Kind: captions
Language: en
a woman is born with over a million eggs
by the time she's 30
only 10 percent are remaining so that's
a hundred thousand eggs
and then once we are in our 40s you're
looking at only about
a thousand eggs fertility declines over
time
not overnight but sometimes people feel
like it's overnight
because they're checking their fertility
at a time when their fertility has run
out
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i think we have these preconceived ideas
of of what a family is
you know with fertility it's never a
guarantee and it's never going to work
out
the way you think or on the timeline you
hope
i think i was about 37 at the time and i
was still
waiting for the guy and thinking you
know that he was going to come
and the years just kept marching by
i didn't understand that egg health was
directly related to chronological age
when bridget adams turned 39 she decided
to freeze her
eggs she became an early adopter of egg
vitrification a technology that can
dramatically improve the preservation of
a woman's eggs and potentially
her future fertility so in the early
days of ivf
freezing technology was not very good we
were using
slow freeze methods where you would
lower the temperature gradually over a
program period of time
and at a point you would reach a place
where ice crystal formation happened
and if the ice crystal happened in the
middle of your egg
it would harm the egg vitrification is
you basically take all the water
molecules out of the cell
replace it with cryoprotectants so that
when you freeze you don't make ice
crystals
so then you don't damage cytoskeleton
and organelles in the cell that
its survival depends on so now you can
freeze
and store infinite amount of time with
no harm or damage
in 2009 475 women froze their eggs
in 2018 more than 13 000 did so
despite its growing popularity egg
vitrification is expensive
most people who participate are white
and with means
the hormone therapy used in ovary
stimulation can result in a range of
side effects
including fatigue nausea and abdominal
pain
back to bridget as a woman ages not only
does the quantity of her eggs decline
but so does the health of her eggs when
i froze my eggs i thought 11
sounded like this great number of those
eleven
nine defrosted successfully from those
nine eggs six fertilized
and at that point i thought wow i went
from 11 to six
in almost a 24 hour period and i started
to get
very anxious then the next call i got
was
of those six only one has made it to day
five
and that was crushing that genetically
normal embryo was
implanted i was pregnant for 36 hours
and then i went for my second blood test
and the embryo had stopped growing
so i went from eggs
to 9 to 6 to 1
to no live birth and i think i still
remember you know vividly the day i
found out my eggs didn't work
i don't want anyone else to go through
that if
they can do something proactively sooner
and freeze their eggs when they're
healthier or start
thinking about having a child when
they're younger
we've now been freezing eggs for women
who are purposely delaying childbearing
or women who are
going to undergo chemotherapy that will
harm their eggs so that we can preserve
their fertility at the age at which they
freeze so you know
clearly the younger you do it the better
the chance of success
there's a crucial moment during
fertilization when the egg needs to
eject
exactly half of its chromosomes eggs are
aging
as you get older and they don't release
the chromosomes until they're ovulated
and fertilized that's
you know this graphic here which shows a
sperm
and an egg this is the egg kicking out
half the chromosomes
when this egg is 25 it's moving the
chromosomes around with 25 year old
machinery
versus 40 year old machinery you're
going to see more mistakes where a
chromosome goes where it shouldn't
and for instance chromosome 21 there
should be one copy here and one copy
there
but sometimes an egg especially an older
egg fails to eject its extra copy
you know now all of a sudden you got an
embryo that has three copies of
chromosome 21 trisomy 21 that's down
syndrome
and that's a meiotic error in a 44 year
old women
95 to 98 of those embryos won't make a
baby and so you wonder why ivf fails so
much
because they don't have a chance with
embryos that aren't healthy i'm asked
all the time what is the ideal age to
freeze eggs and i think that
somewhere between 28 and 34 would be
ideal age that's because in that
window the quality of the eggs and the
quantity of the eggs is still
optimal after 35 it is possible to
freeze eggs but the outcomes are not
quite as successful
egg freezing is not a guarantee and as
bridget discovered success rates decline
with older eggs
i blamed myself for not meeting someone
i blamed myself for waiting too long to
freeze my eggs i blamed myself
when my eggs didn't work there's no
shame and there's you know there should
be no blame
it's just let's start an open
conversation
and let's start to get into action
sooner um
instead of waiting to sort of the last
minute where
everything is so much more complicated
so much more expensive
and so much more emotional
for 36 hours i thought i was pregnant i
thought i had defied the odds
then i found out that the embryo had
stopped growing and
that was uh
you know i had described it as sort of
crying like a wild animal that i
couldn't
i could not get out of bed it was a you
know it was a really
dark time bridgette looked for another
path to motherhood
i realized i was so excited to become a
mom
that i started to think you know
well maybe the egg donor route is the
best route
to take bridgette sought out an egg and
sperm donor
to create an embryo that she would carry
as her own
i always said i would never use an egg
donor i also said i would never be a
single mom
and i also said i'd never have a kid
past 39
so i had these you know lines in the
sand and i kept
crossing the lines
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as i was carrying her it never felt like
she wasn't genetically
mine i view her as a creation of
three different people an egg donor
a sperm donor and me everything
the egg freezing the shots the sadness
the
you know sense of failure the sense of
where did i go wrong in my life all of
that just disappeared
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