Last Call at the Egg Freezing Bar
When you take a good look around the place and decide to just call it a night.
Let me delve a bit into what I touched on in my last piece: experiencing intense fertility cliff anxiety during the pandemic but still deciding against egg freezing in light of the toll the process can have on body, wallet and heart.
Part of the egg freezing process is self-injecting for about two weeks a cocktail of fertility drugs to first stimulate ovaries to produce multiple eggs in one menstrual cycle, then once at the midway point to stop ovulation from taking place too early in the cycle, and finally to trigger ovulation. Although rare, for some women taking these fertility drugs results in the development of Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS). According to this FertilityIQ article: “OHSS symptoms include pain, nausea, dizziness, vomiting, hospitalization, organ failure or worse.” Although also uncommon, some women experience side effects at the finish line when the eggs are retrieved. According to this Mayo Clinic article: “Rarely, use of an aspirating needle to retrieve eggs causes bleeding, infection or damage to the bowel, bladder or a blood vessel.” All in all, egg freezing is a generally safe medical procedure but it does come with short-term risks, its long-term risks are still being studied, and for most it’s a very uncomfortable experience. According to this post by fertility advocate Valerie Landis from her website Eggsperience: “Symptoms such as breast tenderness, bloating, and fluid retention were really starting to be present and take over. Clothes started to hurt. Anything on my body felt like a thousand pins and needles poking me. I don’t want to sound dramatic here, but I was very uncomfortable.”
These fertility drugs I mentioned don’t come cheap and neither do fertility clinic fees (for the initial consultation, preliminary testing, monitoring, anesthesia, egg retrieval, and vitrification), or storage costs. According to this Business Insider article when you factor in all the expenses you’re looking at a range of about $6,000 to $20,000 per cycle for drugs and clinic fees plus a range of about $500 to $600 per year for storage costs. Since most insurance companies and employers don’t cover the costs of egg freezing, single women like me who are considering it are usually looking at either sacrificing their savings that could go towards experiences like travel, goals like a down payment for a home, the security of an emergency fund or they are taking on loan debt to finance egg freezing.
Don’t get me wrong, at the end of the day this is about priorities and although I consider egg freezing to be worth the cost in my particular situation I feel that I waited too long. Youthful face aside, as a 38 year old I should have frozen my eggs years ago since there’s a lot of debate around the “sweet spot” age for egg freezing, some medical experts say 25 to 35 or 27 to 34 or 33 to 37, but 38 is definitely past the recommended age for one’s first egg freezing cycle. This has to do with the reality that both egg count and quality decline with age. This is illustrated in this article from Extend Fertility which states: “The irony of fertility is that younger women need to freeze fewer eggs (because more of their eggs are genetically normal), but tend to produce more per cycle (because their reserves are higher) — while older women, who need to freeze more eggs (because more of their eggs are genetically abnormal), tend to produce fewer per cycle, because their reserves are lower.”
I’m in good health and have good fertility odds when I look at both sides of my family, but in light of some self-imposed parameters that I would set for the use of my hypothetical frozen eggs it doesn’t seem like a good return on investment is likely. For one, I would give myself a limit of about 6 years to use these eggs since even 45 feels like I’m pushing it as far as the max age for becoming a mom. Also, I don’t want to do parenthood on my own and would therefore ask to have these eggs discarded when I blow out those 45th birthday candles if I haven’t found the right partner by then. Lastly, there’s always the option of donating my unused frozen eggs but I know I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to do that.
Let’s imagine I found the right partner in the next couple of years, there’s still a possibility my hypothetical frozen eggs don’t survive the thaw to become viable embryos. All of this is to say that in my particular case I don’t anticipate freezing my eggs would give me the huge sense of relief many women experience when they freeze their eggs. For me it’s a sobering reality any way I look at it and I’d rather call it a night and walk myself home.
