- I froze my eggs. What happens when I want to use them?
So most women who have frozen eggs
have frozen their eggs years prior,
just as a bit of insurance that down the track,
when they're that little bit older
by the time they've met the right person,
their chance of pregnancy would still be good
because they froze the eggs when they were younger
because the age of the eggs
correlates with the quality of those eggs,
and therefore, the pregnancy chances for that woman.
Now, when you have met the right person down the track,
you might be in your late thirties,
you might be in your early forties,
and we know at that point,
it is harder for women to get pregnant
because we are born with all of our eggs,
and we use our eggs up as we get older.
So the older we get, the fewer eggs we have.
But also, eggs that have been in the body for longer,
they're not as nice as younger eggs,
so that's why it gets harder from about 38,
it starts to get quite difficult to get pregnant.
So as a 39, 40 year old now trying to get pregnant,
maybe not with your first,
but maybe with your second or your third child,
using 32, 33, 34-year-old eggs, your chance of pregnancy,
even though your body is that of a 39, 40-year-old,
the chance of you being pregnant
would be like you were 33, 34 again because that
was the age of the eggs when the eggs were frozen.
So when you froze the eggs,
you went through an IVF process with injections,
a procedure to take the eggs out,
and then the eggs were frozen.
So now, to use the frozen eggs,
we need to finish that IVF process.
So what we would need to do is defrost the eggs,
your partner would give us sperm,
and we put the eggs and sperm together
to create the embryos.
Now the timing of when we defrost those eggs,
that's the critical part because what we need to do
is be able to put that embryo back into the woman
when the woman's uterus is ready to accept that pregnancy.
So if you have nice regular periods, that's great.
We take advantage of that to know when to thaw the eggs out.
So what we would do is we would track your cycle.
Blood tests, ultrasounds,
get you to the point where you're going to ovulate,
and then we give you one injection
so that we can plan to thaw the eggs out 36 hours later
because that's when you would naturally ovulate
in response to that trigger injection.
At the time that we thaw the eggs out,
we would need your partner to give us a sperm sample,
and because of the way the eggs have been frozen,
we would have to do ICSI,
where we take one sperm
and introduce that sperm into the egg.
And we would do that for all the eggs
that we want to try and fertilize.
Now when you use frozen eggs,
about 90% of the frozen eggs will survive the defrosting.
And then once they survive the defrosting,
what we usually see is the fertilization rate
would be about 60%, 70% of those eggs
would then fertilize successfully.
Then in the laboratory, we would grow the embryos along,
and we grow the embryos in for five days
because what we're going to find
is that the eggs were frozen
right at the beginning of the process.
There's no way of knowing
whether we frozen good eggs or not.
So some of the eggs we defrost, they're not good.
Some eggs don't fertilize properly.
Some embryos stop growing along the way,
so they're not gonna make you pregnant.
So growing the embryos for five days
allows us to start with a bunch of eggs,
and then as we grow along,
we start weeding out the ones
that aren't gonna make you pregnant.
So at the end of the five days,
we might get one or two nice embryos.
That's typically what we see,
but they're your chances of getting pregnant.
So that embryo, because we also know when you've ovulated,
the uterus will be a day five uterus,
and we've got a day five embryo.
This is when we put the embryo back in,
which is just like having a pap smear done. Okay.
That way, your body thinks the egg you released,
you got pregnant from it.
Doesn't know that the egg was released,
and I put an embryo in from down below.
So that's how we use the frozen eggs.
Any other embryos that look good,
on that fifth, sixth day of growth,
we would then freeze the embryos for you,
which gives you back up.
So if you don't get pregnant straight away,
then we've got a frozen embryo that we can use
so that we don't have to go through
the whole egg thawing process again.
Or if you do get pregnant,
then you've got backup for another pregnancy down the track.
If you've got any questions at all
about using your frozen eggs,
feel free to contact us here at IVF Australia.
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and I'll see you later.
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