My experience during the emergency IVF procedure

The route that we chose to preserve my fertility was that—since I’m married—we were able to retrieve eggs and fertilize them with my husband’s sperm and freeze the embryos. What the process was—it involved taking hormones. I guess the first step was to speak with an infertility specialist to find out what drugs would need to be used and what he recommended in my particular case, given that I had previous infertility, and then check back with my oncologist to make sure that the drugs he was recommending to stimulate my ovaries would be safe, given that my cancer was hormone-sensitive.

And although the tumor had been removed, there’s a chance for recurrence or for a new tumor, and so it was a lot of back and forth between both physicians. Once we got that straightened out, I was taking hormones to develop as many eggs as we could develop safely. I was tracked daily with visits to the doctor, blood draws to check my hormone levels to make sure they were in a safe range—high enough to be producing eggs but not so high that it would be dangerous—and I was also checked with daily ultrasounds—trans-vaginal ultrasounds—so that they could be able to see the eggs that they were developing and see how they were growing, and how many there were, and so on. When it was determined that the time was right, they give you an additional injection that does a final ripening of those eggs, and then the following day there was a procedure done. I went to the clinic, and under sedation (so I don’t remember the procedure) they retrieved the eggs trans-vaginally, and they were able to obtain 18 eggs and fertilize them on the spot. It’s a four-day process where they grow the embryos and do genetic testing to see which ones seem most viable for producing a healthy pregnancy, and that’s what we froze.