Egg Freezing

Egg freezing collects eggs from your ovaries and stores them at very low temperature, so they can be fertilised at a later date. The eggs do not age while frozen; your chance of a live birth later depends mostly on how old you were when they were collected.

Women freeze eggs for two different reasons. One is a medical one, before chemotherapy, radiotherapy or surgery that will damage the ovaries. The other is to keep options open when the right time to conceive has not yet arrived.

Be clear about the numbers before you start. Freezing eggs at 30 gives a meaningfully better chance than freezing at 38, and no age gives a guarantee.

You inject hormones under the skin of your abdomen for about ten to twelve days to make several follicles grow at once. The clinic monitors you with scans and blood tests every few days and adjusts the dose. A final trigger injection is timed precisely, usually 34 to 36 hours before collection.

Egg collection takes fifteen to twenty minutes under sedation. An ultrasound probe in the vagina guides a fine needle into each follicle and the fluid is drawn off; the embryologist finds the eggs in that fluid under the microscope.

Mature eggs are frozen the same day by vitrification, a very rapid method that avoids ice crystals. The embryologist will tell you how many mature eggs were stored, which is the number that matters.

You rest in the clinic for two to three hours and go home the same day with someone to accompany you. Bloating, cramping and light spotting are usual for two to three days, and most women are back at work the next day.

Your next period arrives in about two weeks and may be heavier than usual. Contact the clinic urgently for severe abdominal pain and swelling, vomiting, breathlessness or passing very little urine in the week after collection, since these suggest ovarian hyperstimulation.