Cherry Y.'s Egg Retrieval Story

At 39, I walked into a fertility clinic in Brooklyn. A few years earlier, I'd moved to New York from the Bay Area with a long-term partner I'd been with for five years. I'd switched careers into product design, rented a beautiful brownstone in Park Slope, and for the first time everything felt like it was on the right track. I was finally in a city I loved, doing work I was excited about, and ready to start thinking about a family.

Then the relationship ended, and the future I'd been building toward just disappeared. It took me a while to pick myself back up from that, and the thing that kept nagging at me through all of it was that while I was sorting out the rest of my life, my eggs weren't getting any younger.

I'd been thinking about egg retrieval for almost a year before I actually did anything about it. Not because I didn't want to, but because it took me that long to find a stable enough moment to deal with it. I was switching jobs, moving apartments, rebuilding my life in New York basically from scratch. When things finally settled down in the summer of 2022, I started searching for clinics, reading Google reviews, making calls, and working up the nerve to actually go through with it.

The nerve part was real

Egg retrieval is not a small thing. The first two hormone injections were done by a nurse at the clinic, but after that I had to take the shots home and do them myself. My roommate at the time helped me with the first few at home, and I'll never forget how he calmed me down by telling me this story about walking through a forest and arriving at a warm home. He even put on soothing music in the background. It sounds small, but when you're about to stick a needle into your own stomach and your body is already flooded with hormones, having someone there who cares enough to do that for you makes all the difference. The guy I was dating at the time was supportive too, which helped me feel less alone in the process.

What people don't realize is how much the monitoring takes over your life. I had to go to the clinic every other day to track my follicle growth, and the appointments were always during rush hour in the middle of the day. It was exhausting in a way that's hard to explain because it's not just the physical part, it's that your entire schedule and your body and your emotions are all being rearranged at the same time for about two weeks straight.

One good egg

I did the retrieval in September 2022, right before I turned 40. And then I got news I wasn't prepared for.

My doctor told me that my egg reserve, my AMH level, was lower than most people my age. She recommended against extracting the one egg I had and suggested I either use donor eggs or try another cycle. I was devastated. It took me a long time to accept that I might not be able to have my own biological child. That's a grief that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't been through it, this idea that something you always assumed would be available to you just might not be.

But it turned out I just needed one good egg. And Mia was born. She is my miracle baby.

Buying an option on my future

The way I think about egg retrieval is that you're buying an option on your future. You don't know when or if you'll find the right partner, but freezing your eggs gives you the time to figure that out without the pressure of biology making the decision for you. Good relationships take time to build, and you can't rush evaluating whether someone is going to be a good long-term partner, let alone a good parent.

In the US, each retrieval cycle runs about $15,000 to $20,000. I was fortunate enough to have insurance that covered most of it, so my out-of-pocket was around $900 for medication. But I know most women aren't that lucky, and that price tag is exactly why so many people put it off until it's harder or too late. Looking back, if I'd known how much cheaper fertility services are abroad and how much more personal the care can be, I would have seriously considered it. Going through something this emotional in a place where you're treated as a person instead of a patient number would have made a real difference.

If I could change one thing, I would have done it earlier, in my late 20s or early 30s, when egg quality is better. I'd tell any woman in her 20s to at least look into it. You don't have to use them, you might never need them, but having that option means you get to make decisions about your relationships and your career on your own timeline instead of feeling rushed by biology. I'm 43 now, and Mia is nine months old. When she's old enough to hear it, I'll tell her the same thing.

Cherry Y, 43, Brooklyn, NY. Product designer and mom to a miracle baby.