Marie Smith did five rounds of egg freezing at 40 to have a baby at 44

When Marie Smith turned 40 she went into panic mode, so she froze her eggs. She’s lucky that she was able to have a baby at 44.

Keilor East mum Marie Smith details her egg freezing journey from first cycle to pregnancy.

My egg freezing experience started when I was 38.

At that point, I hadn’t even contemplated any kind of fertility procedure because in my mind, I had time, and I just thought, ‘I’ll be fine’ – I didn’t think that I might need something as a precaution, or a backup plan.

During my 30s, I was making a career for myself and working myself up, promotion wise.

But before you know it, you’re 35, then 38 then 39 and time’s just going by so fast.

Every year I was thinking, ‘maybe next year I’ll get pregnant’, but then time was just slipping away.

I knew it was definitely always something that I wanted to do – I definitely wanted to be a mum.

Marie knew she wanted to be a mum. Picture: Generic

But it wasn’t until I turned 39 and I had my sister-in-law say to me, ‘You really need to start thinking about the future. You’re not getting any younger, you should really think about something like egg freezing’.

When you turn 39, the clock starts ticking closer to 40, and when you turn 40, that’s when you sort of go into panic mode.

So I spoke to my partner about egg freezing, and he was very supportive.

Before I went to my GP, I had done some online research about it and once I was at the GP she gave me a referral to Melbourne IVF.

That’s when my journey started, and I did five rounds of egg freezing within 12 months.

The first cycle was very daunting.

There’s so much that you read about how people feel and what’s involved and when you go through it yourself, it’s a very daunting experience, especially because you have to inject yourself every day.

Injecting yourself can be a daunting part of the egg freezing experience. Source: iStock

I remember that very first injection I needed to give myself. I stood there with the injection in my hand, I’d prepped it all, and I was looking down at my belly and sort of counting, ‘one, two, three, go!’ and then I would freeze. I think I tried that 10 times before I finally managed to get the injection into myself.

As soon as you overcome that sort of initial fear then you’re on your way.

It still can be really overwhelming though, because you need to do this injection every day for so many days but you don’t know the outcome.

You don’t know how you’re going to feel; are you going to have headaches? How is your belly going to feel?

It’s constantly in your mind, thinking about what your body’s actually doing by taking this medicine.

@itslisasun

Injecting myself for egg freezing (old draft i forgot to post) #eggfreezing#eggfreezingjourney#fertilitypreservation#ivfaustralia#fertileminde#drkarenkong

♬ original sound - itslisasun

Then you start having all the feelings like the bloatedness, and go for your check-ups and see how many follicles there are.

When you finally get to those last few days before you get told to do your trigger injection, by that point, your belly is kind of feeling quite sensitive and bloated, and that’s when you’re booked into the hospital to have the collection done.

Going into the collection, you roughly know whether it’s going to be a high count or a low count because you have check-ups along the way.

The most disappointing part is knowing that you’re only going to collect one or two eggs, and that’s what I was going through.

I had low counts for pretty much most of my cycles, with exception to one cycle where I collected six eggs.

I recall there was one cycle I did, and I could hear someone in the cubicle next to me get told that they had 20 eggs collected.

I had just been told that I had collected two eggs.

There’s so much emotional build up each cycle, and you think, ‘maybe this round I’ll get a lot more’. So it was really disheartening to lie there after the procedure and be told that they only managed to collect one or two eggs.

Collecting small numbers of eggs was disheartening for Marie, however she persisted with the egg freezing process. Picture: iStock

It’s hard because one thing that you read and get told is that the more eggs you collect the better because at each stage of actually using the eggs, you lose some.

The reality is as well, the younger the eggs the better. So I just wished, in a way, that I had done it a bit earlier, because I could have potentially ended up with more eggs and younger eggs.

It can be very overwhelming and disappointing, but you speak to the counsellor before embarking on this journey who prepares you for all case scenarios.

Those closest to me helped me get to the mindset that it doesn’t matter if it’s one egg or three eggs or 10 eggs, whatever it is, ‘you only need one’.

After each collection, the eggs get assessed and then you get notified as to how many viable eggs are suitable for freezing.

So of the five cycles of egg collection that I did, I got 16 eggs in total and those eggs were stored for about four years.

It was important to both my partner and I to wait until we were married before starting a family. We’d had to put a hold on wedding plans due to Covid lockdowns because our families are not all in Victoria. We’d postponed the wedding once, but we finally got married at the end of 2021.

As soon as we got married, we decided to use the eggs that were frozen because we’d been trying to get pregnant naturally and it wasn’t happening.

I also felt like my body was starting to change, and I went into complete panic mode.

My periods were starting to get delayed and they weren’t regular.

I started feeling hot flushes and I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, am I going through perimenopause?’

That’s what triggered us to speed up that process and to get help with fertility. We decided to use my frozen eggs when I was 44.

So of my 16 eggs, I had nine viable eggs after the thawing process that were ready to use.

Then of the nine eggs, we got four embryos.

Marie frozen eggs resulted in four viable embryos.

The way we thought of it was, ‘OK, we’ve got four shots for a baby so hopefully this can happen’.

My biggest fear was having no embryos, so getting told that we had four was a positive.

We were so grateful that it wasn’t none or just one but that’s something that you have to mentally prepare yourself for.

So the best embryo was selected, and we got told a date and a time to go in for the transfer.

The transfer was such a quick process, we didn’t really get time to even register exactly what was going on, or to get overwhelmed or excited.

We were just in our minds thinking, ‘We’ve got the transfer booked in. Let’s see what comes of it’, and we just hoped for the best.

After the transfer, all that kept going through my mind was, ‘you only need one egg’.

From that point, I had to have a blood test about a week later to see if my HCG levels had gone up.

There was more emotion around waiting for that result than emotion of going through the transfer.

I remember I was working, and I couldn’t concentrate the whole day while waiting for the results of the blood test.

I got the call, and I was trying to gauge the tone of the person on the other end of the line.

Marie’s egg freezing process resulted in a successful pregnancy.

When she called and sounded quite serious, I thought, ‘this is not going to be good news’.

But then she congratulated me and said that the results came back positive, and that I was pregnant. At that moment I just burst into tears.

My husband was at work at the time but I didn’t want to tell him over the phone, so I waited until he got home from work to tell him the news.

So yes, I had one embryo transferred and lucky for us, it was a successful pregnancy on the first transfer.

From that point, it was just a normal pregnancy. There’s nothing different about a pregnancy from frozen eggs compared to someone who has a natural pregnancy.

For the first three months of check-ups I was still under the care of Dr Fleur Cattrall at Melbourne IVF and then from there you get transferred over to your hospital, or in our case our obstetrician.

We went on to have a beautiful baby boy who’s now six months old.

Originally published as Marie Smith did five rounds of egg freezing at 40 to have a baby at 44