Episode 187: A Decade with Whitney: Freezing her Eggs, Winning the Bachelor, and Becoming a Mom

You may know her as the winner of ABC’s The Bachelor from season 19, but patients at OVA Egg Freezing Specialty Center in Chicago know Whitney Bischoff Angel as their fertility nurse who can also relate to their journey.

In this episode, Whitney tells us about her decision to freeze her eggs in 2013, a decision that provided her with peace of mind as she navigated life’s uncertainties. She also shares where she is today, almost a decade later, and her journey to parenthood.

Whitney now uses her personal journey to empower women with choices and provide compassion and support to patients during their own egg freezing journeys.

Guest: Whitney Bischoff Angel, RN, BSN, OVA Egg Freezing

Host: Julie Campbell, Progyny

For more information, visit Progyny’s Podcast page and Progyny’s Education page for more resources. Be sure to follow us on Instagram, @ThisisInfertilityPodcast and use the #ThisisInfertility. Have a question, comment, or want to share your story? Email us at thisisinfertility@progyny.com. 

This episode is also a video! Watch it here:

Freezing Her Eggs

Part of my job as a nurse is listening, and I was hearing, often, “I wish I would have had the opportunity to freeze my eggs, I wish I could go back in time and make that decision for myself.” And for me, a light bulb went off in my head because for a lot of these women, egg freezing wasn’t even an option. So that’s when I made that decision to take my nursing hat off and put my patient hat on and I trusted science, I trusted the experts that I was working with. And I made the leap to freeze my eggs in 2013.Making the choice to freeze my eggs was one of the best decisions that I’ve ever made. And I have to say, out of all of the years that I’ve been a fertility nurse and all the women that I’ve worked with, I’ve never heard someone say, I regret freezing my eggs. Life has funny twists and turns, and you can try to plan out life as much as you want to. But it’s never going to go as you planned in your head. But the one constant I always had was I had my eggs frozen. So that was the peace of mind now is needed.

Thawing them a Decade Later

I ended up conceiving naturally. And we, you know, have a very healthy, almost five-year-old little boy. But when it was time for us to start thinking about expanding our family further, I had a very unexpected health crisis that had put that on hold. You don’t think about the unexpected things like a global pandemic, like a health crisis for yourself or a loved one. And that definitely caught me off guard. So, we did go ahead and thaw the eggs to fertilize them. They thawed beautifully, they fertilized beautifully, and I was very lucky to have about 10 embryos to work with. We did attempt one transfer, which was unfortunately not successful. But we were ready. That’s why you have multiple embryos, we were ready to, you know, gear up and go for another transfer. Unfortunately, I did struggle with a few natural miscarriages and an ectopic, but I ended up getting pregnant naturally.

Using Firsthand Experience at OVA

I feel like my experience of going through egg freezing and going through, you know, fertility struggles myself has in turn, it’s made me be a better nurse because I understand the other side of it. OVA is an egg freezing specialty center located in downtown Chicago, and our name can be a bit deceiving. So, we don’t just do egg freezing, we do fertility preservation. And we also feel like continuity of care is super important. So, any patient that has come to us for fertility preservation and is interested in coming back to use their eggs or their embryos, we also are their partner for their second half of the journey as well. We really are trying to make egg freezing or fertility preservation accessible for everyone.