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My mom
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is about to meet my dad
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for the first time.
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I grew up with two moms,
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Kathleen and Betsy.
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And I really don't
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miss having a dad
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because they both
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completed a different area
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of me.
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This is the family.
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My sister, Sarah, and I have always just had each other.
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And I love Sarah to pieces.
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I always knew that I was donor conceived.
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We were imagining you
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18 years from now
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meeting this guy
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and we wanted you to like him.
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I don't think
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I ever
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imagined that there could be so many siblings.
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I thought maybe if I'm lucky I'll find one
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or two.
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I think we're still trying to
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feel around
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and figure out how we're family.
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It's
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completely uncharted territory.
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We're going to go visit Carolyn,
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my half sister.
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Carolyn was the first sibling that I made contact with.
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So I guess she's just the introduction,
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my introduction to the donor sibling world.
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Carolyn!
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What up, what up?
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Your haircut, when did that happen?
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That happened like a month ago.
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I love it.
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Thank you.
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It's adorable.
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When I was growing up, I thought that
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maybe I have donor siblings.
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But then your mom was the first person to contact me!
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So that was the like first time I was like:
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'Oh, I have a donor sibling!
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And it's you!'
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So I thought it was just 19 of us,
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and then Sam popped up,
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and we were like,
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'Oh, Sam is another one we didn't know about.'
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There's definitely 20 of us.
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And my mom has an Excel spreadsheet.
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She does?
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Yeah, with everybody that we have to date
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and their parents and contact info.
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This is the sperm pipette...
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is that the word? -
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that my mother used.
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And here you can see that it says 1317.
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I guess she got this on June 6 of 1995
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So she used a little vial and
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syringe to self-inseminate,
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and it came in the mail, it was frozen, she said
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that she warmed it up like so.
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I found out my mom was actually in contact
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my entire childhood
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and even before I was born with other moms.
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Now that I'm 18, the rest of us are also adults.
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We have established our own relationships with each other.
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She had these probably in her freezer for four to five months before she decided:
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today's the day that I'm going to get pregnant.
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Donor 1317 was originally approved for donation in November 1993,
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since the release of his semen,
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we have achieved six confirmed pregnancies.
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The donor continues to be healthy.
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That is so medical and scientific!
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This necklace, it says 1-3-1-7.
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And my moms gave it to me
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for my 18th birthday.
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And I think the number represents less of
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the donor 1-3-1-7 and more of my moms
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and my half siblings and that - just my family,
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it's all different parts of my family.
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When we were starting this process first of all
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there were two known sperm banks we were aware of,
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both in California, that had a known donor programme.
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So this is the questionnaire we got from the sperm bank
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about your donor.
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'Why do you want to be a sperm donor?'
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'Besides the money, which was definitely an incentive since I am strapped for cash,
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I think that it would be a very rewarding experience.
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If I never have kids then I would want to know
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that I have given that opportunity to another couple.'
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'Which option did you choose?'
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'Identity release.'
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'And explain why you chose this option.'
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'It may be interesting to meet my unknown child to see what effects
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environmental and genetic have played a role in his or her development.'
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'If we could pass a message to the recipient of your semen, what would that message be?'
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'Hold your head high and be considerate of others.'
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I mean he just seems like a really nice guy.
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so that's why we chose him.
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We were imagining you
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18 years from now meeting this guy
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and we wanted you to like him
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and, yeah
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think he was a good guy, so that was kind of our process.
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You glad we picked him?
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I mean yeah!
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I love you.
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I love you, too.
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You're so special.
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Kathleen and I got together when we were 23 years old.
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So we were quite young at the time.
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She was the kind of person that would walk in the room
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and light it up.
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Oh my gosh mom, you're so young.
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Thank you? I think.
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Not that you're old now, but like…
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for the three months that she lived
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after her diagnosis,
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she did more living than most people do
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in a decade - if not more.
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Julia, this was when we were on vacation,
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a week before your mummy died.
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And she played the song she'd learned,
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she taught herself to play the ukulele
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in the last two months of her life and
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played the song for the whole family.
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Love you girls.
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You ok?
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Kathleen was very insistent on making sure
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that we used the sperm bank of California,
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because we were allowed to have a 'Known Donor Programme' from that.
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We didn't have any rights to the donor,
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and he didn't have any rights to us, either.
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Julia was the only person that could make contact.
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Julia was born in 1999 in January,
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and she was conceived
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five months before Google was founded.
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So there was no chance in our minds
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that any of the diblings would ever be part of the picture.
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It wasn't that we didn't want them, it just never crossed our mind.
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Oh honey pie, I love you so much.
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I love you, too.
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Have a great trip
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and I want to hear all about it when you get home.
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We are on the road to Syracuse, New York,
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where I'm going to meet up
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with three of my siblings,
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George, Mari and Samantha.
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And I've met George before,
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and I haven't met Mari or Samantha.
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What's up!
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Hi.
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I'm Mari.
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Do you see what I mean?
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I think they look so similar.
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The eyes.
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Yeah.
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Yeah and the nose and the bone structure.
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Already?
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And your nose.
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I have small hands.
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I have huge hands.
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I have bigger hands than my brother.
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We have the exact same size hands.
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I never really wondered about
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the fact that I might have these half siblings -
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diblings.
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I like more calling them like sisters and brothers,
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because I'm trying to get more used to the fact that they are like my sisters and brothers.
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Now it's really become a much bigger part
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of this whole sperm donor story to me than
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the father aspect of it.
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It's so grody that other people's parents had to have sex.
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I was a double donor conception,
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which means that a donor egg and then
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a donor sperm was used.
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I felt very alien, I felt very like
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in a hole,
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and 50 years ago I wouldn't have been able to exist at all.
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I felt like I was kind of forced on to the earth a little bit.
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It wasn't natural at all.
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There was a period that I was just
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I wished I hadn't been born in this way,
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really at all.
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And I almost kind of blamed her,
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because I knew that she wanted a child so bad.
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People don't report when the pregnancies are successful.
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So the sperm banks don't get a lot of information in return from the families
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apparently there's a problem with
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lack of regulation around that or something.
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I don't know, should they have 20-something kids?
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Sperm donation is around to stay.
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So, for someday it might only be this.
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We don't know the future of any of that.
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I really want to get to know you better. I'm down to be like a brother.
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I want you guys too. There's a lot, you know?
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Welcome to the family kind of thing.
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We're not brothers and sisters in name only,
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I kind of want to make it more than that.
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I think it's definitely possible to have a few
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people, or a lot of people maybe, even,
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if I'm good with time management,
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who I can have really deep relationships with
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who feel like my brother and sister.
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I think it's important to do something
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every once in a while with these people
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to grow these connections.
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I don't think it necessarily has to be something
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where you need to talk to them all the time,
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or even having one person that you talk to all the time
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because we're not accustomed to that in our lives,
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but I think that this can be a family.
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And I'm really excited about that.
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My half sister came up to me and gave me a
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hug today,
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and I was the first blood relative she's ever touched
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and it's a Thursday.
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Just a random Thursday.
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The whole experience is always shocking and
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bewildering, but in a really beautiful way.
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And really touching way.
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Hugging George, it was like,
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I don't know, a strange sort of homecoming,
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it was like someone I should've been hugging throughout my childhood but never did.
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I wish I could've told younger me about this day.
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I wish I could go back and tell her that you'll find them.
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You'll find those people that understand.
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It'll definitely
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keep me warm for a very long time, you know?
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We're still figuring out how family works,
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and how our family works.
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I don't know where we are in that, but I like
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where it is. Wherever it is, I like it.
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Really only about 3-5% of all potential donors
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actually become donors. It's kind of an exclusive club.
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So these are the samples
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and they're attached to canes, like this.
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And we just lay them here.
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We limit the number of vials that we allow a donor to produce.
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If we allow a donor to collect 500 vials,
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If you do some calculations,
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that would be approximately between 10 and 15 pregnancies.
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It's not what I expected, I expected it to be some
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crazy, scientific,
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all these people with masks on,
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running everywhere, and kind of scary, but it's very normal.
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If we go down the hallway this way
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is our collection room.
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It's basically just a sink, the chair, the proverbial stack of magazines.
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I don't know if I want to imagine this part.