I feel like a huge sort of weight off my shoulders knowing there is frozen eggs,
there is a backup plan.
It's a huge relief, really.
I met my husband, Matthew, shortly after I moved to New York.
We've been together almost seven years.
We've talked about kids a lot throughout that.
We're really enjoying our time together, we both work hard and, you know, are very career-oriented.
We were always just kind of like living in the moment, I feel like, and that's just always
how I've lived my life too.
Even with kids, it was something we just, you know, we talked it, we knew it would happen.
Once I did that AMH test, and that was like science saying, you kind of need to plan for
your future.
AMH, or anti-mullerian hormone, is a blood test that we do that gives us a good look
at a woman's ovarian reserve.
It mainly reflects egg count.
If the patient is concerned that they're at the lower-end of normal, they may want to
consider something like egg freezing.
On average, you're between a 1 and a 3.5, so when I found out that I was a 1.28, I was
actually like pretty upset.
I think I actually cried.
Something shifted when I got those results, and I was like okay, now I need to seriously
question, okay maybe I should think of a backup plan.
So once we started looking at prices, that when I found this boutique egg-freezing clinic
in New York.
They don't help you with your pregnancies, they don't diagnose fertility problems, they
don't even make embryos at this point, they just do egg freezing.
Anywhere that you're freezing your eggs, the most important factor is what are the success
rates?
What are the pregnancy rates?
I think with those sorts of centers, it's probably a little too early to really understand
the cost-effectiveness.
They may, in the long run, be very cost-effective.
We're only seeing so far, about 15% of patients have come back for their eggs, and we think that's
probably because it's a relatively new trend.
The majority of our egg freezing took place in the last three or four years, and it takes
women about two to three years to come back for their eggs.
So once we decided that I was going to go forward with this, you know, we started the
process, and the process began, it began my first day, or the second day, of my period.
Typically, most centers will start you at the beginning part of your cycle.
You'll come in for a baseline ultrasound and blood work, and then you start taking injections
that night.
You take about two to three injections a day.
What those medications are, they're very similar hormones to the hormones that a woman naturally
releases every month in order to recruit one egg for ovulation.
We're giving these medications which are just much higher doses of those hormones to help
stimulate the ovaries to make several eggs in a cycle.
Morning of, I'm feeling pretty nervous, but I'm also so distracted because I know that
I'm going to have the whole Cosmo team in there filming.
And my husband, who did not want to be on camera, he was with me the whole time.
My expectations weren't high, because my AMH levels were low.
Doctor: Final questions?
Darla: How many are we going to get?
Doctor: We will see, somewhere between 10 and 20.
Darla: Okay.
And how long do you think the whole thing will take?
Doctor: About 10 minutes.
Darla: Alright.
We'll be in there about a half hour, but it's a 10 minute procedure.
Darla: Sounds good.
Doctor: Alright, very good.
Let's do it.
An egg retrieval is minimally invasive.
Most women get an IV and get sedation, some sleepy medication.
We perform the egg retrieval, which is just a vaginal ultrasound that has a needle on
it, so we're able to get the eggs using ultrasound guidance through the vagina and then we'll
take them out and freeze them.
Once the eggs are taken out, we look under the microscope, we assess if they're mature
or not and then we use a process called vitrification to quickly freeze the eggs.
Darla: I wake up...
Doctor: So we'll watch you here in the recovery room about half hour, 45 minutes.
So we got 15 eggs.
Darla: That's amazing!
It was more than the 12, I was really, really happy about that.
Doctor: We'll give you a buzz tomorrow with how many we froze.
Darla: They do tell you, wait for the call the next morning, because we have to run tests
on these eggs, so tomorrow is when you'll get the real results.
Generally we like, in young women, them to have a good 10 to 15 eggs, and in older women,
we like to see more than that.
Only eight of the 15 were mature and healthy enough to freeze.
Now that I know I healed super quickly from the procedure, and it really impacted nothing,
I'm in at the doctor, and here we are doing the whole thing again, counting my follicles
and looking at the ovaries, and he said, you know, it's just, they're not quite healed yet.
So we're going to wait and then start the second round.
My one piece of advice is go get your AMH testing done.
The more information you have, and the better informed you are, the more sound your decisions
will be.