The Egg Freezing Diaries

$8000-$10,000 The cost of one cycle of egg freezing
SOURCE: VICTORIAN ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TREATMENT AUTHORITY

Standing in my bedroom with a syringe in one hand, aimed at my tummy, I paused for breath for the first time that day. How on earth did I get here?

If you’d have told 25-year-old me that a decade later, I’d be trying to preserve my fertility by injecting myself nightly with hormones, I would have chuckled in your face. That’s not how it was going to go for me. It was all planned out: by 35, I’d have at least one of the two children I knew I wanted. I’d also have a three-bedroom house with a small garden, a husband, and at least one pet (obvs). As happens so often, the familiar tale I told myself turned into another all-too-familiar tale. Due to a car crash of a break-up aged 33, the life I so badly craved disappeared.

That’s how I ended up on a fertility website late one night in March 2021. The pandemic had put life on hold. Like so many, I felt out of control, and this seemed like one small way I could claw some of it back. I