Egg freezing with a SA trauma history…and some general tips

If reading about trauma is not of interest, skip to the bottom for some general lessons learned :)

Hi all, this Reddit sub provided so much practical advice and comfort while freezing my eggs. I wanted to pay my gratitude forward by sharing my experience going through this process with a sexual assault (SA) trauma history, in case it is useful to anyone. I was very frightened to do this, and I had a good experience in the end, so I hope this empowering to anyone who is struggling. Disclaimer: everyone will have their own experience, so I offer this more as companionship than counsel. I found some, but not a lot, of trauma discussion on the egg freezing and IVF subs, and yet I know that—unfortunately—I am not alone in this experience.

My background: I was assaulted more than a decade ago, while largely unconscious (probably a spiked drink). Many years of pain and—once I found a good therapist—healing followed. Interacting with men was a challenge, and childbearing was far from my mind. Now I’m lucky to have a supportive partner, but he is wary of having children as a trauma survivor himself (double-edged sword of having this particular bond!). I am 38, quickly nearing 39, and hope to have one child, so I decided to freeze my eggs (not embryos at this time). I am based in the US.

When I began egg freezing, I thought I had well-processed my SA. Surprise!!! I had more work to do. In my experience, trauma lives in the wordless parts of the remembering body, and I have been caught off-guard by the strength of my responses before. For example, it wasn’t until my therapist pointed out a few years ago that I might be having a hard time (crying, feeling panicked) with a Pap smear and ensuing colposcopy—despite my being intellectually fine with the process—due to a trauma response. D’uh! A medical context is so different from the environment where my SA took place that it didn’t occur to me at first, but "the body keeps the score."

My process was slow: I first contacted the clinic in December 2023 and had my retrieval over a year later in January 2025. Some of this was due to scheduling difficulties on both my and the clinic’s ends, but I was also both consciously and subconsciously hesitant to proceed. I had a five month gap between the follow-up (March) from my initial consultant (Jan) and my first attempt at starting the process (September).

At this time, I ran aground trying to figure out what my insurance would cover due to some misleading conversations with insurance reps (in the end: nothing, which is what I thought in the first place). But more critically, I was randomly paired with a nurse with whom I credit my ability to get through this—despite never having met her in person or even knowing what she looks like. I had previously mentioned to my RE that I had a history of SA and she was kind, but non-reactive about it. When I told this nurse in September that I was anxious about the anesthesia and being unconscious due to my experience with SA, I started choking up—and she heard me. Really heard me, which let me hear myself. She slowed down the conversation. She suggested a re-group with my RE and brainstormed some ways of making this experience more do-able, such as getting a tour of the surgery wing in advance. I decided to postpone my cycle to January, which was the next opening in my schedule and also gave me some time to prepare and process more mindfully.

The fallout from confronting this was real: I spent several days in a trauma-fugue with intrusive memories and weird embodied physical sensations. In what seemed like terrible timing, my therapist of many years took a full-time clinical position and had to close her private practice. Ack! But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise: I began working with a midwife-trained perinatal therapist and focused exclusively on preparing for the procedure. She uses the IFS model, and this was really helpful for bringing forward and “making speakable” the many fears living within me. If you are in a position to do so, I cannot recommend enough working with a therapist while egg-freezing, regardless of your history, and it was great in particular to work with someone who had such deep knowledge of reproduction and body/life-changes.

In December, I had a regroup with my RE, who was again kind but matter of fact. She suggested that, prior to the procedure, the anesthesiologist ensure I was fully asleep before the surgical team uncover and begin to prep me. She let me know that it was standard clinical practice for ultrasound monitoring appointments to have a chaperone present. I later saw on my chart a highlighted note that I was victim of SA and that I was “extremely anxious” about the procedure (which felt both true and yet not quite accurate, as my distress was not a manifestation of classical anxiety, but I recognize that’s probably just semantics from the outside).

The RE also said the nurse who I worked with could be a good advocate for me. I took this to heart. Subsequently in the lead-up communication to my stims, when I received a call from a different nurse, I once left a message saying, “I was hoping I could keep working with ____, as we began a conversation together” and my preferred nurse called back later that day. Over time, I became more comfortable with the roulette game of nurses, though, quite apart from my personal history, I found it was important to keep track of what was happening as not all nurses are as thorough and sometimes details would get lost from one to the next.

Just before I began my stims, the surgery team reached out to me, and I got a brief tour of the surgery wing. I cried a bit while I was there, but it was powerful to have a concrete alternate visual to the hazy darkness I was previously envisioning. The surgical nurse explained that there would be four people present during the procedure, which was really comforting and helped my brain appreciate that this would be a very different experience. The following week, more than a year after I started this process, I began stims!

Stims: This phase was better than I expected (though I wouldn’t say I ever really got used to giving myself shots). My mood was pretty good throughout; I think my system liked the heightened estrogen. Side effects were manageable: bloating, twinges in my ovaries, and feeling low-energy. I spent a LOT of time on my mental health, more than I have in YEARS. I was very gentle with myself. At first I tried amping myself up for shots with fun music, but realized I needed less stimulation (plenty of that already - literally!), and switched to a more mindful approach: listening to soothing podcasts, zen music, etc. My partner was a champ, despite his reservations about the process: he sat with me while I did shots and drove me to many appointments, and I know how lucky that is, despite our larger looming issues.

I tried to bring my fears to the yoga mat and breathe through them. By the time my retrieval date arrived, I felt like I had walked an inner path through fire. Going to the clinic for several ultrasounds served as a kind of exposure therapy. I no longer feared that I would start kicking the medical team during the surgery to get them the hell off of me, hah! I was still unexcited about the process, but also proud. I decided I wanted to view my retrieval as a personal triumph, no matter what the outcome.

Retrieval: The day of, I was pretty calm. The same surgical nurse who gave me the tour prepared me for the procedure and let me know that she had prepped others about my background. I met the RE doc who was performing surgeries that day (a different one than I had previously spoken to), anesthesiologist, and scrub nurse before going into the OR. I was nervous but pretty calm heading into the OR. Once I got up onto the table, I started shivering from cold and increasing nerves, but the medical team was kind and brought me more warm blankets. They chatted with me and didn’t even put my legs into the stirrups while I was conscious. Before I knew it, the anesthesia was working its magic (“now it’s time for me to sleep”, I think I said) and the next thing I knew, I was waking up back where I started, feeling like I had a fabulous nap.

And so I made it. I can’t say that I was especially proactive or a superior advocate for myself in this long process — and frankly, I think that’s okay. Everyone has their way. What aided me most in the end was a very human experience: being vulnerable with the right people. It took a while for my vulnerability and the right audience to surface and align, but through those moments of genuine communication, I was able to move through this difficult process.

If you are struggling, I invite you to listen to what you are feeling and try to make sense of it. Your responses contain valuable information, and you may need help to work through that information. If you are not finding the right audience, consider trying to speak to someone else at your clinic or to find a different clinic all together. A therapist can be a great support. I wish you good luck and good care.

Some resources on egg-freezing / fertility with an SA history I found (please take care of yourself reading these):

Finally, some general lessons learned and resources:

  • Seated somatic yoga is a great way to relieve stress and keep subtle movement in your body. I found these videos these videos someone on this sub - thank you!
  • There’s a Mindful IVF app with a free seven day trial. It’s focused on the larger IVF journey, but I still found the egg retrieval sections useful. I listened to the waiting room meditation before going in for surgery 
  • h/t to u/goneb4yrhome who recommended Rabbi Angela Buchdahl's mindful meditation podcast. I’m not religious, but really appreciated these for focusing my mind on my larger purpose
  • Clear mucusy discharge is normal in this process from the heightened estrogen and does not mean you have ovulated early! (But you can always touch base with your clinic if you are concerned.)
  • Icing before the shots really does help. For some reason I didn’t do it for the first half of my stims. It was kind of a nice treat to add it the second half, though it made me feel like a kid who waited too darn long in the marshmallow test
  • I put prunes in my morning oatmeal from early in stims and that helped keep my digestive system moving-ish 
  • I’ve never been very athletic but I finally rejoined a gym (haven’t been a member since Covid) about a month and a half before starting stims. Improving my fitness a little gave me a mental health boost and made me feel more at ease being pretty immobile during the stims. I thought I would go to the gym just to walk on the treadmill while stimming but I only did that once. The rest of the time I maybe took a short walk once a day and let myself flop as much as I wanted. 
  • Check your meds and their supplies twice. I realized the day of my trigger that I didn’t have the right needle for my HCG trigger. I thought that might be the case, but didn’t know for sure until I got the specific instructions from my clinic that morning. I wish I had asked sooner. A clinic nurse called in a prescription for the right needle to my local pharmacy, but I independently contacted the fertility pharmacy to pick up the right needles that day. This turned out to be a good move, because my local pharmacy didn’t have the needles in stock. It was a little stressful but all was good in the end.
  • If you have to do an intramuscular trigger shot (ie. in the butt), I found this video with Nurse Linda useful for placement!

Good luck! We live in a crazy time, where women have this time-defying option to preserve their fertility. I suspect in another twenty years (if humanity makes it that long, lol), there will be less invasive ways for doing this. In the meantime, we get to give ourselves a lot of credit for taking these steps to take care of ourselves and give ourselves agency : )