For the final Wine & Gyn Event recap, I’m sharing all of our questions about egg-freezing. Egg-freezing originally inspired the event and definitely became the most interesting topic of conversation because we don’t hear much about it unless we’ve seen a doctor as interested patients or if we know someone who has gone through it. I have been talking to some friends recently about fertility and egg-freezing and we all felt similarly that this can be a really scary topic to bring up with our doctors. Learning about our own fertility could lead to undesirable results, which can be terrifying to think about if having kids is really important to you. At the end of the day though, I think it would be scarier to find out bad news 5-10 years down the line that could prevent you from having children the way you want to. So, if you’re in your 20s and think you want to wait to have children for 5-10 years, you may want to consider going to a doctor to test your fertility and know your options. In this situation, knowledge is definitely power.
The questions below do a great job covering the basics when it comes to egg-freezing, but you’ll read that a lot of it is very specific to each woman. What stuck out to me most was Dr. Williams’ point about the pop-up egg-freezing services. The main issue he had with them is that they treat every patient the same. This is problematic because this approach can lead to health issues that might end up costing you more in the long run if you need to seek out further medical treatment. While I know those pop-ups seem attractive because they are set-up to be more affordable and I know egg-freezing is not affordable for everyone, if you’re considering egg-freezing, Dr. Williams would encourage all women to look into different options at fertility clinics that specialize in egg-freezing. I’ve been looking into it and there are some that offer more affordable payment plans. Depending on where you work, your company’s medical coverage might include egg-freezing too!
The process of egg freezing starts with the egg. Eggs contain a large amount of water so when they are frozen, ice crystals form that can destroy the cell. The process has evolved to include dehydrating the egg first while replacing the water with an anti-freeze component which prevents the ice crystals from forming. Eggs are frozen using a flash-freezing process known as vitrification. The process of retrieval includes the same hormone-injection process as in-vitro fertilization. The only difference is that the eggs are frozen, not fertilized and implanted into the uterus.
The egg-freezing cycle, or round as the doctors refer to it below, takes approximately 3 weeks to complete. The first 1-2 weeks is for women to start birth control which turns off the body’s natural hormone cycle. Then there is about a week and a half of taking hormone injections which stimulates the ovaries to ripen multiple eggs. When the eggs are ready, they are removed with a needle placed through the vagina using an ultrasound to guide the process. The eggs are frozen immediately and remain that way until you are ready to use them!
Questions on Egg-Freezing:
“This is one of the most commonly asked questions. The challenge is women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. Two things happen with age: it gets harder and harder to get pregnant and the eggs become less and less healthy. The earlier you freeze eggs the better, but you don’t want to freeze your eggs if you think you are going to try to get pregnant in the next few years. If you plan to do that, just wait. If you think that in the next 5 years it is unlikely that you will be in a position to be trying on your own, then you should think about freezing. By 35 years or more you aren’t really in the best position to freeze your eggs. Science keeps getting better and that applies to freezing your eggs too. Once the egg is frozen you put the pause button on it. You just need to make sure you choose a place that is doing it well and producing healthy babies with their frozen eggs.”
“The number of eggs we get with each cycle depends on the woman’s age. At age 25, you have a 90% chance of getting 20 eggs, but by age 40 you have a 20% chance. The number of cycles you do and the number of eggs you want will also depend on the number of children you want to have later.”
(More below in the cost question about this)
“The cheapest option can end up being very costly in the long run. They have physicians, but you have better outcomes in doctor offices that have more experience with the process. When you’re trying to find a doctor for anything, you want to find someone who focuses on just what you are looking for, that is their niche. That is the best way to get the best results.”
“The cost of egg freezing varies a lot. It depends on how many cycles you need and you need enough cycles to get sufficient eggs to give you a viable chance to have the number of children you want. Each cycle is $6300. Someone in their mid-20s could only need one cycle to get enough eggs. It’s very individual though. Someone in their mid-30s could get 40 eggs at once and someone younger could get less than 20. It varies with each woman. Another misconception among patients is that if you get 20 eggs you’ve used up 20 months of eggs. That is not the case. Every month there are a bunch of eggs that leave the resting pool in your ovaries and only one egg ovulates. Each cycle rescues those same eggs that would otherwise die off.”
“There are some side effects from freezing eggs. You can get emotional and hormones get out of control. It varies from woman to woman the same way menstrual cycles differ. A woman’s estrogen level gets higher so we try to be very sensitive to this. Our goal is to get good quality eggs so we do our best to tailor it to each woman. In our office, even just bringing women right back to avoid any time in the waiting room is one way we try to be sensitive to making each woman’s experience better.”
“Unfortunately no, but we are working with a research team who is working with cells to determine if they are cancerous. I brought them this idea of testing eggs and they are working on creating the technology since it hasn’t been invented yet. There is morphology, which shows us how the egg looks, but that’s not predictable to quality.”
“The problem with the pop-ups is that they standardize the process which can lead to these sort of health problems. OHSS is when the ovaries are working too hard. The patient can have too many follicles, so the eggs will get retrieved, but the woman can develop a difficulty breathing and fluid can fill the belly, among other complications. It’s not common though. We have done over 1000 cases and have never had this issue, but it can happen when things aren’t being carefully monitored. There are a lot of things you can do to ameliorate this risk. In terms of other health risks, people wonder if there is a cancer risk. We have over 8 million babies being born with IVF so there is good data on this and IVF doesn’t increase your chances of being diagnosed with breast/ovarian cancer. The confusion lies in the fact that there are higher rates of these cancers in women going through IVF, but that is because cancer can sometimes cause infertility. IVF itself plays no role in the cancer. The biggest risk of IVF is multiple gestation, or twins, triplets, etc.”
“An egg that gets ovulated today or a sperm that gets ejaculated today, started its life 3 months before hand. Wait for that sperm/egg to make its way through, if it’s a real major life stressor. That’s why we see a lot of women who com back from vacation and get pregnant because they have had a chance to relax. Stress causes us to do other things, we overeat/undereat, we may drink too much, we may start smoking, your response to the stress can effect your fertility. Also, when you are really stressed, sometimes your libido is down.”
I hope that this post has answered some questions for you. It definitely helped me think more clearly about the process. There is also a podcast called Glowing Up that talks about fertility and a more affordable at-home test you can take to test out yours designed by Modern Fertility. Click here to listen and here to see if the at-home test is a good option for you, plus you’ll get $20 off thanks to Glowing Up! What I really love about it is the online results that go into detail about your fertility which you can access anytime.
Let me know if you found answers to your questions about egg-freezing in this post and if you have any other questions about it! Would love to share your feedback with the doctors! Also, if you missed Part 1 and 2 about the Wine & Gyn event you can read them here and here, respectively.
Sources:
Dr. Zev Williams and Dr. Mary Rosser of New York Presbyterian