Freezing your eggs while juggling work and a social life

If you’ve decided it is time to prepare for your future by preserving your fertility, you sound like a super prepared boss babe who's probably researched the process and knows what to expect. 

But just knowing what to expect at the clinic itself is only part of it. 

Before you get started, make sure to take all aspects of your current life into consideration to ensure that the treatment process will minimize any affects on your performance at work or upend any upcoming social plans. 

Often when women decide they would like to freeze their eggs, they don't always realize how involved the process will be. 

These weeks will be peppered with office visits, calling your insurance company, scheduling medication delivery, prepping medication and administering injections daily for a couple of weeks, and potentially taking time off from work to undergo the actual egg retrieval. 

You might only have to undergo this process once or it might be recommended that you do a second or even third round depending on how many eggs you are able to freeze from your first cycle. 

There are many great resources out there that explain the general egg freezing process and your clinic will walk you through the steps and teach you how to use the medications as well. 

While you'll get great info on the clinical details, they don't always point out how the process can impact your personal life outside of treatment.

To prep for the personal, here's what to know going in: 

When researching a potential fertility clinic to work with for the egg freezing process, make sure to consider its distance from your work or your home. 

During the stimulation process, which is typically 10-14 days, you will likely have early morning office visits for monitoring. 

These are visits where your reproductive endocrinologist will track your follicle growth and measure hormone levels to make sure you're progressing well with the medications and that you'll get as many eggs frozen as possible. 

As you progress in your two-week treatment, you'll have to go in for monitoring every day so that your physician can assess what date your trigger shot will be and schedule your egg retrieval. 

Because of all these visits, you need to consider what clinic location would work best for you. 

If you’re a busy boss babe and need to minimize your time out of the office, choose a clinic based on its proximity to your work. That way you can limit travel time in case any clinic appointments are scheduled in the morning right before work or, if you’ll have to leave during work, you can at least ensure that you’ll be out of the office for the least amount of time possible. 

If you can’t find a clinic near your work or if you work from home, then choose a clinic closest to where you live.

That way it’ll be easy to head back to your house after an appointment and get ready for work or get back to your home for your morning Zoom meeting.

Check out clinics in your area.

Most medications that you will take for an egg freezing cycle are considered ‘specialty’ medications, which most often are only available through a mail-order pharmacy instead of picking them up locally. Luckily, this actually helps if you have a busy schedule! 

Make sure that you are aware of the delivery terms because some of these shipments may require you to be home on the day to receive them. 

If your delivery is able to be dropped off without a signature, that’s great! But you'll want to get to that package as soon as possible, as certain fertility medications need to be refrigerated.

These types of medications are shipped with a cold pack but it’s best to store those meds in your fridge as soon as possible to avoid thaw of the coolant and the hassle of reordering if your medication has been compromised.

Most specialty pharmacies can send all of your medication order as one shipment so if possible, maybe try working from home on that one delivery day. 

Once your package arrives, it’s a good idea to take inventory against your treatment calendar your clinic gave you so that you can make sure everything you need is accounted for and nothing is missing. 

Before moving forward with your egg freezing cycle, take a look at your personal calendar over the next month to see if you will be out of town at all. 

If you have a trip planned with friends just days after you start injections, you may have to make the choice of rescheduling your trip or pushing your egg freezing cycle back until the next month instead when you'll be in town for your appointments. 

You might think, “well it looks like I’ll be back in town right before my tentative retrieval date so I'll just bring my shots on the trip and be back in time”. Maybe not! The date listed on your treatment calendar is tentative. It might not be the date that your body decides on! 

This is why you go in for so much monitoring towards the end of your medication protocol. 

Your physician estimates a tentative retrieval date or date range on your calendar because the official date is dependent on your body’s individual response to the medications. You'll most likely only have 48 hours notice of when your egg retrieval will actually take place.

You need to go in for every scheduled monitoring appointment to make sure that you don’t miss your window for when the retrieval can actually take place. 

If you miss your window, you could end up getting less eggs or even no eggs frozen from a cycle. Then you'd have to schedule for another cycle the next month with a whole new round of meds and appointments and payments. 

If you travel for work regularly and know you'll be out of town during the early days of your egg freezing cycle, let your nurse know and they can always help you set up a plan to work around trips that can't be rescheduled. 

You can travel with your medications in a cooler until you get to your destination and you may be able to find a clinic nearby where you are staying that can get you in for remote monitoring. This way, your physician can still get the information she/he needs to track your progress. 

This kind of arrangement can usually only be done in the early days of your stimulation process when less monitoring is needed and you won't be in jeopardy of still being out of town once your retrieval is scheduled. 

Bottom line, make sure that you choose to start a cycle during a stretch of a few weeks where you know you’ll be in town to avoid having to choose between cancelling fun plans or placing treatment on hold. 

If you’re active on the dating scene, keep in mind that you’ll have to abstain from sexual intercourse during the stimulation process. 

Your body will be much more fertile than usual as your ovaries will be preparing to release more eggs than what is typical for natural ovulation. 

You might also feel bloated from the medications, which could leave you feeling fairly uncomfortable for a number of days. 

So consider clearing your dating schedule for just a couple of weeks. Maybe keep your date around if they’re cool to help with injections though! 

Speaking of injections, if you’re struggling with the idea of wielding a needle, check out our guide on tips and alternatives for the injection process. 

Good luck!

Check out our article where we break down the most up-to-date research that tells you egg freezing success by age and how many eggs you should aim to freeze.

Up Next, watch: Most Common Egg Freezing Questions Answered by a Fertility Doctor