I froze more eggs during COVID! Now I’ve done 3 cycles and feel I have abundant eggs. Even if none of them turn into a baby whenever I’m ready to have them, I feel like I gave it a solid try and am free of biological clock time scarcity. FB posts from friends have motivated me to freeze my eggs, so this post is my way of passing on and adding to the story.
Birth control unlocked freedom for uneducated women, giving the choice to go to school, to get a job. Egg freezing is the 2nd half of that equation. Egg freezing unlocks freedom for educated women, giving us the choice to enjoy the fruits of our careers instead of feeling like we’re sacrificing personal life for career, or being rushed because of time scarcity. For the first time in human history, the 2 technologies give women male-like freedom over their reproductive destinies. Egg freezing + birth control level the playing field for women. Until a few years ago, I never thought of a new path towards domestic bliss because, until the last few decades, stories of successful women being single moms via surrogates at age 45 didn’t seem accessible, financially or biologically. But now there are other stories that are possible, and we’re the first generation that will see what kinds of families we’ll create.
The happily-ever-after story I learned as a kid went like this: I’d effortlessly marry my childhood sweetheart (even though I didn’t have one), we’d take over the world together by day while making love all night, and when we’d sufficiently mastered and indulged that phase of life, start pushing out as many babies as possible. In high school, I chastised my best friend for dating idiots who were clearly beneath her. In college, I didn’t date seriously, especially no one my senior year because, even if I liked the guy, we were going to get jobs in different cities and break up anyway. I didn’t date for most of my 20’s because I was focused on my work and my family. But when I hit 30, I realized that my family fantasy was not coming true. It had already not happened. I had to catch up! My high school friends were long married. My MIT friends weren’t married yet, but they were heading there.
My executive coach asked me, “How old is your dad? Do you want him to have a relationship with your children? Right, so when do you need to marry by? So how many dates do you need to go on per week?” I was busy running my company, and I resented that I, the great Nancy Hua, had to go on dates with internet strangers just to build pipeline. Why couldn’t I effortlessly fall in love with some supermodel genius who was already my best friend and had loved me for years, as per my childhood fantasy? Instead, I was stooping to swiping on apps.
I told my personal trainer my dating stories to make him laugh. He said, “You’re such a badass. I told my friends your dating stories. That last guy isn’t good enough for you.” Then he looked at me aghast, “Are you crying?!” I couldn’t explain why I was crying into my towel, mid-dead-lift. When he said, “You can have any guy you want. Every girl here wants to look more like you,” I cried harder. When people told me they were sure I’d find someone, I’d feel so hopeless and heartbroken. One of my executives discovered this the hard way when he remarked during our 1:1, “You’re the most eligible catch I can think of,” and I burst into tears. “Why are you crying?” he asked, eyes wide. “Don’t go into the office or the bathroom in case the team sees you.”
Dating was not fun for me because I was doing it out of fear, so I’d try frantically dating in bursts, get tired and sad and delete all the apps, take 8 months off during which I’d distract myself with my friends and my work, then get scared of dying alone again and re-download all the apps. This happened for several years. With my biological clock counting down, I wondered if I should just settle.
Then I stopped being CEO of my company and decided to never do anything that I wouldn’t do solely for the fun of it again. This included dating, because dating for me was about alleviating the fear of being alone, not about the joy of dating. I got curious about all my fears and sat with them. I was scared of my friends leaving me behind, of not prioritizing me once they got married and had kids, of being a single mom, of being lonely. I sat with each fear, and looked at the opposite story. I thought of how I’d seen married friends get divorced, how I’d grown closer to friends after they’d married and had children, how it could be better to be a single mom than co-parent with someone who wasn’t right for you, how married people could be even lonelier than single people. I saw how I was making finding a partner the Way to Having a Happy Family, when really it was no guarantee of happiness, as evidenced by so much experience I’d personally witnessed and experienced. I started looking for counterexamples and saw them everywhere, single moms, successful women I knew like my VC’s, or celebrities like Lucy Liu or Shonda Rhimes, raising children on their own even though they could probably marry genius supermodels if they wanted. I started to see another way the happily ever after story could happen.
I wrote on my goals doc, “Freeze enough eggs such that I feel abundant about future progeny.” Then I did nothing for years.
One day, Diane posted on FB about freezing her eggs, which inspired me to get off my butt. I did one cycle, then thought I was done. But my founder friends told me stories that scared me into intending to do more cycles. I procrastinated that until Jessica posted on FB about freezing her eggs. Then I did 2 more cycles and crossed off “freeze enough eggs” from my goals list.
In my 20’s, I thought I wasn’t afraid of being alone, or afraid of anything, but I was just better able to ignore fear then. My 30’s forced me to face my fears, which I’m grateful for because now I don’t have those fears. Facing fear, I saw that the fear I was avoiding was with me all along, and that I was fine. I was always feeling it even when I was running from it. So it’s better to love it and feel it instead of trying to control it, which is futile and was actually making everything worse. Trying to control my emotions or the future is like building a sandcastle. It’s a fight against nature. Life wants to shift and change. Emotions want to be felt, to move and to move you. All I can do is play with it. And when I dance instead of control, I see life can be better than I’m able to imagine.
Now I look forward to potentially being a single mom, to dying alone. I’ve embraced being a cat lady. Not to say that I’ve given up on love! I want to love again and raise a family with a man I’m devoted to. I’m just no longer afraid of that not happening. Rather than settling, my standards have gotten higher over time because I love my friends and my aloneness and my cat more every day, and anything new would have to be better than investing in my existing exquisite life. I look forward to making beating my aloneness as hard as possible, and to being delighted if it ever happens.
The Egg Freezing Process:
Each cycle took 8-10 days. So fast! COVID is a great time to freeze eggs because, unlike my first cycle, I don’t travel or do anything, freeing my body to do nothing but cook up eggs. The first cycle, years ago, I went to UCSF because Diane used them and it was close to my work. They extracted 16 and froze 11 eggs.
My friend Jessica went to RMA so I decided to use them for my extractions this year. Sart.org only had data for RMA’s NJ office, but that data was good and Jessica is smart, so I went with them. I loved RMA! They were really communicative over text and super organized. They worked during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
At RMA, the 1st cycle took place a week or so after my period. The time from 1st injection to extraction was 10 days. I went in about every 3 days so they could check on the follicles, and I found the process fast and fun. I never felt like they were wasting my time or being inefficient. Everyone was smart and nice. I loved interacting with everyone and highly recommend them.
I injected myself with 1-3 medications every night for 10 days. I figure out how to have fun no matter what I’m doing, so I generally enjoyed injecting myself. I felt like I was playing at being a mad scientist mixing powders and tapping for air bubbles. I found it satisfying to *poink* into my juicy flesh. I did get scared towards the end of the last cycle when I started making mistakes. I bruised myself by hitting a blood vessel or something somehow, and I injected air by forgetting to expel the air, which made me scared I was going to die, but a doctor friend said I was fine.
The extraction took about an hour and I was knocked out. When I woke up, the first thing I exclaimed was, “I feel great!” They said they extracted 27 eggs and froze 21.
The 2nd cycle took place immediately after my period, and was just like the 1st cycle except 2 days shorter and with fewer side effects. The time from 1st injection to extraction was 8 days. They extracted 19 and froze 16. With 40+ eggs banked, I felt abundant about future progeny.
Costs per cycle:
$8K for the procedure.
~$2K for medications. You don’t know how much medicine you’ll need because it depends on how your body responds. Alto delivers same day, so you can avoid ordering more medication until you’re sure to save $. Also they give you a caramel with every delivery, so you’re incentivized to increase delivery count.
Side Effects:
The first cycle I did with UCSF, I don’t remember having any side effects even though I was worried about acting crazy. I did feel sore after the procedure and watched hours of Reign (a show I’ve never watched before or since) and shop for elaborate ball gowns, which is uncharacteristic of me, but that was just for 1 day.
The first cycle with RMA, I gained 9 pounds in 3 days! I’ve never bloated like that before, and it was uncomfortable. Lying on the exam table, I felt like a queen bee whose limbs had withered off, only a gigantic thorax remaining with drones swarming around me feeding me royal jelly while I pooped out eggs. It was water weight, and the day before the procedure I somehow lost 4 pounds, maybe because I had swapped the hormones for the trigger shot. Anyway, a week after the procedure, I was back to my normal weight.
I babied myself this whole time with lots of heating pads and soups and basically followed what I guessed my cousin would say Traditional Chinese Medicine would say, and basically soupifying everything before I ate it (even fruit) and under-washing my hair. I started getting into making mushroom barley and other veggie soups. I bought a bread machine, an electric steamer, and tons of wild rice. But when those hormones went away, so did the urge to bake.
The final time with RMA, I didn’t bloat, which made me worried it wasn’t working, but it was. We did this cycle immediately after my period, whereas with the previous cycle, we started injections about a week before I would’ve normally ovulated, so maybe that made a difference.
Both times, my uterus and boobs felt sore so I used heating pads. Unlike my first cycle years ago when I was running around working a ton, for the cycles with RMA, I basically lay in bed all day for a week under a giant heating pad. Generally lethargic, I was not in the mood to do anything other than watch pretty people entertain me via Netflix. My cat was really happy to get so much snuggling and warmth.
The day after my extraction, I got the strong urge to do annoying tasks I’d been putting off for literally years, like a super-charged PMS time (when I’m in my PMS zone, I get into hyperproductive, focused, conscientious mode). For example, I got very interested in my taxes, which has never happened before. As I’ve aged, I’ve learned to notice and love my cycles. My hormone cycles weren’t noticeable until my 30’s when I started getting PMS symptoms. When PMS-ing, I start to clean my house, figuratively and literally. I throw out stuff, organize drawers, and speed to inbox zero with renewed zeal and certainty. The morning after my extraction, I, with genuine gusto, got new health insurance, transfered my retirement accounts, and mailed a package. My body was like, “I guess we’re not pregnant so let’s get busy creating whatever else we do with our lives when we’re not making babies.” All my times of the month bring unique benefits, and I love making the various parts of the cycle work for me.
Reproductive Therapist:
I was thinking of freezing embryos, so I did a session with a fertility therapist Annie that RMA referred me to.
Annie asked, “How did you decide to freeze eggs?”
I said, “I always meant to, but I kept putting it off. Finally my friends posted on Facebook and that inspired me to pull the trigger.”
She said, “Yes, that’s often the case, where women in tech read on some message board randomly and then finally do it.” Indeed, my friends who posted are both women with STEM PhD’s from Stanford and Caltech who work in tech. This post is my way of passing on and adding to the story. Sharing more personal experiences has been a gift from Facebook because it safely normalizes / surfaces some things we can normally view as private, which can help us learn more faster together, so I want to share my experience of this process.
Annie asked, “When do you want to have children?”
I said, “It sounds silly, but I read Lucy Liu had her kid via surrogate at 45. She’s Asian, and I’m Asian, so I arbitrarily pegged that age in my mind as roughly when I’ll have kids if I still haven’t by then. But a decade is so far in the future; I almost can’t imagine it.”
She said, “That makes sense. There aren’t a lot of models for successful women who can afford to be single moms with abundant resources and support network. It’s new.”
I asked, “What blind spots do you see women having?”
She said, “I see people who have a very specific time they want to have kids by, and that lack of flexibility can cause issues. I also see people underestimating the support of the community and overestimating the importance of their significant other.”
“I won’t overestimate the importance of my significant other versus my friends. My friends are the standard that helps me set the bar and decide if a guy is worth dating. He’d have to be really special to be worth investing in instead of just continuing to invest in my friends.”
“What if holding that standard means you are alone?”
“Then I’m alone! I saw a video on tik tok where this girl was saying we don’t need men because women make sperm in their bone marrow.” We laughed.
Philosophy:
The future is fundamentally uncertain and thus scary, so I try to give myself the illusion of control to try to alleviate my fears. Yet control is impossible. Even with all the eggs I’ve allegedly frozen, who knows what power outage or earthquake could happen. Maybe I’ll go to the doctors in 10 years and they’ll be like, “What eggs?” Maybe none of my eggs will convert to being a child. Maybe my child will die young. Maybe my child will grow up to hate me. No one knows. From the view of fear, nothing I do is ever enough to make me safe, because safety and certainty are impossible. All is illusory. So we might as well choose the illusion of abundance instead. And, of course, take advantage of the amazing, abundant technologies available to us. Scientists can make embryos out of skin cells. Through science, much is possible.
Anyway, abundance teaches me that even if my friends spurn me, and I never find true love, and I never have children, I’ll always have me, and that’s just as abundant as it is scarce. It’s cool, having enough, being enough, letting go of control, all an illusion anyway. Whatever happens, I know I’ll be ok, more than ok. I’m not going to do anything out of fear anymore. I’m doing it because I can, because I want to, because it’s fun.
Technological change drives cultural change, and in this case egg freezing changes the possible futures I can envision for myself. Now I see infinite stories full of abundant joy and no longer feel any scarcity or pressure.
“Annapurna, to which we had gone empty handed, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days. With this realization we turn the page: a new life begins. There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.” There are other Annapurnas in the lives of women.