Should I go through more than one egg freezing cycle?

This is a question we frequently get during our free Ovally consults, so we decided to lay out different considerations in more detail. If you’re asking yourself this question, you’re already a step ahead: You know that it typically takes more than one egg to hopefully have a baby with the help of fertility treatment, and that you might need more than one treatment cycle to collect enough eggs to be more comfortable with your chances of being able to take advantage of them to have a baby later on.

In the earlier days of egg freezing many women weren’t told that each egg may only have a 5-10% chance of becoming a baby (which decreases with age as egg quality goes down), and that 15-19 eggs seem to provide the highest likelihood of a live birth without increasing the risk of overstimulation. At Ovally it’s important to us that you have all the information you need to make treatment decisions and avoid possible disappointment later on. We hope the below helps you think through whether it may make sense to undergo more than one treatment cycle, and what the decision process could look like:

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Common misconceptions about egg freezing

Our founder’s recent interview on the Podcast “Technophobia” got us thinking about common misconceptions about egg freezing that we hear in our Ovally consults:

1. I’ll wait until my mid/late 30s to freeze my eggs:

Egg/embryo freezing & IVF: What are the trigger shot and retrieval like? A personal account (2/3).

What does the trigger shot feel like, and how is the retrieval under anesthesia? Here’s Ovally founder Kathy’s personal account starting 36 hours before her egg retrieval until a few hours after the procedure. If you’re interested in the hormone stimulation period leading up to the egg retrieval, check out the previous blog post.

Egg/embryo freezing & IVF: What’s the stimulation period like? A personal account (1/3).

It’s one thing to read a summary of what happens during egg freezing or IVF, but we’ve found it’s often more helpful to read an honest, personal account of what every day of a treatment actually feels like. When Ovally founder Kathy froze embryos in Spain, she blogged about it every day – below is an unedited version of what the “stimulation period” was like for her, when she was giving herself daily injections of follicle-stimulating hormones. Even though everyone’s experience is slightly different, we hope that this will make the procedure more tangible:

Why do I need to retrieve more than one egg to hopefully have a baby later on?

Since a baby grows out of just one fertilized egg cell, it seems counterintuitive that you’d have to freeze more than one egg to increase your likelihood that your frozen eggs will result in a baby. However, while eggs seem to survive the freezing and subsequent warming relatively well, the actual IVF procedure tends to be a lot less efficient. You can think of the process from freezing an egg to implanting it in your uterus as a funnel that gets narrower: