How Do I Sign Alaska Banking Medical History

How do i industry sign banking alaska medical history

welcome to the egg whisperer show a program exclusively designed to promote reproductive health awareness and discuss fertility preservation options here is your host the harvard educated fertility specialist dr amy she's known as the egg whisperer fertility expert dr amy lazadez and you have yet another success story just launched by an east bay fertility doctor [Music] hi everyone welcome to another episode of the egg whisperer show and tonight's episode is titled how to pick the right sperm and who better to have on tonight's show than the general supervisor from the seattle sperm bank angelo allard hi angelo thanks for being here tonight i so appreciate it all right doctor it's real a pleasure to be here we're going to have a blast tonight because what you don't know is i've been basically collecting emailed questions from all over the world for the past week and some of the questions are pretty bizarre i haven't sent any of them to you because i didn't want you to cancel on me last minute so i just want you to be prepared but before i get into the questions i want to know like how did you get into sperm into the sperm business sure so you know coming out of college i got a job doing diabetes research and after doing six seven days a week 12 hour days of research i decided the research life just wasn't for me anymore and uh saw posting for a sperm bank and i thought this is too funny i have got to check this out and applied uh actually when i first came to seattle sperm bank was just a lab tech here and about a year and a half into it they gave me the opportunity to run operations and compliance yeah so i think you have to have a pretty good sense of humor to be in the sperm business and and really have to love what you do yeah i i would say it is you know if not the most important probably right up there on the resume portfolio requirement for being uh working in a sperm bank right and what does it mean to be a general supervisor so can you just describe a day in the life of angelo at seattle sperm bank like talk to me well you know we we interact with over 40 countries all around the world so i'm getting emails uh voice messages offline chat messages all through the night you know i usually leave the office around 4 30 local time but from 4 30 until i get here about 7 a.m every morning it's just a compiling of emails calls voice mails etc that as soon as i sit at my desk in the morning it's correspondence got it and after correspondence when the rest of my staff starts arriving it's uh delegation and duties for the day and then compliance is about 50 of what i do so all tissue banks are governed by the fda here in the u.s and so it's donor eligibility determination and reviewing risk assessment forms and blood test results and i usually end my day with special projects that need to get done as we look to continue to improve our donor program so basically you make sure that you're sending out sparkling sperm to 40 countries sparkling yes sparkling clean i'm the ultimate sparkling swim coach that is awesome but 40 countries like 4-0 yeah over about 44 at last we we just did a an audit of distribution about a month ago and there's 44 countries that we sent our donor specimens to so what what i'm when i hear that what i'm thinking is basically if like one of my families here in san ramon uses one of the vials that potentially there could be a half sibling in another country absolutely and one really cool thing that i love about your bank is how you can connect families of with donor siblings so tell me about that program that you guys have yeah so we started our own in-house sibling registry uh we named it uh ssb connect so seattle sperm bank connects in any time that a recipient anywhere in the world uh reports of birth with us they then have the opportunity to gain access and a login to our in-house sibling registry that would then place them into the donor group that they were a recipient of so if you were uh use donor 99999 then you reported a birth for 999 then you could be in the group for 999. yeah and do these people hang out together share pictures like have there been group meetups tell me more about that yeah actually every year for the past three years we have hosted an annual picnic uh where our owner and a few of our staff here get together and in send invites out to recipients who have used our donor specimens and they come to an annual picnic where they're not just meeting half siblings they're meeting uh other children that have been used by other donors that they themselves didn't use but yeah they use ssb connects in the annual picnic as an opportunity to learn about these things yeah that's really good for families so i'm really glad that you guys do that i mean there's so many reasons why i like sperm bank you know any time or seattle spring break anytime a patient comes to me and they're looking for donor vials i always say well you have to look at seattle sperm bank just because they're so nice and they clearly love what they do and they're really really good at it and i think customer service is so important when you're going through something like a fertility struggle or you're trying to find the right sperm donor when you pick up the phone you want someone on the other end of the line to be really friendly and willing to help you and i just want to say thank you for just being so kind and wonderful to all my patients over all these years how long has seattle's firm bank been around tell me a little bit about the history of the sperm bank yeah so we we opened doors in 2008 um and you know we began collecting donor specimens had to wait you know well into 2009 until we had specimens released from quarantine and ready for dis purchase and distribution and when we first began we most of our distribution was actually international you know the domestic market share was really well captured by other sperm banks in the u.s and so we we use the opportunity to gain some some revenue and some growth by shipping specimens internationally and as we have more resources then we begin investing in to the domestic market share and we're really happy to see now that we have been able to distribute to over 600 clinics here in the us wow that's awesome and most your donors i'm assuming they live in the seattle area well yeah so you know our main location when we opened in 2008 was here in seattle and in late 2015 we have we opened a satellite uh donor collection facility in tempe arizona the only places where the donors are collected at this point are either in seattle while they're in the program or in tempe while they're in the program nice oh i didn't know that and so how do you recruit donors how do you find donors for your sperm bank uh the university ads are the number one so you know advertising on the university newspaper or online periodical or classifieds that that's number one you know about 60 of the population is a student either undergraduate graduate physician etc um and other recruiting efforts are you know paid facebook ads paid google ads the light rail the tram and it must be you know maybe where i'm on facebook that i don't see these ads but what does an ad say i'm just curious like do you love yourself and think you're the awesomest genetic specimen ever and want to donate sperm what do you guys how do you reject the donors spread your genes everywhere around the world like genghis khan yeah no it's um a paid google ad or a paid facebook guy would be something along the lines of uh our mission statement how we want to help families all around the world have happy healthy children and do you want to be a part of it right oh that's so awesome and then how much does a donor get paid typically i mean that's honestly like one of the most common questions that people ask me sure so i mean there's different restrictions based on compensation for all around the world but in typical in the us the donors are going to make around seven dollars to 100 per donation okay and then how often can a guy even come in to donate uh every 48 hours if their quality allows for it you know the the the sperm cells will be ready and provide quality specimens for some guys every 48 hours and for other guys it's every 72 to 96. nice and then what is that quality threshold like what does it take to be a sperm donor from a count standpoint you know the first bottleneck the first filter that the potential donors applicants go through is just initial semen analysis got it how potent is the specimen itself and 90 of the potential donor applicants at that point are screened out it's just only 10 of the guys that even come through the door have enough sperm cells a high enough concentration motility to go through our washing process freezing process thawing process and survive to the point where be ready for distribution nice and then i'm assuming it's not just that it's also they have to go through the psych evaluation they have to do a genetic screen there's more to it yeah so like i said 90 percent of the guys are gone right away so the 10 percent that are left we then begin screening for family medical history psych evaluation genetic testing physical exam infectious disease screening they meet with a master's in social work and get counseled so that they fully understand the implications of being a donor and what it means that you could be contacted 18 years later i mean the amount of screening these guys go through i wouldn't put myself through it but it just it's a lot and you guys have a pretty good relationship with your donors so if people have questions for them down the road like i just sent you a question the other day you actually said to me you know let me ask him and i'll get back to you so i think that's really a special connection if you treat people well you know your donors they're going to be willing to still be contacted and and if you ever have questions you can reach out to them well and to us the donors are as important or if not more important than our clients because our donors just aren't the product they are they're the lifeline they're the heart of this business right so i just want to go to my questions now and i want to start off with a question about what i'll call the uh sperm alphabet soup you know you hear all these names thrown out i ui art ici washed unwashed i mean can can you break that down for me what does that all mean yeah so you know our nomenclature that we've chosen to use like for iui ici art etc we the nomenclature we've chosen to use for the iui for example is that it's a wash specimen it's ready for inner uterine insemination right turkey based are people for those of you don't know okay yeah so we we we've chosen to use that nomenclature because clinics all around that that's known to they use so when they tell their their patients to say you're going to have an iui treatment go get an iui vial if they say we'll get a wash file we end up we find that there's a lot more questions what does wash mean right always happy to answer those questions who doesn't want to wash sperm i mean no one would be like please give me the dirty stuff i mean come on right so you're absolutely and so art you know art means assisted reproductive technologies and what we're saying there is that this is still a wash specimen but the cell count in this specimen is a little bit lower than the standard or what would be considered industry standard at 10 million per milliliter or 20 million per milliliter and in that case we're saying there's less concentration here you could use this for treatments like ivf or ixy right and so what i've done before if let's say someone really likes a donor and let's say they only have art vials you can actually combine them together to do one iui potential even yep pellet them out and pre-suspend them and there you go right exactly so the other question that i have is you mentioned wash versus unwashed can someone get any of these vials for home use absolutely yeah and the only thing that we require for home use if we're going to be delivering directly to your home and not to a clinic address is required that a physician or licensed medical practitioner sign off on a release form to allow you to accept the to receive the specimens to your home address got it so a licensed medical practitioner could be a nurse midwife a nurse practitioner a pa your ob gyn your primary care doctor just basically anyone who's saying yes you're medically you know cleared to do this at home absolutely because with any pregnancy even with the amount of screening that we do with any pregnancy there's risk right and so when they do it at home do you provide them a special kit in case they want to get higher up like beyond the vagina or is that something and i just said vagina and does that make you uncomfortable because i know you're so used to sperm and penis talk no it's okay you're not blushing quite yet but you'll get back to me i'm sure there's more questions that might make me bless you oh there are you just uh so no we do not provide a catheter or speculum uh for for for anything past the cervix we do provide a needleless syringe for cervical insemination got it so you just leave that up to the medical professional makes total sense and if someone does use it at home what what is the best vial for them to use you know our statistics show that there's really almost no difference in using a washer unwashed specimen for at-home insemination uh i mean it's it's slightly and what i mean slightly is less than half percent towards unwashed but what we see is that at-home inseminations have a very similar success rate to just uh traditional intercourse okay it's about one in five one and six got it yeah that makes sense so that's what i quote my patients as well and so you mentioned something about 10 million 20 million is that close to what your guarantee is and what does that mean when you say a sperm count guarantee well the thing that i always want to tell the clients is you know it only takes one right well i tell them it takes one egg but 40 million sperm but that's okay that's fertility conversation so the industry standard at this point in time all around the world is that the iui specimens should have 10 million modal cells in total and most iui wash specimens are going to have 0.5 milliliters of volume okay that's just what's normal for the catheter yeah it's not it's very little volume so what we then do is we set the concentration to 20 million per milliliter and then us in half a milliliter of volume you get 10 million modal cells that's what we are going to set as our standard our guarantee for our standard iui specimens and then for the unwashed specimen since typically the only other use besides at home insemination for unwashed specimens is for it to be sent to the clinic or to the lab for them to wash it so the standard that then is actually a little bit higher there's going to be at least 15 million modal cells because they're going to try and wash it for other treatment use and you want to make sure there's enough cells there still to use and then what are they washing when you're saying they're washing it i mean i know but i'm just saying for my viewers what are they washing i want you to say it they're washing away seminal fluid they're washing away um if they're using a density gradient you can wash away things like dead cells round cells blood cells um and any other particulates basically they're getting it sparkling clean before it goes into the uterus and there's that sparkling there you go and then the reason why it's 0.5 mils of volume is because the uterus is a muscle and it's just not nice to push a large volume of fluid into someone's uterus because that can really hurt absolutely yeah and then you guys make sure that you use the right cleaning products i mean i know they're not cleaning products i'm just feeding us being a smart alec here um yeah we use the natural organic method cleaner here so yes no but seriously that's a good question i didn't even have it on my list what kind of things do you guys use to clean or wash the sperm what's the media that you use yeah so we use in vitro life uh and but what specifically what it is is that the first step in the process like i said as you get the semen analysis get the counts at the raw specimen right and then at that point you begin adding things to it to uh wash it and to wash it is putting it through a density gradient which pulls just the modal sperm cells through like a matrix of other you know materials then it pellets down at the bottom and after it pellets you can then resuspend in what's called a wash media and then at that point your the wash media's goal is to get rid of all the density gradient media that is still remaining after the that separation and then you dilute it down to the right concentrations and you lost me at matrix but that's okay so tell me about how you freeze it i mean you must have like tanks that are like i don't know taller than i am and i'm pretty tall we have it we have upgraded our storage system over time when i first began here and i was working in the lab the lab had 30 tanks a year later it had 100 tanks i mean it's just you were walking on tanks and they all look like if you've seen the movie alien they look like the little pods that the aliens are in right but um you know yes we have these gigantic freezers that now hold twenty thousand specimens and it's and that's like a full-time job for lots of people to make sure that you know everything's properly stored labeled yeah we have we have three people alone just in cryologistics and distribution wow and then same thing with liquid nitrogen tanks i bet you have a company that drops off liquid nitrogen in a big truck often twice a week six canisters each right and so you know you hear about these awful sadly these awful natural disasters with hurricanes and fires i mean what would happen if there was some sort of natural disaster in seattle to your to what would happen to the sperm bank if something like that happened yeah one of the most brilliant things about uh liquid nitrogen and what we you know the specimens are frozen in for long-term cryo storage is that if there was a major disaster they're fire proof they're waterproof and they will hold that liquid nitrogen for about 18 days 20 days without being at risk oh that's good to know that's really good to know and does the freezing process damage the sperm at all do those things like make could it potentially cause a birth defect or anything like that that you know of no because it what can happen during the freezing process is that little ice spicules would form and they would kill the sperm and if the sperm is killed it can't it can't swim can't it can't fertilize the egg right so only those yeah only those healthy sperm cells that have survived the washing freezing thawing process uh will make it to the egg got it okay so now for some questions that might embarrass you so what happens when a guy checks in like you told me a day in the life of angelo but i want to know a day in not so much the day but what happens at the appointment for one of your donors sure when they get here they're checked in with a fingerprint scanner it identifies them uniquely okay so kind of like myself my cell phone so no one can get into my phone there's a fingerprint thing that's pretty cool right but there's no manual code either unlike your phone it has to be the fingerprint okay uh that fingerprint then brings up their their picture their id their identifying information and from there um is it because someone might fake it that they might think they might say that they're that guy that's actually something that i created about three years ago uh i wanted to have an assurance for our recipients that we take the um chain of custody of the identity of the specimen very seriously so important i mean you hear these crazy stories out there so there's never going to be a crazy story with seattle sperm bank in the news ever that well i sure as hell hope not no uh so yeah they get fingerprint scanned there's double it's a five step double verification process that every time that the specimen changes vessels or changes containers it's double verified by two employees nothing is you can you can't do any manual input of donor id it's all done by barcodes and computers and scanners so i bet you like star wars uh can you see the picture behind me i was wondering that kind of looked like a mess of dead sperm but i didn't want to say anything that was actually gifted to me by a donor who knew that i loved star wars and it's a painting of some of my favorite villains from the star wars universe oh very nice and i noticed that i think we're kind of twinsies here i think you're wearing an egg whisper shirt oh i love it thank you so much for doing that that's super fun okay so then okay so we checked in we're getting past the verification and then what they go to a room so yeah after after they're verified they receive their specimen cup uh then they go to a donor room did they ever come with a friend or their mom seriously yep oh god this is awesome okay keep going so yeah they go into the donor room they provide the specimen and then they walk to the lab and we have a drop-off window at the lab they leave their specimen there and then they're out the door okay you skipped a step what happens in the room the magic the magic do you have materials is it live porn is it recorded porn so it's it's actually we use roku's and it's streaming porn over a roku device okay that's nice no no vr bangers.com or anything like that i've had one pd bring it in and it took him more than a half hour just to figure out how to hook it up to our wi-fi interesting yeah that's really not worth it is there like a help button in the room if the guy's having trouble no the reason why is because for the safety of our front desk staff if they're having issues we would require them to be fully clothed and come out and speak to us that does make sense i want you know these are not questions that i've come up with myself you know these are good i like it they really aren't i swear um let's see here uh have you ever had weird porn requests yes can you share uh let me think of a weird one that i can share okay sure we'll wait as long as we need to you know 18 year olds requesting porn of 70 year olds oh yeah i mean i'm not saying 70 year olds aren't hot jane fonda is hot i'm telling you yes she is hot but wow that's something i need to think about that or maybe i don't want to think about that right just and keep this in mind that's the one that i that i could share i know i don't want to know what you can't share all right let me go back to my questions because that was too that was just awesome okay so let's just talk more about the screening um you mentioned um psych do you ever do a background check of your donors that was a question someone asked me since the beginning of time in 2008 since we opened the doors we've always done criminal background checks and uh we also do school transcript verifications got it love it i love it so if someone said they went to this university you're going to make sure that they're not committing fraud and they actually went there yeah and the big one is when they when they claim to be doctors physicians phds right yeah right because of course people would want to you know pad their cv so that they get picked so they can make 70 to 100 bucks every 48 hours right there you go and then um cmv i mean what the heck is cmv i'm over it i know i'm so over it it's like getting the flu i'm like just don't worry about it but you obviously can't say that because the fda is watching yeah so cytomegalovirus is you know by age 65 80 percent of the population has been exposed to it like chickenpox right you know and and the way that we look at it is but the fda just says you have to have a policy regarding cytomegalovirus now donors can test positive as in they have an active infection they can test positive as in they've been exposed to it or they can test negative as in they've never been exposed to it and what's your process that they test just interrupt you real quick what if they test positive as if they currently have an active infection but they're like an awesome donor no they're deferred until it until it's no longer active how long does it usually take do you find you know some guys it can be a chronic thing and it's actually kind of linked to chronic fatigue syndrome so if they're cons if they're igm antibodies which is indicative of a an active infection if it's chronically active we just have to say sorry you can't be a donor because we can't prove you don't have it oh that makes sense um i'm glad we learned that today i didn't know that yeah so we had a fully uh we have to wait until they're fully serial converted meaning they no longer have the active infection with the igm antibodies and once they have just the igg antibodies so that they don't get the virus or the infection again then they can be actively donating got it and that was that's a pretty i mean sperm donation and sperm banks have been around for a really really long time but the cmv thing is more recent isn't it it is yeah and it's because of the research that's been done and the findings that have been made about you know if you know you you and your partner the sperm donor the egg donor had an active cmd infection and the fetus got that infection that that can be dangerous to the fetus but you know then there was some research that came out in the 90s in the early 2000s about how they thought just being positive for the antibodies against the virus could you know cause an allergic or an immuno reaction because sperm is so rich in leukocytes well the problem is is that with donated sperm that's washed there shouldn't be leukocytes there shouldn't be an abundance of antibodies and if you're doing ivf and you're picking out a single sperm cell and putting in you know single sperm pointing to the egg it's kind of a non-issue yeah okay good so how much does one vial of costs i mean i had a lot of fun joking around about the sperm donors and what they go through and how they can bring their mom to the bank to sign them in but how much does actually one vial cost for someone like me who let's say wants a vial if you're going to be doing inner unit insemination the vial cost is 635 okay and shipping is dependent on your location and so to california for example shipping from seattle to california is 180. so for one violent shipping it's 815 and you know our our prices are very competitive to the other u.s banks if not lower yeah and you guys deal with a lot of sperm emergencies i imagine frantic men and women calling from all over the world saying i'm ovulating i need my sperm you probably deal with that a lot a lot yeah and i mean here in the seattle area it's really nice you know we work with some local fertility clinics i think you had one of the doctors over here last week we had uh laura we had laura on previously and julian last week about how to pick the right egg yep and you know in those instances we can help them we can we can get it over to the you know to one of the seattle area fertility clinics uh same day but if you're if you're writing me or calling me and telling me i'm ovulating right now i need sperm today and you're in alaska it's not happening and you guys have a bike that looks like this sperm and i imagine you guys riding the bike and couriering it to the fertility centers in seattle the head of the sperm that you were just grabbing on the bike is actually a canister and you can put a tank inside the head of the sperm and ride it i have a feeling you invented this too is that your design no comment no comment okay um okay so let's say someone we buy a vial we get pregnant um and i want to use the same donor from before and maybe their vials aren't available online what what what are my options i'll tell you the hardest conversation that i have to have with recipients is sorry the donor that you have a child with is no longer available right so if you get pregnant you just go back and you buy more vials right away isn't that kind of yeah that's kind of what i recommend too we've got an article on our website about family planning and you know we understand that there's financial restrictions to these types of situations but you know if you want to make if you are thinking about having more than one child the best thing that you can do is to purchase as many specimens that are financially feasible for you right and place them into long-term storage with us right and do you guys have a buy-back program so let's say someone buys six vials and they ended up just wanting four kids because that's cool yeah and uh then do you would you buy back the other two if they got pregnant with the first four and didn't need the other two yeah absolutely if if the specimens are still here in our storage and they haven't left our facility we'll buy them back at 75 of the original purchase price excellent okay and then does anyone you just mentioned something that made me think well does anyone ship them let's say to off-site storage and then ship them back to you to buy back unfortunately because of the constant relationship that's defined by the fda right once once i've distributed a specimen outside of my facility i can't guarantee that what's in that sperm even though it's highly unlikely what's in that sperm container is what i shipped out so the only thing i can do is if i do ship it out and they do want to send it back to us we can store what whatever they send back to us for them but i could never buy it back and i could never put it back into general inventory yeah that makes sense so like do you guys hand hold my patients so well and really help guide them about the donors like who's the person there that patients should talk to if they just want a little bit more tension a little more help trying to find the right donor who's who's who's their guy oh man it's a good question i mean i do all the audio interviews for the donors so i know them really well but i also oversee and manage our client service team and that's gonna be candy katie abby and scarlett and they're all terrific and they know the donors very well uh very well so basically if someone calls up and says you know i'm looking for this donor i went to your website can you help me sort through which of my top six i should really be looking at any one of those any one of your employees would be able to help them yeah and you know we offer things like photo matching we offer things like tell us you know tell us what is most important to you and your donor and we'll you know that list from 50 down to three real quick right so photo matching would be like maybe providing a picture of um i don't know uh uh luke skywalker there you go i got one today for david beckham you know there you go david beckham's on a sperm donor honey he's just not so that's true that's true okay and i think that i think that's kind of all my questions i i am so i had all these questions and i hope i didn't embarrass you and i really really appreciate you just just being ready for anything that i had to throw at you and and and all that good stuff and i heard a rumor that you're you're also not just a general supervisor of seattle sperm bank but you're actually also a singer tell me about the group that you sing with i am yeah so i sing in a six person a cappella group called restless vocal band uh we won the 2016 northwest a cappella championship we've competed at nationals and we do a lot of things like weddings corporate events charities it's we love it do you have i mean i don't want to put you on the spot and ask you to sing me a tune but i might have promised people in the teaser for tonight that i would get you to sing how would you feel about that i can do it okay i'll do it go for it let's do it when the night has come and land is dark in the moon is the only light we'll see is that good no i wanted to i wanted more that was beautiful yay we usually have an applause track but it wasn't working tonight imagine that you hear cheers that was beautiful thank you okay well angelo thank you have an awesome night i really hope that we can get you on one more time in the future i'll find some other topic related to sperm that we could talk about just any excuse that i have to call you up get you here on my show i'm going to go ahead and do that absolutely i'd love to okay thank you again angelo have a great night and thank you for helping healthy families grow in the bay area and beyond good night good night welcome to the egg whisperer show a program exclusively designed to promote reproductive health awareness and discuss fertility preservation options here is your host the harvard educated fertility specialist dr amy she's known as the egg whisperer fertility expert dr amy lazida and you have yet another success story just launched by an east bay fertility doctor [Music] welcome to the egg whisperer show a program exclusively designed to promote reproductive health awareness and