Spring Stories: Danielle’s Journey to Egg Freezing

One of the most rewarding parts of working at Spring Fertility is getting to learn from and be in community with our incredible patients. We sat down with Danielle to learn more about her journey to freezing her eggs. She shared the personal and financial considerations that impacted her decision, what led her to Spring, and the “fertility autonomy” that she believes egg freezing gave her.

Get to know Danielle, and read her interview below!

Let’s start off with a bit about you- tell me your name, who you are, a little bit about yourself, and where you're from.  

Danielle: I’m Danielle, I am a transplant from the DC/Maryland/ Virginia area, originally from Maryland. I work as a patient coordinator for a psychiatry group, and I've been working in the mental health field on the administrative side since I moved to San Francisco 8 years ago. It's a population that I love to serve and feel like it's a mission of mine to do it. I spend my time with my plants. I love that I have a ton of plants - like 40-45 plants.    

Love all of those things! Let's start off with your egg freezing story. How did you find out about egg freezing? And why did you decide to do it? 

DT: I probably heard about it through Youtube. It definitely wasn't through anyone that I knew personally who would have done it. I probably heard about it in my mid to late twenties, and I thought, oh, that sounds cool but I could never afford that. But, I'd love to do it if I had that opportunity to. I was very curious about it, what the process would be like, but I just thought it was cool. I thought it was a cool thing that we had the technology to be able to do. I definitely felt the distance in access for me. It didn't feel like something that was attainable at the time.  

What ended up motivating your decision to freeze your eggs?

DT:  I knew I wanted to do it because I wasn't sure exactly when I wanted to be a mother. But I knew that I had a lot of stuff in my life to figure out. If I had the money to do this, I would do it for sure because I’m probably going to be trying to figure out my life for a good long while.  

At the time, I was thinking about going back to school for graduate school which I still have not done yet. And I still want to. But I just had all these ideas for things that I wanted to do in my life, including traveling a lot. So that was part of the reason why I was thinking about egg freezing at the time. Absolutely. 

That makes sense. Once you decided that you were going to freeze your eggs, what was the consideration process like to find a clinic?

DT: At the time, I had been hearing a lot of headlines about Black women dying or being mistreated within medical settings or hospital settings, especially in childbirth, because people just weren't paying attention to their complaints or believing them when they said that they had certain medical requirements or medical issues, or even pain. So one of the first thoughts that I had when I was looking for a clinic was “I would like to find a Black fertility doctor.” But my immediate thought right after that was “I'm never going to find a black fertility doctor in the Bay area - I can't even find anybody to do my hair.” So I Googled “Black fertility doctor Bay Area” with no faith whatsoever. I came across a few technicians or practitioners who weren’t MDs, or who wouldn't have been able to work exactly as my fertility doctor, per se. And then I came across my doctor at Spring, Dr. Zore, and she was right in the city. So I reached out, and I realized I'd heard good things about Spring. I had mentioned that I was interested in freezing my eggs to my OBGYN, and she said “Spring Fertility- that's a really good one.” She also mentioned that she thought Spring took my insurance. That was a major thing. 

What was that conversation with your OBGYN like? Because I think we hear a lot of people saying, “I bring it up to my OB and they think I’m too young or don't need that.”

DT: So the part of the reason why it came up was because we were having a conversation about my birth control. Just for context, I'm in my thirties. And at that point I was in my early thirties. In her mind I probably wasn’t too young, and you just never know what kind of fertility issues you may come up with or can happen earlier in life.

Thankfully, she definitely thought that I was in the family planning mindset, and thinking about what I should be doing. So, in my case, I felt like I was of age. She probably felt the same way. And so, the conversation was pertinent. 

the conversation was pertinent. 

So after you did all of your insurance searching, you landed on Spring. You came in, you met Dr. Zore. What was meeting her for the first time like?   

DT: I remember liking the way the office looked, to begin with - “Oh, my eggs will be very happy in here.” The staff were all really great. They were very, very kind and just nice, professional, everything that you expect. I went in, not so much nervous, but excited. I was looking forward to learning about the process, and when I met Dr. Zore, she laid out the statistical expectations for what I could expect going through this process, and thankfully - and I'm very, very glad that she did this - she had some really conservative estimates. She really did a really good job of laying out what my expectations should be. And she just seemed so, so knowledgeable. I was also glad she was young. It was cool, having a woman, a Black woman, who is a fertility doctor and is also relatively young. You don’t often meet folks like her.   

Totally. We feel so fortunate to have her on the Spring team. Now let's talk a little bit more about financing. As you said, it can feel inaccessible, especially seeing that price tag at the beginning. What was that consideration process like for you? How did you end up working out the finances?  

DT: Yeah, so my partner had gotten a job at a really great company. He had been at that job for a few months and was starting to sign up for his insurance. He found out that he was going to be able to put me on his insurance, and that he would have fertility benefits. And my ears perked up at that, thinking ‘I’m following up on that!’ As soon as he gave me the insurance information, I called them immediately to see what was covered.  

I was very, very lucky because I happened to be in a relationship with someone who had a really good job with really good benefits. I know not everybody has that, and if it were just me on my own, I would not have been able to do this myself. It's definitely a privilege that I acknowledge. But once I worked through everything, I started working with Progyny and they did a really good job of helping me navigate the process, getting my patient portal set-up, and understanding how everything was going to work. It was a great experience.   

It’s really cool to see companies like Progyny and Carrot that are really leading the charge around fertility insurance. We're lucky here in the Bay Area that a lot of those bigger companies are offering those insurances. I hope it continues to grow in all the places in the Bay Area, as well as across the country, because it's so important that people have that access to care.

So after you figured out your finances and you had your initial consult, you started the cycle. What did the process look like for you in terms of maybe obstacles you encountered, or things you didn't expect or maybe just things that were challenging?

DT: Yeah, no. Number one, I knew that I was going to need to make sure that I went through all the paperwork. There's a lot of paperwork.  And why shouldn't there be? This is an extremely important process, and it's a delicate process that you're going through.  So that's number one- that was one of the main things I knew that I would have to go through to make sure I understood exactly what I was getting myself into, especially financially. And in areas where I didn't understand, I most definitely would send an email to Spring or to Progyny. 

Totally, that’s huge. In terms of during the process, with the retrieval and injections, was there anything that was surprising? If there's anything that you think you would have liked to have known before that, you think it's important to know, or maybe tips for how to deal with the post-retrieval effects?   

DT: I wish I could say there was some huge obstacle that I just figured out how to navigate all on my own, but honestly, I feel like Dr. Zore did a really good job of helping me set my expectations. There are also a lot of resources that Spring offers online about how to do the injections. It's one of the things that I was most nervous about, injecting myself. Part of it was just me — I had to psych myself up in order to do it. Thinking about it now, when I went to pick up my medication, it really hit me: “These people think I'm responsible enough to participate in this medical procedure myself, and inject myself with things properly.” That's a lot of responsibility. That part hit me pretty hard, but I didn't want anyone to know that I was getting nervous.

But once it came, oh my gosh! The box of medication that you get, you can fit two small people in there! It is huge! Obviously, of course, there's a lot of packing around it and things that need to stay cold or are fragile, so it made sense. But I was definitely timid from the size of the box that showed up in my house. That's when it started getting real to me, when I realized how much I’m going to have to do. The putting together of the medication and finding the right needles- I was thinking ‘Can I hire someone to do this?’ Which you can! But I ended up deciding I was going to do it myself, and it turned out just fine.  

The instructional videos were super helpful, and I watched them repeatedly, even while I was doing the injections. I would put all this stuff together just as they said in the video. And then inject and watch at the same time. That was extremely helpful. I found that to be a really intimidating part of the process, but I think I was just psyching myself up more than I needed to, because it turned out they ended up not being so bad. There was one medication that does cause a little bit of burning on the site of the injection while you're injecting, but once it's over, it doesn't last very long. That was really the only pain that I had during the injections. The most pain that I experienced was after the retrieval.  

I always kind of think the injections are also part of this empowerment that people feel after. You're thinking, “I did that! I mixed this medication. I did it myself.” So thinking about empowerment, and I think that's a word that we hear thrown around so much, when you think about your experience of freezing your eggs, what does that look like for you? Do you feel like the world has changed in any way? Or that there are any feelings coming off of this experience that you would share with other people who are considering going through it? 

DT: Oh, yes, definitely! I got the opportunity to do it during a time in my life where both my partner and I were getting even more pressure from the outside world to have a baby. Our friends are all having their kids, they may be on their first or second or third. We were getting a lot of that pressure- and I’m the type of person where if someone tells me I have to do something, I’m always going to do what I want. I'm rebellious in that way. I really wanted this process to be for me, the way I wanted to do it. No one is going to have to parent any children that I bear or deal with any consequences of any of my decisions. This process really had to be about me, and what I felt was right for my life, and not what anybody else was thinking. 

I knew that I wouldn't be satisfied if I didn't do it my way. So, I've felt that-it's a cliche. I definitely felt that sense of empowerment, and I felt that sense of autonomy, too. Fertility autonomy is extremely important to me. I didn't want to feel like it [starting a family] was happening to me. I wanted to feel like it was an active decision that I was making. 

I love that. I think that speaks such volumes to the importance of knowing your options. I’d love to know more about your future — what are you excited for? What do you have planned?  

DT: Oh, yes, I'm excited for all of it! I've always been a lover of travel. I'm going to 5 different countries this year. I've had some of my happiest experiences in life through travel. I made all these plans, and I was able to make all these plans because I got proactive about my reproductive life. Traveling is extremely high on the list. Also, I do want to go back to grad school- I've been thinking a lot about the quick career transitions I'm making, and grad school is also something that I still really want to pursue. I'm also going to be starting a new job next month. And yeah, things like that are the main things that I'm really excited about.  

That’s all so exciting! Are there any parting messages you want to leave people with? 

DT: For the lay person with ovaries who is interested in freezing your eggs: If you have the opportunity to do it, and you have the resources to do it, or you have some way of obtaining the resources to do it, I would so encourage you to do it. It is not nearly as scary as your mind thinks it’s going to be. And it’s so worth it. I had doubters. I had people who just didn't understand why I was going through this process. I didn't listen to any of it because I knew that by going through this process I would have a resource then to have more agency in my life. I feel a lot less pressure to just go forth and have babies when I want to, not just because ‘timer’ is running out. I feel like I bought myself a little bit more time. 

And for the policymakers out there: make it easier for people to gain access to this kind of resource. It's so unfortunate that so many people don't have the money, the resources, the insurance to be able to access fertility preservation. That’s it. My goal and my hope is that more and more people with ovaries will have the opportunity to have more agency in their reproductive lives, and that goes across all aspects of their reproductive life. Whether you're trying to preserve your fertility, or you're deciding that you don't want to have kids.  

People with ovaries need to have the agency to be able to say what they want in their reproductive life, and to be able to get the resources to accomplish those things.