Searches for the fertility treatment shot up during the pandemic and companies offer it as a work ‘perk’. But what really happens when you freeze your eggs? Amy Grier takes us on her very personal journey
The glass from the tiny vial shattered between my fingers. As I stood in my bedroom, syringe in one hand, ruined medication in the other, I paused for breath for the first time that day. How on earth did I get here?
If you’d have told 25-year-old me that a decade later, at the age of 35, I’d be trying to preserve my fertility by injecting myself nightly with drugs from thimble-sized glass bottles, I would have chuckled in your face. That’s not how it was going to go for me. It was all planned out: by 35, I’d have at least one of the two children I knew I wanted. I’d also have a three-bedroom house with a small garden, a husband (obvs) and at least one pet. I’d be a journalist (well, at least one thing remains true) and hubby dearest and I would be happily contemplating our next move. Maybe a bigger house. Another child on the way. Who knows! The world was my 25-year-old self’s oyster.
As happens so often, the familiar tale I told myself turned into another all-too-familiar tale. Due to a car crash of a break-up (two-car pile-up, no fatalities, a few life-changing injuries) aged 33, the life I so badly craved disappeared like an etch-a-sketch wiped clean. It’s not that the one I have instead is horrible. Far from it. It’s full of love from friends and family, adventure, hilarity, intrigue and fulfilment from my work. I am beyond lucky, in the scheme of things, especially given the past few years we’ve all just dragged ourselves through.
But as all my self-imposed timelines gradually fell by the wayside (you know the ones: the ‘I’ll freak out about my fertility when I get to 30. Okay, 33. Okay, no, 35. Fuck it, 40 it is’), I had no choice but to pull my head out of the sand long enough to realise that no one was going to come along and fix my fertility anxiety for me. I had to fix it for myself.
That’s how I ended up on the website of The Fertility & Gynaecology Academy late one night in March 2021. The pandemic had put life on hold. Like so many, I felt entirely out of control, and this felt like one small way I could claw some of it back. I was not alone. After steadily rising, the number of Google searches for ‘egg freezing’ hit a five-year high last summer. The Fertility & Gynaecology Academy saw rates go up eight times compared with pre-pandemic. For those uninitiated, egg freezing is a process that takes between nine and 15 days, where a cocktail of drugs (selfadministered injections twice a day in the morning and evening) are used to first stimulate a woman’s egg reserve before the eggs are extracted under sedation. They are then frozen using vitrification.
When I went for my first ap
