sydney had let us on the plane without one!

So ... after a 13-hour flight from Sydney to Mumbai, the immigration desk wanted us to get straight back on the plane back to Sydney! Luckily, the pilot said the plane was full and he was about to take off ... so the lovely Qantas staff in Mumbai argued that we should be allowed to continue onto our next stop ... London!

Fate steps in when she has to. It was fortuitous that we missed our step in India, and had to move onto London, as Trevor got to spend two more weeks with his grandmother, who unfortunately passed away not long afterwards.

Luckily we were able to rearrange our flights so that we could go back to Mumbai, before we travelled onto Bali to celebrate Trevor's 40th birthday.

We arranged an appointment at the clinic, and got to meet the senior staff and check out the facilities. We made our bookings, paid our deposits ... and arrange for me to return approx. six weeks later to meet our egg donor. As I would be leaving fresh samples when I returned to Mumbai, Trevor also had to leave a "small desposit" of his own!

It was while shopping at a local market not long after our first appointment, that we got the news that Trevor's grandmother had passed away ... talk about a day of mixed emotions! The fact that she passed while we were starting our own "circle of life" certainly did not go unnoticed!

As we did not have as much time in India as we originally intended, we had to leave a couple of days later to continue onto Bali.