Egg storeage

To give a little back ground my husband an I are contemplating ICSI but have a few hurtles to jump before we can get there. One of them is a religious issue. I don't want to start a debate ect about it. But we are working with our minister in trying to find where we stand.

One of the thoughts raised is to only fertilise the eggs that we wish to put back at transferre and freeze the rest. (In a very similar fashion the the Gift style of IVF)

Has anyone ever heard of this being possible or not, ordoes anyone have any experience with this?

I am currantly in the process of changing FS as our currant Dr makes it a huge issue every time that we won't do traditional IVF and made it clear that GIFT is not going to be any better for us than IUI. They are also double the price of other clinics!

Hi,
I'm not sure on all the ins and outs here, but I believe it's much harder to freeze and thaw eggs than it is embryos, so you're likely to lose more.
I guess you have to try to balance your religious beliefs against medical reality - It's a big undertaking (emotionally, physically and financially) to go through IVF and I personally would not undergo GIFT if the success rate is so low. With regular IVF I have a ~40% chance of success and that is daunting enough!

There's definately no harm in getting a second opinion - hopefully you can find someone who can be a little more understanding of your beliefs. Bedside manner is important when you're going through all this.

All the best~~

i was going to say the same as Marcellus - the thaw rate for frozen eggs is much much lower - the eggs are just not viable. they are frozen as a single cell and that single cell has to survive the freezing and thawing process. embryos are frozen with at least a few cell intact and can afford to "lose" one or two of those cells at thaw.

i hope you can find a doctor that will work with you - but you may find the logistics are going to work against you - and the additional cost with going through repeat stim cycles if you lose your eggs at thaw could be crippling for you

good luck

I'm with the other girls. From everything i know there is very little success with freezing eggs - although I was reading recently that SIVF are having some success with a new snap freezing technique - but still not very high success.

I know that it is a very difficult topic but I wondered if you had considered fertilising and freezing more embryos and making a commitment to using all the ones that you have in the frezer. I know at least one person who has gone down this path. She decided that she would have a number (not all) of her collected eggs fertilised - this number roughly coincided with the number of kids that she thought that she would like long term. As it turned out she got pregnant with her last frozen embryo - and I think would have found it much harder to go through the several full stimulation cycles which was the alternative option for her. Just throwing something else in the mix.

Good luck with your decision.

Thanks ladies, I really hope that we can come to a decision that will help us concieve number 2 or beyound. We have been given a less than 5% chance of naturally concieving before they found I had Endometriosis, so until later this week we will not know by how much this will go down further. It seems since concieving our son our chances are falling rapidly. And that so called we have done this once we can do it again motto seems to have gone.

So far I have been able to find out information about social storing of eggs, but not anything about storing of eggs as aposed to embroys.

The decision to even look into this thus far has been incredibly hard, But I am hoping that what ever way we decide to go, things will so how be easier on us.

Hi Jodie

I just had a look on the sydneyIVF site - they have a bit of information about egg freezing. It is under the Fertility and Conception tab. This may help - it also gives stats on the results of a recent study.

They seem to define social storing of eggs as being someone who stores eggs for any reason that isn't medical (like for someone starting chemotherapy) so maybe although the information that you are finding defines social storage it is actually what you are looking for.

Hope that this helps.

wow this is very intersting, i like the idea of using up all your embryos. i really do not know anything about egg freezing.
good luck

We have similar religious beliefs and at this point in time we have a "no man left behind" policy regarding our embryos. Basically, we will use them all, and if we feel that we can not have any more children, any embryos unused at that point will be donated to another infertile couple.

After my first egg collection I started to panic a little when 26 eggs were collected. But only 15 of them fertilised and only 4 grew to blastocyst. All embryos were frozen at that point in time as I had quite bad OHSS. When I fell pregnant with the first transfer I started to panic a little. But I miscarried, sadly. Our next transfer had two embryos fail to thaw and lead to another miscarriage with our last remaining embryo.

If you are going to grow to blastocyst stage, the number of embryos drops off very quickly. If you have other fertility problems which are encountered during your course of treatment than things can become even more complicated.

Our second egg collection gave us 32 eggs. We froze 7 blastocysts from that cycle (an even worse case of OHSS) but only two of those were able to be thawed and used. One miscarried, the other just didn't work.

Final egg collection gave us 20 eggs, but we only managed to get three day three embryos. Two are frozen and one has grown into my 14 month old son.

It's hard to forecast how many eggs will be collected with each cycle. It's equally hard to forecast how many will grow to become viable embryos to transfer. It's good to discuss options, but difficult to set a plan in stone when so many things can change along the way.

I wish you all the best with your decisions.

BW

I totally understand the moral dilemma that you are going through. It is tough to try and decide what the right thing to do is. We were faced with the same thing 20 months ago. We had decided that we would freeze all but 1 implanted embryo and i was panicking that we might have twenty+ frozen and I wasn't willing to destroy any We only ended up with two viable to freeze so fortunately it has been a much easier journey, morally. After the birth of our daughter from icsi 10months ago we are now ready to use the embryos.

In hindsight i would have said to only freeze the amount of embryos according to the number of children we wanted. It is such a big decision that you have to make at a time when you're not really capable of making decisions. Good luck

Update...

Had my follow up appointment with FS last week. Our thought of only fertilising 2 and freezing remaining eggs was actually brought up by the Dr first. And I was pleased straight away. unfortunately we walked out of the appointment feeling less comfortable with the Dr and even more in a quandry as to where we feel comfortable with things.

We honestly said to each other, "when did Dr's become salesmen?" "He really did try extra hard to sell us on IVF." We felt we were talked to rather than having an open discussion. There was loads of boasting from the Dr about his skills and boards he sits on ect. (all of which we have heard before at previous appointments.) I just felt that he is not the Dr for us if he can not listen to a word we say.