Preserving your fertility for the future

First, you’ll need to have a fertility assessment. For females this includes an AMH (anti-Mullerian hormone) blood test and AFC (antral follicle count) vaginal ultrasound scan. Together, these provide an accurate measure of your fertility health and your likely response to the medication used in fertility treatment.  

The egg freezing process itself involves the following steps: 

Medication will be administered at home via an injection to stop natural hormone production and control when your eggs are released. 

Further medication will be given to stimulate egg production. This increases the chance of more eggs being collected.

A scan will be performed to check the development of the follicles that produce the eggs. This will determine when the eggs are collected.

Once the follicles have reached the correct size, an injection will be given to mature the eggs for collection. A needle is then gently guided through the vaginal wall to capture the eggs one by one. Don’t worry, you will be sedated for this part of the procedure to ensure no pain or discomfort.

Any viable eggs are then frozen using a method called vitrification and stored safely for use in future fertility treatments.

First, you’ll need to have a fertility assessment. For males, the main type of fertility test is the semen analysis which assesses your sperm for density (the number of sperm in your semen sample), mobility (how well they swim) and morphology (the size and shape of the sperm).  

You’ll need to provide a semen sample for the analysis to be carried out. If you experience anxiety and cannot produce a sample at the clinic, you can take the pot home for a less clinical environment. You must ensure that we receive your sample within one hour of it being produced.  

If you are unable to produce a sample because of difficulties with ejaculation, we can extract a sample using a procedure called surgical sperm retrieval.

The sperm freezing process itself is fairly straightforward and involves the following steps:

Following your initial fertility assessment, you’ll need to provide a further semen sample that will be screened for any infectious diseases such as HIV or hepatits C.

You’ll then need to produce a fresh sample which will be mixed with a cryoprotectant to protect the sperm from damage during freezing.

Before the sperm is frozen, it will be divided into separate containers so that not all the sperm needs to be thawed at once and can be used in multiple treatments (if required).

Your samples are then rapidly cooled using a method called vitrification and stored in tanks of liquid nitrogen until you’re ready to use them.