Episode 167: Egg Freezing: The Back Up Plan

Shannon Fender: I swore up and down in my twenties that I didn’t want kids. I wasn’t going to have them and then stereotypically reached my thirties and realized that might not be true for me. So, here I am in my mid-thirties. I don’t have a partner currently and I’m not looking to start a family right away, but I’m interested in preserving my fertility until a later date, and very much understand that there is a biological clock associated with that. I first heard about egg freezing during a Sex in the City episode. Miranda talked about creating a fertility savings account. And so, I was kind of familiar with that concept. And then of course, I heard about IVF over time, and I had several friends who for different reasons, either had frozen their eggs or gone through IVF and so I did know about it beforehand.

Dr. Kathy Hong: In a typical month with egg freezing, you have a group of eggs that is dormant, and one of them is activated by the hormones that are secreted from the brain. And this allows one follicle to grow which is a container for an egg and that one grows, and you ovulate that and the egg is released and can potentially get together with a sperm if you’re trying to get pregnant. The concept with egg freezing is that there are a number of dormant eggs that month that are otherwise not being activated. And instead of just utilizing the one that month to save for the future, what we can do is have you take medications that are usually in the form of injectable medications. And these basically step into the place of where your brain would normally stimulate the growth of one follicle, and you can stimulate the growth of the entire group of otherwise dormant follicles. So that group of follicles would normally just die off at the end of that month if you’re not using them. The concept with egg freezing is that you can actually save the eggs within them for the future. It makes it much more efficient than just saving one egg per month. And at the end of that month, you’ve saved yourself a group of eggs and your future self can have access to a younger version of you to help to conceive with.

Dan Bulger: The eggs that are retrieved can then be frozen using vitrification. And those eggs can be kept in storage for as long as you might need. The eggs won’t age while frozen. When needed, they can be thawed and then utilized.

Shannon Fender: You know, I wasn’t really looking for the fertility benefit when I joined my current employer, but I found out about it quickly after I joined and was just really excited about it. Once I found out the out-of-pocket costs for me were going to max out at $4,000, I figured out a way to swing it. And that made it really easy. But my understanding is that this can cost you know, upwards of $20,000 to do without the benefit. So that would have been out of reach for me right now. I may have been able to do it sometime in the future. But no time like the present, as I’ve learned with egg freezing. I’m 34, kind of reaching that tipping point into 35, where it starts to be more difficult for women to conceive naturally, it really kind of aligned to the right time for me to be able to do it.

Dr. Kathy Hong: When you do egg freezing and you take injectable medications, it usually takes about seven to ten days for those injectable medications to cause a group of follicles to grow. And when those follicles are at their optimal size which can be measured on transvaginal ultrasound, then what you do is you take a trigger shot, which mimics what your body would normally give you to ovulate, except that it’s timed so before you actually ovulate and release those eggs, an egg retrieval’s performed.

Shannon Fender: I had a very great experience where it just became very clear for me in that first consultation that I absolutely wanted to do this, I wanted to give myself every ability to preserve my fertility and have kids in the future biologically.

Dan Bulger: Shannon shared that she was happy with the results. Shannon’s experience is extremely helpful for anyone listening. But her results aren’t actually going to be relevant to other people who have, you know, their own bodies. But Shannon got a lot of eggs, so many eggs, in fact that she experienced a lot of bloating and some significant discomfort. One potential risk of egg freezing is OHSS, which is ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which sounds an awful lot like what Shannon just described, this can actually be a quite dangerous thing if left untreated.