Why egg freezing?
There are many reasons to consider egg freezing, or fertility preservation. It is now more common for women to freeze eggs. It allows women to take control of their fertility as they focus on the following priorities.
- Career or educational goals
- Looking for a life partner
- Trying to prepare financially or emotionally for a child
- Addressing a family history of early menopause
- Facing a cancer diagnosis
Motherhood on your terms at your time
Fertility Specialists of Texas (FST) has a proven track record of success in IVF and egg freezing. Our Dallas-Fort Worth fertility center is one of the first fertility practices in North Texas to help a patient have a live birth using this process.
As a premier program with one of the most highly-respected certified embryology laboratories in the nation, we are uniquely qualified to offer the latest treatments in fertility preservation that give our patients hope and safeguard their fertility so that they can build a family when the time is right.
What comes first when it comes to egg freezing?
It all starts with a consultation. Dallas-Fort Worth fertility center will order an anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) screening that indicates how you may respond to treatment. It also evaluates how many eggs you have remaining (ovarian reserve). You can have this quick, in-office blood test on any day of your cycle.
AMH testing is a great baseline test for any woman under the age of 35 who has been trying to conceive for about a year, or any woman over the age of 35 who has been trying for about six months.
The fertility preservation process
We will begin by giving you a series of fertility medications that will encourage your ovaries to grow and develop more eggs than usual. During this time, we will carefully monitor you with blood tests and ultrasounds to see when your eggs are mature. Retrieving the eggs is a brief procedure that takes less than half-an-hour. You will be under light anesthetic during the procedure. Typically, the doctor retrieves between 10 to 20 eggs from the ovaries.
After the eggs are collected, they will be frozen the same day using a rapid freezing technique called vitrification. This novel technology allows freezing of the eggs without the formation of ice inside the cell. This keeps the eggs in the state of suspended animation indefinitely.
When pregnancy is desired, months or years later, the eggs are thawed and fertilized via intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). One of the resulting embryos is then transferred to the uterus.
Contact us if you’d like to learn more about how you can freeze eggs. You can also call us at (214) 618-2044.
