Egg freezing is a 12-14 day process of preserving some of your eggs by retrieving them from your ovaries, freezing them, and storing them so you can use them to conceive in the future.

To preserve your options. You may not be ready to have a baby yet or you may wish to conceive later in the future. There are several other situations that advice towards preserving your fertility while your eggs are healthy. Some of these situations include, prospective ovarian surgery, declining ovarian reserve, radio or chemotherapy, history of early menopause in the family etc. Freezing your eggs buys you time and can give you more choices in the future.

Yes, you generally do not need to stop your birth control to do an egg freezing cycle. You can keep your IUD if you have one.

I’m ready to freeze my eggs, what preparations do I need to make?

You’ll start by having a fertility assessment to finalise a personalised plan along with a timeline. You’ll need to clear your schedule of traveling for roughly 2 weeks. Once you decide on a stimulation start date with the doctor, you’ll be ready to go!

One cycle of egg freezing takes roughly 11-14 days from the first injection to the day of the egg retrieval. During those 14 days, you can go to work and continue your normal activities. The only day you need to make time or take off from work is the day of the egg retrieval because the egg retrieval is done under anesthesia. You’ll need to rest following your procedure, and should feel back to normal the next day! 

If you are planning to do more than one cycle, we recommend waiting at least 1 month between, but you can wait as long as you want. The decision to do more than one cycle will be based on your age, the number of children you hope to have and the number of eggs that are retrieved from your first cycle.

• Medicated IUI has a success rate of 10-15% in contrast to Doctor Aradhna’s success rate of 25%
• IVF without genetic testing has about a 40-50% success rate while Doctor Aradhna has been able to achieve a success rate of 70-80%
• IVF with genetic testing has about a 50-60% success rate.

If you eventually decide to not use your eggs, you can discard them (remember an egg is a cell, not an embryo), or you can also donate your eggs to science. In addition, if prior to freezing your eggs, you already know you want to do a “directed donation” where you are giving someone your eggs, you will need to undergo some additional testing to screen for certain diseases that you could potentially pass on to your donee.

Theoretically you can store your eggs forever! Once frozen, they’ll remain that way until you use them or they are discarded. There have been many healthy babies born from eggs frozen for 5–10 years, with the longest successful conception coming after 14 years. There is no evidence of the health or viability of frozen eggs decreasing over time. 

The most predictive and important factor that affects fertility is our age. Age affects our eggs more than any other factor. Typically, the younger we are, the greater the quantity and quality of eggs we have.

• Ovarian reserve is your quantity of eggs. Women are born with all the eggs they’ll ever have in their lifetime. At birth, we have about 2 million eggs and by the time a woman has her first period, she is down to 300,000 to 400,000 ( we know, that is so unfair! ). We continue to lose eggs at a rate of about 1,000 a month. 

  Age also degrades the genetic material of our eggs which can make having a healthy pregnancy/conception tough. Eggs that are not chromosomally normal can result in miscarriage. Most miscarriages are, in fact, a result of genetically unhealthy embryos. Chromosomal abnormalities can also lead to congenital disorders like Down syndrome. It isn’t every egg that degrades as you get older, just a higher percentage. Hence, egg freezing is advised to preserve your fertility if you are unsure of your future conception plans.

Egg freezing typically entails 9-11 days of hormone injections to stimulate your ovaries to grow multiple eggs in one menstrual cycle, instead of the single egg they would typically grow. During this period, you’ll have 5-7 short clinic visits including blood tests and vaginal ultrasound exams. At these visits, we’ll assess your individual response to the medication and possibly make adjustments depending on how your eggs are growing. Finally, there will be  a 15-minute surgical procedure performed under mild anesthesia to retrieve the eggs from your ovaries. This whole process, from the beginning of the injections through to the retrieval, is called a “cycle.”

We will help you understand what to expect and provide you with the support you need every step of the way.

We will only retrieve eggs that grew that month, which will dissolve (be lost) otherwise if not retrieved. So no, Egg freezing does not affect your natural ability to conceive.

While you are under anesthesia, the physician inserts a needle through the vaginal wall into each ovary to draw out the eggs and surrounding fluid. This is done with ultrasound guidance. The needle is attached to a catheter that is connected to a test tube. The eggs flow through the catheter into these test tubes, which are then handed off to the embryologist, a highly trained expert in the science of oocyte cryopreservation (that’s the technical name for egg freezing). The entire procedure takes about 10–15 minutes. There are no scars left or stitches required.

Certain parts of the process can be uncomfortable depending on your sensitivity. The stimulation phase, during which you are injecting yourself with hormones, is generally more about inconvenience than it is about pain(frequent visits, daily injections).The needles for daily injections are very thin and you inject them into the fatty tissue around your belly. (Don’t worry—we will help you understand the process step by step. You’re never alone during this process!) Sometimes, the hormone medication may cause you to feel bloated and crampy due to your body responding to medication and growing more follicles this month. The vaginal ultrasound exams are not painful, but they can be a bit uncomfortable due to the nature of the procedure.

During the 10-15 minute procedure to retrieve the eggs, you’ll be under anesthesia and won’t feel anything. You may experience some discomfort when you wake up, like a little soreness in the vaginal area and/or some abdominal cramping, similar to how you might feel when you’re getting your period. It is a simple and painless process that does not require you to stop your day to day activities.

We recommend you rest for the remainder of the day after the procedure. The vaginal soreness and cramping can last for a few days after the procedure. But usually, that’s about it. 

In general, the younger you are, the better. This is because you’ll be able to produce and freeze more eggs in one cycle, with a greater percentage of them being genetically healthy. Typically, you’ll get the most healthy eggs before you turn 30, slightly fewer from 30–35, and then a much smaller yield over 35. Keep in mind, in your mid-to-late 30s or even 40s, you can at least partially compensate for low egg-quality by freezing more eggs to increase your odds. This usually requires multiple egg freezing cycles, but it can give you a comparable chance of eventually achieving a healthy pregnancy to that of a younger woman who froze fewer eggs.

That depends on several factors, the most important one being age! That’s because your age at the time of freezing is the best way to predict the likelihood of any individual egg being genetically normal. The egg freezing assessment gives us a better picture of your current ovarian reserve. 

If you are under 30 and you freeze at least 12 eggs, you can be pretty confident that if you decide to use them later on, they will ultimately yield a healthy pregnancy. If you are between the ages of 30 and 34, you should freeze about 20 eggs. If you are 35 or older, you should freeze at least 30 eggs. In short, more is always better, because it increases your odds of achieving a healthy pregnancy. 

Of course, a successful pregnancy may be likely, but it is never a guarantee with frozen eggs (or fresh eggs, for that matter). The best available scientific data suggests that if you follow these guidelines you will have an 80% or greater chance of achieving at least one pregnancy, not taking into call any additional or unrelated fertility problems.

It depends. Younger women also produce a higher percentage of genetically healthy eggs, so they need to freeze fewer to begin with. In general, when you are younger, you are likely to produce a larger number of eggs in one egg freezing cycle than when you are older. Most younger women will reach their egg-freezing target in just one attempt whereas older women are likely to need to complete multiple egg freezing cycles to reach their goal.