Preserving a woman’s fertility with advanced oocyte cryopreservation
Career goals, personal circumstances or an illness can all influence the timing of your pregnancy, so it’s encouraging to know there are options available to safely put off conceiving until your situation is more favorable to having a child.
The younger you are when you freeze your eggs the better quality they’ll be when thawed for insemination.
Egg harvesting and freezing usually take four to six weeks. After discussing your fertility goals, we conduct a physical exam to ensure you’re in good health and to determine how many eggs are available for retrieval.
Next comes ovary stimulation to retrieve as many eggs as possible. Ferny closely monitors your progress with ultrasounds and blood work throughout the process.
In a typically painless 30-minute procedure your eggs are harvested. Immediately after retrieval, the eggs are cryopreserved or vitrified, the most effective method of preservation.
Finally, when you’re ready to become pregnant, the eggs are thawed, fertilized in the lab and the embryos are transferred into the uterus.
At Ferny, vitrification is an approach to oocyte freezing. It is based upon the principle that metabolically active cells can be cooled so rapidly that ice does not have time to form. During vitrification, permeating cryoprotectants are added at high concentrations, a very short time is allowed for equilibration, and an extremely rapid rate of cooling is used.
Embryo cryopreservation is a proven method of fertility preservation we offer. It requires the use of sperm, making it applicable only to women who have a participating male partner or are interested in using donor sperm.
Ferny’s development of the most up-to-date cryopreservation methods for our patients and our continuous improvements in protocols and techniques have achieved the highest levels of success in pregnancies from oocyte cryopreservation over the last decade. In 2017, we were responsible for a successful pregnancy following 13 years of embryo cryopreservation at our facility.
