[ad_1]
“I always knew that I wanted to have my own family one day. When I was growing up in Limerick, my mom was a babysitter. She cared for other people’s children in the village, so there were always babies and children in our house.
hen I was older, I started to work on children’s rights and specifically on child protection policy and advocacy. I lived in Tanzania for five years, working for UNICEF, the UN agency for children. When I was 30 years old, I moved to New York to work at the UN headquarters.
I was young, free and single, living life with my friends. I went out three or four nights a week with the girls, I had dates and I had a great time.
New York is such a cool city, but I never saw myself living there for long. When you work for the UN system, you tend to move around the world a lot. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep doing that. After five years, I wanted to get a new job, a new challenge, preferably in Europe, to be closer to my family in Ireland.
He was also aware that he hadn’t met anyone yet. After five years in Manhattan, it was clear that I was getting sick of big city life and dating. When I was living in Tanzania, I had met someone, but he died in an accident early in our relationship when I was 29 years old. And even though I was dating in New York, I never met anyone else I hooked up with.
At 35, I was really looking for a change and a fresh start closer to home. Randomly, at the age of 35, I also started getting all these targeted ads on Facebook and via email, like ‘Have you thought about freezing eggs?’ They were sent in a way to say that suddenly there was something “wrong” with me. Then I was chatting with my sister and she had two children thanks to the assistance of the Waterstone Clinic in Cork. She had a great experience with them, so when I was home in Ireland for Christmas 2017, I made an inquiry about egg freezing.
In New York, a round of egg freezing costs around € 20,000, and my American health insurance doesn’t cover it. There was no way I was paying that kind of money and I didn’t want to have my potential eggs in America if I wasn’t going to live there.
That initial consultation with the Waterstone Clinic really set the process in motion. The next time I was home in Ireland, I went for a fertility check. The clinic told me that I was fit and healthy and that it was better to do it now than later. Then they said ‘here’s your plan’ and I was thinking ‘the plan?’ He did not expect them to produce an operational master plan. It was a bit overwhelming.
I learned that the process of freezing eggs is actually quite time consuming and logistical. You should have regular scans and start hormone injections on the third day of your cycle and give yourself injections at the same time every night for up to 10 days. I was thinking, ‘how the hell am I going to handle all of this?’
It was crazy, but the nurses and staff were very helpful. I really felt supported professionally and not only clinically, but also lovingly. The follicle growth monitoring was taking place in New York and then when the follicles were a certain size, I would book a flight back to Ireland for what they call the ‘trigger injection’ and then undergo the procedure.
The whole time I was getting ultrasounds at a gynecologist in New York on my lunch breaks, and they were sending the information to the Waterstone Clinic.
There was even one night when I was going from the office in New York to the airport and I had to inject myself on the airport bus because you have to take them at the same time every day. I could see people looking at me thinking, what are you doing?
Turned back and forth between New York-Cork-New York, the entire two-round process took approximately five months from initial consultation to final procedure and we obtained 42 eggs in total.
Initial storage costs are included in the price for one year, and then you can renew the storage in blocks of five years.
Overall, I found it to be very comforting and comforting. It was a relief, and it really helped me make the decisions I had to make that year with ease and relaxed me in terms of dating.
A lot happened between leaving New York, changing jobs, and not meeting the right partner. So I thought, you know what, I’m going to take this one thing, this time bomb, and give myself some peace of mind and security for the future.
Like everyone else, he wanted to find love for all the right reasons. And he didn’t want the baby-making issue to be a determining factor.
Freezing my eggs freed me in so many ways to make the right decisions. You can’t control what happens in the future, but the only thing you can control is putting your eggs, your fertility, on ice.
I left New York in December 2018 and moved to Zurich a month later for a new job as head of child safety and protection at FIFA.
A month after moving to Zurich, I met Mathias. I didn’t know anyone when I arrived, and before closing my Tinder account, I decided to give it one last pass. It was my first time using Tinder. I was his first match and his first date.
In fact, my decision to freeze my eggs came up on our first date. We were in a bar in Zurich, drinking cocktails. Five cocktails later, maybe six, we started talking about broader life topics and somehow it came up.
In fact, he was very impressed. Later he told me that it was one of the things that appealed to him the most.
Mathias and I got engaged six months after our first date and starting a family is very much in the cards. We were supposed to get married this month, but we had to postpone it because of Covid.
When I decided to freeze my eggs, some friends texted me to say they were thinking about it, but they weren’t sure. I told them to do it. If it crossed his mind, I told them, it crossed his mind for a reason.
If egg freezing helps you live your best life and have no worries or stress about your fertility or getting old; If it helps you make the right decisions for the right reasons, then my advice is to do it. “
[ad_2]