Anonymous wrote:PP which clinic are you at

I am at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia. I live in the DMV and previously was with Dr. Sachs at Columbia but Penn is much cheaper and my family lives nearby so I go up for monitoring and work from there if I need to or come back.

PP which clinic are you at

I just had to make this choice. I ended up going with donor embryos that were offered bc they had a very good chance of success but along the way I considered frozen and fresh donor eggs and here are some of the things I was told.

The reason fresh eggs are a surer bet is they dont really know how frozen eggs will do until they try to use them and despite young age, healthy donor it can vary by individual. For example, my RE said that some donors who have provided fresh eggs to great success have also had their eggs frozen and they didnt do well when thawed while others have been fine.

Also the number of frozen eggs matters so you should ask how many they will provide and how success rates vary by number provided. My clinic's frozen egg paperwork says they give "at least 6" eggs per cycle. However my RE said that she almost always gives 8 eggs bc recent studies have shown that number is correlated with higher live birth rates.

Depends on your goals and which risks you want to take. We did frozen with a 2 HQE (day 5) embryo guarantee. At the time (4 years ago), we weren't thinking we'd want two kids, cost, and immediate availability factored into our decision. Also having a guarantee of two embryos made the risks of getting less total eggs acceptable. We received 7 eggs and had 3 -day 5- embryos. No PGS testing.

We decided we wanted two kids after-all so went back and did frozen a second time. 7 eggs and we ended up 5 -day 5- embryos. No PGS testing.

Fresh we got 12, 6 embryos made it to day 5 and 5 came back pgs normal. This was with severe MFI...

Fresh

Fresh eggs are better in terms of the chance for success per egg. Frozen eggs can be less expensive if you only need 1 lot bc you end up splitting costs for donor fees and retrieval since you typically get only 6-7 eggs per lot, but you can also do shared rounds with fresh eggs sometimes. That can mean working around other people’s timing though and you need to want to use the same donor as others. I found there to be equivalent numbers of donors for fresh and frozen to select from. For fresh you do have to look at agencies, not just donors your RE has to get equivalent numbers of donors.

Whether frozen r better really depends on how you measure better.

We did frozen egg bank too for a large pool of donors and usually would get between 5-7 eggs. All 3 times, 2-3 didn’t survive freeze. My nurse gave me stats and for fresh vs frozen that I’ll have to see if I can find.

It depends. We did frozen because of the larger donor pool, and we could simultaneosly screen for proven donors. We got a lot of 7 eggs, 6 survived thaw and we got only 2 blasts of which one worked. I don't know if the results would have been better with a fresh donor.

I did frozen. You know how many you are getting and no chance of a cycle that result in no eggs. Only your body to worry about. So much less stress than a fresh cycle.

Donor Eggs - Is fresh better or Frozen eggs from a donor bank