Hi ladies,
I’m doing some research on egg freezing and would really appreciate your thoughts:
- Have you considered egg freezing?
- If yes, what’s your biggest reservation? If no, why not?
Please DM me if preferred. Thanks so much!
Sana
Egg freezing
Iynna·Mar 03, 2022Iynna·Mar 03, 2022Yes I have but I am green on the subject. It is costly, it is also a pain in the butt and it is painful I have heard? Anyone else has done it and can help a sister out?
I’m 32, and considering doing it this year, and most my gfs has done it. Check if your company covers some of the cost, most my friends company covered for most the cost and they only need pay few thousand dollars out of pocket, and if you don’t want kids during 30 to 35 but for sure want have a kid of your own one day, highly recommend it do it as early as possible.
I have thought about it and do want to do it but it's costly. I doubt the insurance I take in Germany covers for it.For me, I know I want to have kids, but not sure when. But I like that I have a possibility of it insured.
Hi there, I also live in Germany, and from what I understand egg freezing when you're married with a partner is covered by statutory (public) German health insurance, however if you are not married it's called social freezing and this is not covered by any insurance, which is about 2000 EUR. Hope this helps!
Hey, I used to live in Germany so I know how it works quite well. Eggs freezing is not covered by statutory health insurance even if you're married, what is covered if you're married is IVF which is a different procedure (because you don't freeze eggs but embryos so you need either a sperm donor or a male partner). Eggs freezing itself is about 2500 euros in Germany but that only covers the procedure. You will pay about 500 euros in fertility tests and ultrasounds (mostly covered by your insurance if you have a private health insurance).But then you need to take into account the meds, which will cost you about 1000-1500 euros so total cost is more around 4000-4500 euros.
I froze my eggs (actually embryos with my husband) in my mid 30s and am so glad I did. Wish I had done it sooner even. I got a great result, but many of the women I talked with didn’t, perhaps because most had known fertility issues. I didn’t and was just doing it to buy time.I found the whole thing to be quick and easy. The expense for me was maybe $21k all in, but would have been only maybe $12k if I just froze eggs alone. I choose to do embryos because they do better when unfreezing if the eggs are already fertilized. And we wanted to know the quality of what we were working with. There were two reputable clinics I choose from in my area and I did initial screening consult with them both where they check your follicles via transvaginal ultrasound. This was I think $450. You follicle count varies throughout your cycle so I got different readings at each place, which initially freaked me out but was actually no big deal. I chose the clinic closer to my house because you have to go in every few days for monitoring once you start the injections, usually in the morning before work. My appointments were all like 7 or 8 am. They check your follicles via transvaginal ultrasound each time. It was annoying to have a doc “up in there” so often but it’s quick and only takes like 5 min. Based on the frequency of these though I did demand an all female staff as I was not comfortable with a male physician. This was almost an issue at the end of my ivf cycle when the day of my retrieval was the day a male physician was on call, but I put up a real fight about it and got an all female staff again. The injections were honestly not a huge deal. I built it up in my head to be way worse than it was. The needles are small and thin, and you just pop them in like a dart. I iced my skin thoroughly beforehand so I didn’t even feel it. Although I am a wimp and made my husband do them. You have to do the injections in certain evening and morning time windows but the clinic was very good about making my schedule clear. You have to communicate with them every day basically so that you know the plan. You also have to order the medications on short notice because they adjust doses and types each day or two. I worked with Aalto pharmacy and was always able to get my meds same day delivered. I highly recommend using a pharmacy that specializes in fertility meds, or the clinic’s medication program (though you can easily overpay by a few thousand by getting meds through the clinic). The cycle is less than two weeks if I remember correctly, so it flies by.By the end I felt like a cow though, and had a little belly and felt super hormonal, so I was glad it was the pandemic and I was working from home so I didn’t have to feel uncomfortable at the office. The one annoying thing is you can’t plan your retrieval date ahead of time because it based on how quickly your follicles respond to stimulation. So I tried to time my cycle with a slower time at work where I could call in sick the day of retrieval. Retrieval was super easy. They put you under light anesthesia and I slept like a baby. You bleed afterwards because they just pierced your ovaries but it was no big deal. I was back on work email in the afternoon and felt fine. No pain, just slight discomfort on the order of magnitude of a normal period. Because we froze embryos my husband had to give his sample while I was in my retrieval. It has to be a fresh sample so he had to go into one of the little dark rooms and, you know. I think he felt upset about all of it because it’s a little emasculating for a man, so I tried to be as emotionally supportive for him as he was for me during this process. With embryos you get a report from the clinic each day on how they are growing and how many progress to the next stage. There is a steep drop off by the end. For example, with 12 eggs you might only get 1 or 2 viable, euploid embryos. It all depends and varies a lot person to person. They grade the quality of your final embryos at freeze time and can genetically test them for a bevy of genetic diseases if you pay for it (I think it was like $1,200 to test up to six embryos, if I remember. Natera did the testing). We did this because we wanted to know what we were working with or if I should do another cycle of egg freezing just to have backup). The clinic will also tell you the gender of each embryo if you want to know. That was a lot to write and I’m sure I missed some things but happy to answer any questions from the group. I did have a very good experience overall and found the process a lot easier than I expected.
I did it when I was 30. At the time, my biggest reservation was that I felt like I was still young enough to meet a partner and conceive naturally. However, I was working in the fertility space witnessing all of these tragedies happening to women who were still incredibly young. On top of that, my landlord at the time (herself an entrepreneur who gave me 60% off of my rent to help me get my business off the ground) acknowledged it was none of her business but encouraged me to look into it due to challenges her adult daughter had conceiving. When I realized I could get $20K of it covered through COBRA from my former employer, I got in to see an endocrinologist immediately.Here's a blog post with FAQs: https://predictabill.com/2021/09/egg-freezing/
I just did it last month at age 30. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions. I had a lot of reservations including everything I've read here (young so I could do it naturally still, needles, feeling hormonal). Some reservations I haven't even really articulated to myself (I guess probably having to confront what life really means to me). I decided to do it anyway for the peace of mind and because my workplace covered most/some of it.
I've frozen eggs! The company I was with at the time has great benefits, so the financial component wasn't a factor. My biggest reservation was being fear that it would change my body / cycle somehow (friends who'd done a full IVF cycle said they could *feel* their ovaries afterwards). I'd had ovarian torsion beforehand, so I was worried the hormones might trigger another flare up.I ended up doing it and thankfully no ovarian torsion, but I do wonder if it impacted my body... hard to know, cause the second cycle was right around the start of the pandemic, so maybe some of the changes were also a result of changes in routine, commute, movement, etc Happy to chat more if you have any other questions!
I did. I went to Kindbody and was very happy with the service. Make sure you are off your birth control pills. The doctors may not tell you to do so, but your egg follicles are suppressed from birth control and they will not grow as quickly with the fertility drugs. Before I stopped birth control the doctor said I had 5 egg follicles. I stopped birth control and within 3 months the doctor retrieved 40 eggs and froze 33 mature ones. Doctors generally aim for 12-15 eggs for retrieval.
Hey, I froze my eggs last year. I did not have any reservation since I live in France and we're probably the only country where eggs freezing is actually fully covered by public statutory health insurance (sorry American friends, socialist countries are good to women sometimes ;)I was 32 with excellent fertility levels (AMH levels at 8) and no known fertility issues. My body reacted very well to the fertility meds (at the beginning of the stimulation cycle there were more than 50 eggs), however in the end they only retrieved and froze 8 eggs (because they did not use the right ovulation med and they waited too long to do it) so I was super upset. I expected way more. The doctor encouraged me to do a second round of egg freezing saying that now that they knew how my body reacted to fertility drugs, they were sure they could retrieve about 20 eggs but I was super tired from the previous cycle and I was getting serious with my boyfriend so I thought I'd wait and see if we could conceive naturally. So my take is even if you are pretty young with great fertility levels, bear in mind the procedure may not go as well as expected and you may have to do 2 rounds or more.
@SanaW Happy New Year! Curious how did the research end up? Any insights you could share with the community?
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