Egg Freezing
What is Egg Freezing?
As women age, egg health drops off significantly. By freezing younger, healthier eggs, you can improve your chances of a successful pregnancy later in life. We offer a number of cryopreservation services, and we’re happy to discuss all of your options with you to find the best path for preserving your fertility.
why choose to freeze your eggs?
- Empowering Future Family Planning: Egg freezing offers women the ability to preserve their fertility, providing the opportunity to have children at a later time when it’s more suitable for their personal or professional circumstances.
- Advanced Preservation Technique: Utilizing the latest cryopreservation technology, egg freezing safely stores a woman’s eggs at a younger age, when they are of higher quality, increasing the chances of future pregnancy success.
- Beneficial for Medical Reasons: Egg freezing is an invaluable option for those undergoing medical treatments that might affect fertility or egg quality, such as chemotherapy or surgery, allowing them to preserve their eggs before proceeding with treatment.
- High Success Rates with Vitrification: The modern method of fast-freezing, known as vitrification, has significantly improved the success rates of egg freezing, ensuring better survival, fertilization, and pregnancy rates when the eggs are later used.
Who Is Egg Freezing Right For?
Egg Freezing at Pinnacle may be right for those who:
- Want to wait to have a child.
- Are AFAB (assigned female at birth) and undergoing or plan to undergo testosterone treatment.
- Have PCOS, endometriosis, or other diagnoses that can affect fertility.
- Are going through cancer treatments that can injure or destroy a healthy egg supply, like chemotherapy and radiation.
- Are undergoing surgical removal of a fallopian tube, an ovary, or the uterus.
The Egg Freezing Journey
Stimulating Egg Production
During this step, you’ll begin hormonal treatments by either taking a pill or an injectable medication. This medication encourages your ovaries to produce more mature eggs than they would naturally. The end goal is to get at least three mature and fully-developed eggs. We’ll track your egg development with blood tests and ultrasounds. It takes time for your body to adjust to the hormones and nurture your new eggs, so this stage can take several weeks.
Ovulation and Egg Retrieval
Once you’ve produced enough mature eggs, you’ll receive a hormone injection that induces ovulation (releasing the mature eggs). After about 36 hours, you’ll return to our office for the outpatient egg retrieval procedure. An anesthesiologist will place you under IV sedation and our specialists will remove the eggs. This only takes about 15 minutes, and you’ll rest comfortably afterwards in one of our recovery rooms. After about 30 minutes, you’ll be able to go home.
Egg Vitrification
Vitrification is a special way to freeze your eggs and embryos that avoids trauma to the cells. Water is removed from the eggs or embryos and replaced with an “antifreeze”. Then the egg is quickly brought to a very cold temperature. By removing the water and freezing it quickly, your eggs or embryos are safe from damaging ice crystal formation.
Get started on your fertility journey
