Tag Archives: egg freezing

A sober wedding

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So I went to the wedding, and I didn’t drink. In fact in one of those beautiful/tragi-comic ironies, I actually drank less than the pregnant women at the wedding. While I watched them treat themselves to a glass or two of champagne, I barely had a token sip during the speeches to avoid looking conspicuous. Looking like you’re drinking when you’re not is hard. Although sparkling water with ice and lemon does a mean imitation of gin and tonic. And it helps if you volunteer to go to the bar – or if one of your friends in the know kindly offers to get you a ‘gin and tonic’ when they go to the bar.

But you know what? Having dated sober, Continue reading →

Imperfect timing

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If I had tried really, really hard to pick a time when I would LEAST like to be not drinking and injecting myself with hormones, it would probably be this week. Which is, of course, why today I’m starting the injections for my third – and final – cycle of egg freezing.

This week I have in my diary: 1 x reunion of old work colleagues, 1 x best friend’s hen do, 1 x best friend’s wedding, 1 x work night out, 1 x boozy Sunday lunch with the girls. I’ve already had to cancel the blow dry I had planned for the morning of the wedding because I have to have my day 5 scan that morning instead.

Why am I doing this? Because there’s never a good time. Because there’s always Continue reading →

Going it alone

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I think I’ve touched briefly in this blog on whether, if I don’t meet someone, I want a child enough to try to get pregnant using donor sperm. It preoccupies me more than it should. Or maybe not more than it should. I found myself lying in bed the other night trying to work out how much money I would have to earn in order to put a child in nursery so that I could work to look after us both.

I know that I’ve been at kids’ birthday parties and watched them blowing out the candles on their cakes with both their parents, and wondered whether, Continue reading →

The Kirstie Allsopp thing…

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I REALLY didn’t want to write this post. To be honest, I didn’t see what I could say that would actually add anything to the reams of newsprint and fuck-tonne of pixels that have already been devoted to supporting/denigrating her and her argument – and my view on that hasn’t really changed. But it’s just not gone away. Nearly a week later and people are still going on about it. Sigh. So I thought I’d write something.

If you’ve been living in the mountains of Tibet, or Jupiter or something, you might not know that last week Continue reading →

Eggs or embryos?

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When I first embarked on this whole thing, in my head, I was going to do one cycle of egg freezing, end up with 20 eggs and freeze half of them as eggs and and get the other half fertilised with donor sperm and freeze them as embryos. (Oh the naivety of ignorance. Basically I didn’t really have a fucking clue.)

The thing was, I’d done a (negligible) bit of research and it looked like the success rates from embryos were better than the success rates from eggs, and I figured that if, in X years time (where X is a number I haven’t yet decided upon) I was still single and decided to Continue reading →

Existentialist blog angst

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How often should I be blogging? Yet again a week has passed and I’ve not updated this at all. I think there are a few reasons for this. As I said in my last post, once I’ve got my social life back, the prospect of spending nights in, with just a blog for company, is slightly less appealing. Also, I set this blog up to talk about freezing my eggs and when I’m not actually going through a cycle, there’s a limit to how much there is to say. (Although admittedly there are a few posts Continue reading →

The gory details

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Sorry, sorry, I’ve been rubbish – it’s nearly a week since my last post. My excuse? Umm, well, I can’t lie; as soon as I was able to drink alcohol again, I was going out and drinking and seeing people. Which obviously meant less time sitting at home on my own and thus fewer – ok, no – posts.

But I’m back, feeling guilty. And also realising that I’ve rather shied away from some of the less sanitised aspects of egg freezing. Which is crap of me, because this blog was meant to be “everything you wanted to know but never dared ask…” so that’s this post. The gory details. Readers of a sensitive disposition might want to skip it. It includes words like “discharge” and “bleeding”. Continue reading →

Adding it up

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In my last two posts, I talked about the egg collection and what they actually do. What I didn’t talk about was how many eggs they got. Before you go into the procedure, they have a pretty good idea of how many follicles are going to be big enough to drain the fluid from. And the expectation is that in that fluid is going to be an egg. But, of course, there’s no guarantee that every follicle will contain an egg, or that every egg will be of good enough quality to freeze.

I know that my clinic focuses on minimal stimulation – they say it’s safer for the patient, and cheaper as you use fewer drugs, and that the end result is Continue reading →

But HOW do they do it?

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On my twitter feed today – I’m there as @EggedOnBlog, so do come and say hello – I saw a post from @RedMagDaily flagging an interview with author Samantha Shannon that said ‘Write the story you want to write.’ Me being me, I read it too quickly and thought it said ‘Write the story you want to read’ which I thought sounded like a good maxim (and, actually is possibly the same as writing the story you want to write.)

Because that’s what this blog was meant to be about. I wanted to write the story that I wish had been out there when I was thinking about freezing my eggs. And I’m not always sure I’ve done that terribly well. Continue reading →

Harvest festival

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Today was the day that I had my eggs collected – or harvested – I feel slightly like a battery chicken – although I didn’t have to lay them, that would have been weird(er). Because this was my second time around, I knew what to expect – no food – just water – for six hours before sedation and then nothing at all for two hours before. I was booked in for 9.30am and so woke up at about 7am to guzzle a load of water because a nurse told me last time that you tend to recover better from the sedation if you’re well hydrated.

I blow dried my hair and put make-up on before I went – and I refused to dress in tracksuit bottoms, I wore my regular skinny jeans. I think it’s all Continue reading →