The agony of being told you have no frozen eggs left

As the dreams of scores of women are wrecked by fertility clinic scandal . . .

WHEN I read last week about more than 100 women discovering that their frozen eggs and embryos might not be viable because of a fault with the freezing process, my heart went out to them.

I’d like to say I couldn’t imagine how they must be feeling, but I could. Because I know first-hand exactly how it feels to have done everything you possibly can to preserve your fertility, then to have all hope snatched away from you. It is utterly devastating.

In my case, it wasn’t due to a technical error, but I can still recall vividly the phone call in July 2017 telling me that of the last seven eggs they’d defrosted, only five had thawed normally, and of those five only two had fertilised — both abnormally. There was no chance they’d go on to form an embryo, much less the baby I desperately wanted.

Years later, I can still remember how utterly floored I felt. If I dwell on it too much, the tears still prick in my eyes.

‘Nothing?’ I recall asking. ‘I’ve got nothing?’

In an instant, it felt like my dreams of motherhood had been stolen from me. I’m not someone prone to daydreams and flights of fantasy, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about the potential those frozen eggs held.

Although I knew they came with no guarantees, I couldn’t help but think what it might feel like to be pregnant; to have my baby in my arms; to see them become a walking, talking toddler.

It was only natural that having done all I could to ensure I could become a mother — three years previously, at the age of 36, I started three cycles of eggfreezing, in all 14 eggs at a cost of about €16,000 — I would wonder what my future offspring might look like, whether I’d have a son or a daughter and imagine the person they might become as they grew into adulthood.

Then, in an instant, there was nothing.

SO I KNOW exactly how the 136 patients who, in September and October 2022, froze their eggs and embryos at the assisted conception unit at Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Trust in London must feel.

In the past few weeks they will have received a letter telling them a ‘manufacturing issue’ with some bottles of a solution that may have been used to freeze their hard-won eggs and embryos could mean that they ‘may not survive the thaw process, and may not be able to be used in treatment’.

After my own shattering phone call, I tried to explain how heartbroken I felt. But everyday language seemed inadequate to describe the complexities of bereavement and frustration.

On eggedonblog.com, the website where I documented my treatment, I wrote that I felt ‘sad and angry and resentful’, and lamented the fact that I had ‘nothing to say that wasn’t crying and raging at the world that it was really unfair’.

Because, as I put it back then, ‘three years ago I froze my eggs, knowing that I might never have a child from those eggs, but knowing it was a positive step I could take at a time when everything looked really bleak.

‘I don’t regret it. I really don’t, but I didn’t just do it because I wanted to be able to look back with no regrets. I did it because I wanted the possibility of getting pregnant with eggs that were younger than I am. And I don’t have that possibility any more’.

Because that’s what frozen eggs and embryos are: possibilities. Some of the Guy’s Hospital patients will have been women, like me, who hadn’t met the right person to have a child with, but were worried about the impact their age might have on their fertility. It’s not impossible they could still go on to conceive with their own eggs. (I tried — and failed — to do this, and ultimately used donor eggs to become a mother.) However, others were cancer patients whose treatment may since have left them infertile.

But I don’t just feel compassion for these women, I feel a seething, furious outrage on their behalf. Because the hospital knew nearly a year ago that this was an issue.

In March last year, a mere six months after the women had frozen their eggs, it was alerted to the issue. So why has it taken so long to share the information?

This needless delay has only compounded the tragedy. When you’re talking about fertility, when every month counts, it can be the difference between success and failure.

When I was going through my own egg-freezing treatment, and subsequently attempting IVF with my own eggs at the age of 40, with every passing month I worried my fertility was dwindling. I bailed out of holidays so I could have treatment, and when a cycle had to be cancelled because I had a cyst on my ovary, I worried that was the one: my last fertile cycle.

So for the clinic to have been aware of these issues and — it appears — to have withheld them from patients for 11 months is utterly unforgivable. The arrogance, the disregard for the impact on patients’ lives is . . . well I was going to say unbelievable, but it’s not.

BECAUSE over the past ten years I’ve been treated by four fertility clinics, and while many of the staff I encountered were kind, there is a culture in these places that seems worryingly prevalent.

Whether it’s being expected to wait hours for a scheduled appointment, having to chase test results, or deal with thoughtless comments that feel casually cruel: the receptionist who told me if I didn’t pay the €140 for a blood test there and then, the results would be destroyed; the anaesthetist who hadn’t read my notes and seen that I was trying to conceive on my own with donor sperm, who asked where my other half was; the nurse who cheerily quizzed a desperate friend about her plans for Mother’s Day — it all smacks of a lack of consideration for the patient.

And this catastrophic delay in notifying the patients is the very pinnacle of this.

I know that if you are one of the women affected, nothing I say will change the sense of loss and injustice you are feeling.

But as someone once told me after yet another failed cycle of IVF, there are many ways to be a family and you’ll find the right one for you. When I received that devastating call, I could never have anticipated that, less than a year later, while I was trying — and failing — to get pregnant using a sperm donor, I’d meet the man who would go on to become my husband and the father of my child.

Nor could I have imagined that having a child of my own would involve the altruism of an egg donor, or that I had the capacity to love a child that I’m not genetically related to in the way that I fiercely, proudly adore my son. They are, unquestionably, the right family for me.