Just open your mouth wide please........

No this was not a visit to the dentist with the twice yearly anxiety of further holes having appeared on the already pitted landscape of my ageing teeth, but the practice nurse at our local GP surgery encouraging me to keep said teeth away from her hand whilst she scraped some mucus from the inside of my cheek onto a long-handled cotton bud. Such was the experience of having a DNA sample taken.

In August this year our daughter Susannah became 18. Amongst the possibilities now legally open to her was registration with UK Donor Link. As she had been eagerly anticipating this time, when sample registration forms arrived for me to look at (I am on the Advisory Group) she pounced on them and filled them in. Counselling is offered to anyone registering with UKDL and initial registrants do not have to provide a DNA sample but as the chances of making a match are pretty limited without, Susannah was clear that she was happy to provide a sample. She decided she didn't need counselling for the time being (bad enough living with a mother who is a counsellor!) but thinks that she might want to take this up if the laboratory comes up with a match.

I wasn't sure if our local surgery would be happy to do the test for us but my completely un-fazed GP said we should just make an appointment with the practice nurse. I gather from UKDL that some GPs are not so accommodating and indeed some donors or donor offspring do not want the testing to be known about publicly, so UKDL's team of counsellors are available to help with the testing process if required.

Our kits arrived at home in very important looking sealed bags and with yards of detailed instructions. The practice nurse was very nervous. She has to sign a form saying that she has followed the directions and as this was her first test she didn't want to get it wrong. It wasn't a problem. After checking that we had had nothing to eat or drink for the previous twenty minutes, the nurse used the extended cotton bud supplied to scrape cells from inside Susannah's cheek and then it was my turn. The implements were then popped (don't nurses just love this word) into their little plastic bags and it was all over.

You might ask why I was having a test as well when it is Susannah who wants to find people genetically connected to her. Well the answer is that if a birth mother (or father in the case of egg donation) gives DNA too this can be excluded during the process of matching with other registrants. It apparently makes the chances of coming up with a good match much better. Anyway, it was all over very quickly and painlessly bar the filling in of numerous official forms. Susannah and I were not allowed to take charge of the tamper-proof package, leaving that in the safe keeping of the nurse who was quite overawed by the occasion and promised faithfully to post it that evening. We had confirmation several days later that it had indeed arrived in Leeds where UKDL is based. Now comes the waiting. Susannah is almost more curious and certainly more comfortable about half siblings than she is about her donor. Half-sibs would be young people facing similar life situations to her whilst her donor would be an older man with whom she might have nothing (other than similar DNA) in common. She knows that the chances of making any sort of match are slim but wants to give it a go. In the meantime an exciting gap year between school and uni beckons.