Why We Wrote the Book: "Everything Egg Freezing"
Updated: May 12, 2020
The simple reason why we (authors Brittany Hawkins and Catherine Hendy) wrote Everything Egg Freezing: The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Doing it Right was because when we both started out on our own egg freezing journeys, an informative and empathetic resource like this didn't exist - and we really wished it did.
Once we hit our early 30's, the concept of our fertility hit us like a sack of bricks. In the midst of our panic, egg freezing seemed like a promising option that could help us quiet the alarm bells of our biological clocks, but where should we even begin? It’s not like you can just pick up the phone and ask your mom or friends for advice like you might do during pregnancy or before a more routine gynecological procedure.
We know that if we had received trusted and unbiased information from scientists, fertility doctors, and fellow freezers - the right people to help guide us through each stage of the journey - that we would have had both a better experience and a better outcome. We can't change our own pasts but we can help other women like us to transform this very confusing and lonely fertility journey into one that is supportive and empowering, no matter what path they choose.
That's why (like 99.9% of women who set out on an egg freezing journey) when we were first researching whether or not we should freeze our eggs we felt on our back feet and on our own. And as women who pride ourselves on being confident and capable, that wasn't a comfortable place to be. We wanted egg freezing to mark an empowering moment in our lives, but the truth is that it felt like the exact opposite.
A big factor in us feeling this way was having no place to turn to for comprehensive, straight-talking, unbiased advice and to hear from other women in similar situations.
That's why, with their help of an incredible panel of experts, we decided to create a resource that brings all the experts together in one place and helps other women get to grips with the big questions around the procedure.
A companion to your research and journey, the book takes you through the chapters "Exploring Egg Freezing", "Preparing for Egg Freezing" and "Owning Your Procedure", to help make sure you don't miss anything important from any stage in the process.
Everything Egg Freezing is both rooted in impartial, rock solid science and peppered with personal anecdotes from real women who have frozen their eggs. It is packed with strategies and checklists that help make sense of both the decision to freeze in the first place, and how to best go about it once you've made the right decision for you.
In our opinion, this is something that doesn't get acknowledged often enough: that there's no such thing as a "right answer" when it comes to fertility preservation, only the right answer for you. The book is designed to help get you there.
Our doctors were great, but staff in fertility clinics simply don't have the time or the training to engage with patients on the zillion subtle social, financial, practical, personal, ethical and lifestyle inputs to a decision to freeze your eggs. And even if they did, ultimately, this is a decision that only you can make. And we want you to have all the data points to hand to make the best decision for you. Although egg freezing is a medical procedure, it's really about more than just the science. It's an incredibly personal, subjective life choice that requires great thought, like any major financial commitment.
The exciting thing is we ended up writing a different book that the one we set out to. Not only is Everything Egg Freezing packed with answers and insights about the procedure itself, how to best plan for it, how you might feel and what the chances of success are, it also gives you a roadmap to making your treatment as successful as possible.
Once we drilled down into the data, it turned out there are choices like what you eat, your daily lifestyle, what products you use, the types of exercise you do, the supplements you take that can have a direct impact on your egg freezing outcome. And we've brought all the tools and support together in one place to improve your chance of success and help you get the best experience of the procedure you can.
If you've read the book, let us know what you think by leaving an Amazon review! Or why not gift the book to a friend, or suggest it as your next book-club read?
The more we talk about the topic, the more stigma we can remove and the less likely it is any woman will feel alone, unsure and on her back foot when it comes to her fertility. Your doctor is there for all your medical advice, for everything else to do with egg freezing...get the book
