‘You don’t have any embryos to transfer,’ said the voice on the phone. Of the 14 eggs I’d frozen, not one had given me a baby

longer had any frozen eggs that were four years younger than me. if i wanted to have a child, i was going to have to have conventional iVF — and if 36-year-old me hadn’t managed to produce good enough eggs to get pregnant, what hope did 40-year-old me have?

Most of all, i felt alone. Egg-freezing is so new that, although i knew lots of people who had frozen their eggs, i knew no one else who had gone back, defrosted them, tried to get pregnant — and failed.

there are many people who will suggest that the least surprising thing about this story is the outcome.

AFtEr

all, earlier this month, in an article published in BJog: an international Journal of obstetrics and gynaecology, experts warned that the best time for a woman to freeze her eggs is when she is in her early 20s and certainly under the age of 37.

at 36, i might just have snuck in under their cut- off point, but clearly, it wasn’t early enough.

‘the majority of women are taking measures to preserve their fertility too late, as a “lastditch” effort, instead of a planned and informed choice in their early to mid-30s,’ wrote the experts, pointing out that the proportion of frozen eggs that leads to a baby among women under 36 is 8.2 per cent, while among those aged 36 to 39 the figure is just 3.3 per cent.

Put simply, if you freeze your eggs aged 37, you want to be freezing 30 of them if you hope to get just one baby.

that’s not great news, given that, of the 1,173 egg-freezing cycles recorded by the uK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology authority (HFEa) in 2016, 68 per cent involved women over the age of 35 and the average number of eggs frozen per cycle was just eight.

the thing is, when i decided to freeze my eggs in 2014, i knew the odds weren’t stacked in my favour.

When i looked into it, i found that the total number of babies born from frozen eggs in the uK was still only in double figures.

But four years ago, some hope was better than none.

a year before, i had split up with the man i thought i was going to marry. at the age of 36, i found myself heartbroken, single and wanting a child.

My ‘choices’, such as they were, were unappealing: desperately date in the hope of finding a man who wanted to have children sooner, rather than later; attempt to become a mother on my own using donor sperm; or try to get pregnant on a one-night stand.

Hitting pause and freezing my eggs seemed like a good option.

the rhetoric around ‘social’ egg-freezing has painted women like me as the want-it-all generation — high-achieving women who don’t want to step off the career ladder to have children, but instead squeeze in eggfreezing between board meetings.

those are hurtful and unfair assumptions to confront when you’re also dealing with a failed relationship and dwindling fertility.

Especially when they couldn’t be further from the truth — while i enjoy my career as a marketing consultant, i have never prioritised it over my personal life.

But this attitude even pervades fertility clinics. Fellow egg-freezer, susie, 41, says: ‘at one of my appointments, a nurse asked me: “so, when are you going to use them?”

‘it was as if she expected me to say: “Well, i’ve scheduled it for september when the merger’s gone through and i’m back from my

holiday in the Maldives”!’ The truth is that Susie, like me, wanted to freeze her eggs to buy herself time — time to find a partner in the way that we had when we were in our carefree 20s and early 30s, before the threat of age-related infertility started looming large.

‘It’s one of life’s cruellest ironies,’ she told me. ‘You want a child, but you can’t have one because you don’t have a man. And you can’t find a man because you want a child so badly.’

BuT

Susie and I are far from alone. When I decided to freeze my eggs, I knew one woman who had done it — I now know at least five.

As one friend responded when I shared my news: ‘You and everybody else!’

Indeed, egg-freezing is rapidly becoming the norm among educated women who are either financially independent or, as often seems to be the case, have parents willing to invest in the promise of a future grandchild.

And it’s not just my friends. In 2014, as the path was relatively untrodden, I set up a blog to document my experiences ( egged onblog.com).

Since then, the phenomenon has exploded. Over the course of writing my blog, I’ve been in touch with hundreds of women freezing their eggs or thinking about it. Every one of them was doing it because they were single or in the very early stages of a relationship. It’s what some experts have started calling ‘emotional infertility’.

But if you think that the process of egg-freezing is going to make you forget your single status, think again.

Egg-freezing is basically the first half of IVF, so you spend a lot of time alone in waiting rooms, trying to be brave as you wait for yet another invasive scan or life-changing test result, all the while surrounded by couples with their arms around each other.

Nothing makes you feel quite so alone as Googling the side-effects of the hormones you are taking, only to find online chatrooms full of IVFers discussing how supportive their darling hubbies are being.

I’d undoubtedly have been better off freezing my eggs at the age of 25, both from an emotional point of view — no one likes to feel they are in the last-chance saloon — and a fertility point of view.

But not only was the technology not around back then — it’s only in the past five or so years that a more successful fast-freezing technique has been routinely used — I simply didn’t have the money. I spent £14,000 of my savings on three cycles of egg-freezing.

Even if I had frozen my eggs at 25, the law states that eggs frozen for ‘social’, rather than ‘medical’, reasons can only be stored for ten years.

So by the time that I wanted to use them, they would legally have had to be destroyed.

Fertility experts are campaigning to change the law but, for now, the best advice they can give is that women freeze their eggs in their early 30s — a sweet spot that straddles their best chance of storing healthy eggs for a period of time that might actually prove to be useful.

At 36, I knew eggfreezing bought me no guarantees. But it did buy me breathing space, the chance to date without feeling like every encounter was an interview with a potential father, and let me focus on what was important to me. And so, in the year I turned 40, when, despite various possibilities along the way, I found myself still single, I decided to defrost my eggs and undergo IVF with donor sperm in a bid to become a mother on my own.

This was not a decision taken lightly. It had taken me four years to make peace with the idea of my child not knowing their biological father; with the idea that emotionally, financially and practically, I was enough.

This was not my first choice, for me or my hypothetical child, but I truly believed that it was the least worst option — for us both.

It was an inevitably tense time. Of the first seven eggs that were defrosted and fertilised, only one formed a good enough quality embryo to be transferred back into me.

After an interminable two weeks, a blood test revealed that I wasn’t pregnant. Still, I told myself, who gets pregnant the first time around? I’ve got another seven eggs — surely I’ll get a couple of embryos from them?

And I sustained the optimism, the conviction that getting my head around the idea of being a solo mother had been the hard bit — right up until the phone call that told me I didn’t have any embryos to transfer. Not one.

I felt angry and resentful at the universe. I was utterly floored by the news.

I’d tried so hard to make it work. It just seemed unfair.

Above all, I was incredibly sad. Not just for me, but for the many other women like me who followed my blog in hope, crossing their fingers that my news would validate their own choices. I felt like I had let them down.

Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing. If, in 2014, I had known what I know now, I wouldn’t have frozen my eggs.

In fact, I’d have gone a step further, used donor sperm and frozen fertilised embryos.

What’s more, I’d have had those embryos genetically tested before I froze them, so I knew that they were chromosomally normal and stood an above-average chance of resulting in a pregnancy.

( More robust embryos can withstand this sort of test, but eggs can’t, so you have no idea whether the eggs you are freezing are duds.)

But when, at the time, I had considered freezing a combination of eggs and embryos, an embryologist advised had against it.

‘If you freeze half of them with donor sperm and you find a partner, that’s half your eggs you won’t be able to use with him,’ he pointed out. Who knows what would have happened if I had tried to create embryos back then?

Maybe I’d have found out that my eggs weren’t up to it, or maybe I’d have decided to try to conceive on my own sooner than I did.

But I do know that, these days, when women contact me through the blog, asking about my experience, I urge them to think hard about what they want.

If your friend or your sister or your daughter is thinking about freezing her eggs, this is what I’d say to her: if you know that you’d never go down the road of trying to become a solo mother and that meeting a man and not being able to have a child with him is a better worst-case scenario for you than having a child on your own, by all means freeze only your eggs.

But if you’re even considering going it alone, then freeze your best chance of becoming a mother — freeze embryos.

Yes, I know you don’t feel ready to do it. Yes, I know it’s the end of a dream. Yes, I know it’s more expensive — I spent about £2,000 on donor sperm to convert my frozen eggs to embryos.

And yes, it’s so much more of an emotional investment.

After all, you’re choosing the genetic father of your future children when you’re still hoping to meet him in real life.

But, despite all that, do it for the future you. I wish I had.

It would be easy to feel exploited by an unethical industry, sold false hope. But I’m an intelligent woman. I did my research and I knew that the likelihood of success was slim.

Maybe I did choose to see the more optimistic statistics, rather than the gloomier ones. But no one over-promised me anything.

THE

simple fact is that, at that time, I felt even a 3 per cent chance of success made it worth it. I still do.

And I’ve still not given up on my hopes of a child.

After my frozen eggs failed me, I decided to try conventional IVF using my ‘fresh’ eggs — if 41-yearold eggs can be considered in any way fresh.

Three unsuccessful cycles later, I’m still not a mother.

But, in a weird twist of fate, at a time when I least expected to, I’ve met a wonderful man.

He wants children, but who knows what will happen. It’s still very early days, but maybe we’ll end up being one of those handholding couples in the waiting room of an IVF clinic.

If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that you never really know what’s around the corner and — as the old saying has it — life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

But, for the first time in years, I’m making those plans with someone else.

undoubtedly, there will be people who think I’ve thrown good money after bad.

I’d estimate that, including the egg-freezing, the attempts to get pregnant using my frozen eggs, the donor sperm, the three subsequent attempts at IVF, the drugs, the blood tests and all the rest of it, it’s been the best part of £50,000.

But, despite the money I’ve spent and the tears I’ve cried, and even though I don’t yet have a baby, I don’t regret a thing.

Freezing my eggs at 36 means that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life wondering whether doing it might have made the difference between me having my own biological child or not. And that certainty is worth everything.