Thursday, January 23, 2014

Choosing a Clinic

When I did my first egg freezing cycle, I did virtually no research before choosing a clinic. I went with the Stanford Fertility and Reproductive Medicine Center because it is close to where I live, and because it is affiliated with Stanford, I assumed it had to be excellent. I have no real complaints about the Stanford clinic, but I certainly didn’t do my due diligence when selecting it.


I recently found a great post on “Finding a good egg freezing clinic” on the Fertility Lab Insider blog and it contains a lot of good things to think about when selecting a clinic. I am currently in the process of deciding where to do my second egg freezing cycle, and that post is really helping me understand what kind of research I should be doing and how I can use SART statistics to inform my decision. It also has a great list of questions to ask the clinic.


I decided I should find out the answers to these questions for Stanford, even though I have already completed a cycle there. I contacted the clinic with the questions and received some answers in a voicemail (unfortunately I missed the call). Around 200 women have frozen their eggs at Stanford, but “very few” have come back to use the eggs. It was not clear in the message if any of those women who came back to use their eggs actually had babies. It sounds like there are no real clinic-specific statistics on the thaw survival rate, the fertilization rate, etc. The doctor said in the message that she “expects” the survival rate to be x, the fertilization rate to be y. But it sounded like she was quoting numbers from studies done elsewhere, not actual results from the Stanford clinic. This makes me a little nervous, because it sounds like Stanford doesn’t have much experience turning frozen eggs into actual babies.


However I did learn that Stanford now uses vitrification for freezing eggs. This was my #1 reason for not returning to Stanford for my second cycle; I had thought that Stanford used slow freezing. Now that I have learned that Stanford uses vitrification, I am considering returning there for my second cycle. The clinics I am considering:

No comments:

Post a Comment