"I feel empowered": Ria's egg freezing journey

At 31, Ria had built a career helping other women navigate their fertility journeys. As a Patient Support Manager at TFP Fertility, she knew the process inside out, the consultations, the consent forms, the calls from patients anxious about injections. What she hadn’t anticipated was how quickly she would find herself on the other side of that experience. After a long-term relationship ended and she moved back in with her parents, Ria made the decision she was going to freeze her eggs, and she was going to do it for herself.

Ria’s story

Ria’s path to egg freezing didn’t begin with a medical concern or a diagnosis. It began with a relationship ending.

“When my relationship broke down and I moved back in with my parents, my sense of timeline was everywhere,” she explains. “When you move out with a partner, you think you know how things will go, you’ll get married, you’ll have kids. When that stops, it’s very disheartening. You just don’t know where to turn.”

The end of that relationship left Ria feeling out of control of her life, her plans, and her future. For a woman who had spent years supporting fertility patients, it was a disorientating place to be.

Then she attended an egg freezing workshop at TFP GCRM Fertility. What she heard that day crystallised something she had been circling without quite naming.

“The demonstrations that were given on the day really made me think: this is something I want to do for myself,” she says. “I came back to clinic and made the enquiries to get booked in. This was something for me, to know that moving forward was in my own hands.”

“If you haven’t had kids by 30, that’s it…why haven’t you?”

Ria is candid about the social pressure that had been building around her.

“The pressure to have children when you reach 30 is massive,” she says. “Everyone is having children, and if you haven’t, people want to know why.”

She was aware, through her work, that egg freezing was an option. But she also knew that most women her age weren’t. “For people who don’t know that it’s out there and they’re struggling, it’s really difficult,” she says. “I’m very lucky that I’ve always known about it.”

Even with that knowledge, there were real barriers to overcome. Cost was the first. “It’s expensive, and not knowing all the options until you’ve had a consultation can be difficult,” she admits. Moving back with her parents had made it financially possible in a way it wouldn’t have been before.

The second barrier was more personal. Despite working in a clinic, Ria is not good with needles. The prospect of self-injecting every evening felt massive. “It took a long time to get round it,” she says. “But once you have your nurse appointment, everything is explained to you and you can practise. It was all made very clear.”

“Everyone treated me like a patient not a colleague.”

There is an unusual intimacy to seeking treatment from the people you work alongside every day. Ria had seen colleagues go through fertility journeys before, but sitting on the other side of the consultation table herself was a different experience entirely.

“The moment it hit me that I was a patient was during my consultation with Mr Gangooly,” she recalls. “He treated me as if he didn’t know me from the next person, which really put me at ease. He was setting the right plan for me, not just because he knew me. And every step after that, everyone treated me like a patient. Not their work colleague, not their friend. It was really comforting to know they were putting me in a patient’s shoes.”

That shift in perspective would turn out to be one of the most valuable things she took from the experience. “I know the admin side, the consultations, everything up to starting medication,” she explains. “After that, patients are passed to the nursing team, and we don’t generally have dealings until the end of treatment. It was interesting to learn that middle bit, and it gave me a whole new respect for anyone who goes through this.”

Her pre-collection nerves centred mainly on one thing she had never experienced before: sedation. “I’ve never been under sedation. I know it’s a quick procedure, but it’s never happened to me, so I was apprehensive.” Her biggest fear going in wasn’t the needles or the hormones, it was the loss of control. “Knowing I was going to be out of control of everything for two to three weeks felt massive.”

“Is that it?”

On the morning of her egg collection, Ria’s mum drove her to the clinic.

“It was excited,” she says of the journey in. “When you’re having egg freezing rather than IVF, you’re just excited to get it done. It’s the lead-up to everything you’ve done in preparation.”

In theatre, the team joked with her to keep her calm. The anaesthetist walked her through every step. And then she was out.

“The first thing I thought when I came back was, ‘Is that it?’” she laughs. “It was over so quickly. The last thing I remember was being in theatre. After that, I was in recovery, and the first person I saw was from the lab team and they told me straight away how many eggs had been collected.”

The news brought immediate, physical relief. “It was relief that I’d done everything correctly leading up to that point, relief that my body had responded how it needed to, and just excited that I could then park that and move on to whatever the next chapter might be.”

“It’s like a life insurance policy.”

In the weeks that followed, Ria dealt with some mild hyperstimulation, a heavy sensation in her stomach that eased once the collection was done. She was tired. But she was also, for the first time in months, settled.

“I feel like I have a lot of power back following my collection,” she says. “More so that I now don’t have to stick to a timeline. It’s in my hands. If I meet someone and I don’t need to use them, that’s fine. If I don’t meet someone and I do need to use them, that’s also fine. Just personally knowing that they are there for me and me only it’s like a life insurance policy, almost.”

“As a woman, you grow up thinking you’re going to be married, have children,” she reflects. “But that isn’t for everyone. Knowing I have control of that and can make the decision when I want to, if I want to, is now an option for me.”

Her friends, she says, were full of questions. Some of them hadn’t known egg freezing was an option at all. “Working in this field when they didn’t know anything about it makes me want to share it more,” she says.

“You can do it for yourself. You don’t need to answer to anyone else.”

Ria is direct about what she wants other women to take from her story.

On the taboo she still encounters: “People think egg freezing is only for celebrities, only for anyone with millions of pounds. But actually, it’s accessible to anyone. It can be expensive, but there are options. Clinics like TFP Fertility work with Access Fertility to offer payment plans, and there are open evenings, webinars and tours where you can get your questions answered before committing to anything.”

On doing it alone: “Looking at my life now, living at home with my parents, just come out of a relationship, freezing my eggs…I feel empowered. It was for me, and me only. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. I feel really secure in knowing I can make decisions and move as fast or as slow as I want to.”

And to a woman sitting in her bedroom at her parents’ house, feeling lost after a breakup and worried about time running out: “Just speak to people. Speak to professionals, speak to your friends. Get the correct information and find the right pathway for yourself. I just want every woman to feel empowered that you can take control. You don’t need to follow a timeline.”