A 33-year-old single woman's account of her experience freezing her eggs

Traditional in-vitro fertilisation between a couple would feel, I imagine, like the ultimate creative collaboration. There are two people (sometimes more), there is an egg, there’s sperm, and ideally, you take a baby home when you’re done. This is the story of a 33-year-old single woman freezing her eggs without a collaborator, hoping to safeguard a far-off arbitrary dream. It felt terribly isolating, embarrassing, and singular in its experience.

Getting married, being a wife, having a baby, and putting that before any independent goal (not just professional aspirations) is embroidered into the fabric of every society. And the truth is, there is unkindness toward women who don’t conform to these structures.

Now that I’ve prefaced this essay with every bit of feminist edge I was itching to let out, let’s get into it. In February 2020, my dermatologist asked me to do a hormone panel to understand why my pesky acne was flaring up. Studying the results, I locked in on a reading I had never seen before. The Anti-Müllerian Hormone VOICES 83 (AMH) indicates ovarian health and egg reserve. There was a figure considered “normal” for my age group and I fell desperately outside of it.

I was 29 and felt my body had betrayed me… or had I betrayed my body?

The proverbial biological clock took its place to remind me that I was running out of time. From then on, my AMH came to underscore every major I decision I made from then on.

Having children has always been my greatest wish. It wasn’t until years later that I realised being single, perhaps never marrying or marrying later in life, wasn’t a reason to not have them.

I wanted to freeze my eggs immediately, but my doctors and parents said I was too young, and believed I’d be married in time for it to not matter. Before I could protest what felt like an injustice, it was March and the world went into Covid-induced lockdown. Over the next few years the impact of the pandemic ebbed and flowed as did my AMH panic.

Last year, the AMH nag made a nasty resurgence. Again, I was hostage to a clock whose alarm became louder and louder. I decided it was time to grab life by the reigns (eggs?).

My gynaecologist is warm and motherly, and never misses an opportunity to tell me to find a husband because that’s what you need to make a baby…

After many years of walking into her clinic alone, she finally ceded her stance and said, “Okay, you should freeze”. She directed me toward a fertility expert who was thrilled that I’d come in at 33 and not 43.

We did standard blood work, a few hormone panels, and many scans to draw the clearest picture (literally) of my ovaries. They wanted to know exactly how many follicles develop naturally to calculate the dosage for treatment. To prep for retrieval, I quit alcohol, sugar, gluten, and dairy for three months leading up to my first shot. And I was guzzling vitamins by the gallon— omegas, CoQ10, Folic Acid, digestive enzymes.

I received my first shot on Day 1 of my period in January 2024. My mum stood behind me holding my head, praying loudly, while I lay on my doctor’s table inhaling and exhaling to the rhythm of a shamanic drumming track I found on YouTube.

The first drug stimulates your ovaries to produce more follicles than it would in a regular cycle. This went on for six days, painlessly. During that first week I felt liberated, relaxed, and totally in control.

This wore off when Day 7 came. That day, my doctors introduced a drug called the antagonist which prevents ovulation. Laying and humming as I did every day, I flew into a panic as every drop of this new drug travelled through my body with the sting of hellfire. Liberation faded. I felt suddenly at the mercy of my doctors, raging hormones, and a body I didn’t recognise. I was bruised and enormous.

I received a combination of two or three injections daily for 13 days. On Day 14, I got the “trigger” shot which signals to your ovaries that it’s time to ovulate. It is administered exactly 36 hours before the time of retrieval.

The retrieval itself was painless. They gave me general anaesthesia that lasted for about 25 minutes. I was slightly uncomfortable when I woke up, but nothing compared to how I felt before. I went home four hours later and was told to expect my period in two weeks.

That didn’t happen for me.

I took a beating—my body, my hormones, my mind. I had ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and suffered from painful gut stress, hormone fluctuations, erratic and painful periods. The recovery took months.

The egg freezing process has been by far the most emotionally and physically taxing experience of my life. Having said that, I would do it again in second. Having children and doing it on my time, with or without a partner, was more important than any interim discomfort.

A friend who divorced recently decided to freeze her eggs this year too. We were chatting one evening and she said, “I can barely think about the future when I am trying to focus on the present…to be able to give myself options and have the freedom to exercise those options is the greatest gift I can give myself.”

I felt that in my bones.

I know I sound like I come from privilege. I do. But what is the purpose of privilege if I don’t use it to make my life better? What is the point of going to the best universities and exposing yourself to the most revolutionary philosophies, only to come home and live like a provincial schoolgirl who died centuries ago?

I used to feel dependent waiting for that abstract “someone” to fulfil my dream. Freezing my eggs took the sting of that “wait” away. To be able to navigate and steer my own course is the very essence of my privilege.

I know I won’t go down in history, and they won’t name any streets or airports after me. Maybe the only thing I will ever do is use these eggs to have a baby, who will change the way the world looks at his mother and every other woman like her. If that is all I ever do, this whole ordeal would be well worth it.

Illustration: Sumedha Abhyankar

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