Egg Freezing
Cool job? Check. Brooklyn apartment? Check. Special someone who can deal with your cat? Work in progress. Egg freezing preserves your fertility while you’re working on everything else!
Egg Freezing or fertility preservation is treatment for many women from New York City and across the U.S looking to preserve their future fertility at the youngest age possible. The egg freezing process shares many of the same steps as an IVF cycle including workup, ovarian stimulation, and egg retrieval.
For our egg freezing, we use a flash-freezing technique called vitrification which dehydrates and freezes the eggs instantaneously, contributing to a 90% survival rate when thawing. Your eggs will be frozen right here in our state-of-the-art lab in New York City. Once they are frozen, we move the eggs into a liquid nitrogen storage tank. Here, they will stay safe until you decide you are ready to use them.
Unfortunately, many patients come to freeze their eggs after being diagnosed with cancer. Cancer is stressful enough. Chemotherapy treatment can reduce greatly reduce egg quality and quantity. Freezing eggs before undergoing treatment is a great option to preserve your fertility.
If you’re preparing to undergo HRT and transitioning, let’s talk. Hormone replacement therapy will often times leave someone infertile. Freezing eggs prior to transitioning is highly recommended if one wishes to maintain their reproductive potential.
Egg Freezing FAQ’s
When should I freeze my eggs?
Freezing your eggs at the youngest age possible is best. Unfortunately, women are born with all the eggs they will have in their lifetime – maybe 1-million or so. But by puberty, that number drops by 70% or more. At the same time, the quality of those eggs declines over time so younger eggs are often healthier eggs.
Published data supports that for most women freezing your eggs by your mid 30’s is best, but every patient is different so talk to your GNF provider about your health history and if egg freezing right for you.
How does the egg freezing process work?
Egg freezing is basically the first half of an IVF cycle. You’ll do an ovarian stimulation cycle using injectable medications over 7-10 days where we recruit as many eggs as possible. After we collect or aspirate those eggs they are transferred to our lab and cryopreserved using a process called vitrification.
What number of eggs is a good number?
Every patient comes to us with a different health history and ovarian reserve. If you’re in your late 20’s with no underlying or significant issues, we could retrieve 30 eggs or more to be cryopreserved. The more eggs we have now, the more you have to use when you’re ready to fertilize them and make embryos for transfer.
Some patients may have naturally lower levels of fertility hormones or have a family health history that makes egg freezing important to consider now. If after a fertility preservation cycle, we retrieve just a few eggs, your GNF provider may discuss doing a second stimulation to build up your personal egg bank.
How will my eggs be stored and where?
Once your eggs are frozen, they will be stored safely at our facility here in our state-of-the-art IVF lab here in New York City.
How much does egg freezing cost?
Most patients can expect to pay about $X for the initial fertility preservation cycle which includes the first year of storage costs. After that, patients are charged an annual fee of $X for storage.