The day Brittany Hockley was told she had a 15 per cent chance of falling pregnant.

When I was a little girl, I couldn’t wait to grow up. I often thought about the future with excitement. 

I would imagine how my life would look: where I would be, who I would be with, what my children would look like. 

What I didn’t imagine was being 33, childless and possibly the most single person in Australia after being very publicly dumped on The Bachelor, despite my best efforts to reach happily ever after as the last woman standing. 

Oh, and did I mention I had been flying solo for the best part of a decade by this stage?

So there I was: fast approaching my mid-thirties with not a husband, house, dog, or child in sight. What a rude shock!

Everyone around me was getting engaged and married, falling pregnant, buying houses and having babies, and I was just trying to work out what I would have for dinner.

It took a lot of soul-searching but I finally accepted the fact that my life just didn’t look like the lives of a lot of other women I knew, or like what society expected of me. 'Settling down', whatever that means, was probably not going to happen in the near future, which meant it was time to make some big decisions. 

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I was not in a position to have a child. I was single, deep in my career, and I knew that I didn’t want to go down the track of having a baby alone. 

It’s a personal thing, but I just didn’t have the desire to do that. I’ve never really felt that strong pull to have a baby like many women do, but what I did want to be sure of was that when the time came, I’d have the choice, that my biological clock wouldn’t have taken that away from me. 

I wanted my future self to be empowered and have the option to create the life she wanted on her own timeline – not the one prescribed by society. And that, dear reader, was how I decided that I needed to take control of my future and put my eggs on ice. But how the hell do you go about actually doing that? And did I even have any left to freeze?

Once I had decided to freeze my future babies, I needed to find out how many – if any – of my viable eggs were available to put in the deep freeze, so I took myself to my GP to have some tests. 

Laura and I did an extensive amount of research on fertility clinics before releasing our egg-freezing episode on the podcast, and Genea was the clinic we decided to feature because we were really impressed by their team, equipment, and technology. 

Dr Cheryl Phua is an amazing doctor, and I trusted her wholeheartedly, to the point where, after our podcast interview with her, I decided egg freezing was for me. So I set the wheels in motion.

When I found myself sitting alone in front of Dr Phua, I wasn’t feeling overly worried. I have lived a very healthy life: I’ve exercised daily since I was a child, I’ve never smoked or taken drugs, I eat well, have no other health problems and, let’s be real, I was only 33. 

So I was stunned when Dr Phua informed me that basically from next year on, any pregnancy I might have would be classified as geriatric, and in terms of even getting to that point, things were not exactly looking great for me. 

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She told me that, with my test results combined with my age, I had around a 15 to 20 per cent chance of falling pregnant naturally. If I was lucky, I might get eight eggs, of which a few usually aren’t viable, and not all of those would necessarily make the journey of being frozen and thawed. Mind. Blown.

This was not how I’d imagined this conversation going. Even though Dr Phua was very encouraging and supportive, all I heard was '15 per cent'. I left feeling completely deflated, and I cried all the way home. Looking back on that moment through the wonderful lens of hindsight, I can see that it was an unreasonable train of thought.

 All I heard was, 'You ONLY have a 15 per cent chance' instead of, 'You HAVE around a 15 to 20 per cent chance'. It is about perception, isn’t it? Fertility is unfortunately not a given, as some people know all too well. It is something we shouldn’t take for granted and my heart goes out to those that may be going through this as we speak, preparing to go down that road, and those that have gone through it in the past. 

For me there actually were a lot of options; I just couldn’t see through the cloud of disappointment or shake the feeling that I had somehow failed. I can only imagine how many women feel that sense of failure – but it is not you; you have not failed. Some things are beyond our comprehension and control.

After four months, the time came to flood my body with the copious amounts of hormones that would give me the best possible chance of putting my eggs safely on ice. I don’t think I really understood beforehand how time-specific the whole thing was going to be – they prepped me for it during my consultation, of course, but I was still surprised at how demanding the process proved to be. 

For a period of about two weeks it’s like you belong to your eggs and your hormones because you have to inject your specified level of hormones every day at the same time, in the same place on your body. It started out fine enough. Besides an excruciating hormonal headache on day two, the first four days were great. 

But then the second week came, and I started to swell and cry. Those surging hormones were what I found the hardest. If I had to describe how it felt, I would say it is like having your period, but when it’s really pissed off, and then add in some steroids and an IBS reaction and you’re sorta in the ballpark. 

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Every two days, sometimes every day, I had to go in to the clinic for blood tests and internal ultrasounds. This is super important to monitor the hormone levels and follicle growth. While my hormone levels were probably where they needed to be, my silly little follicles weren’t responding that well – some not at all. 

I had to increase my injections again for a few days at the end to give them a little boost and by the day of collection I could barely walk. Honestly, every step was so painful. 

The car ride to the clinic was horribly uncomfortable; every bump or corner was agony. I slowly waddled into the clinic, bent over and holding my belly carefully as if I was protecting those little eggs until the last moment, giving them every chance I could to survive!

Mercifully, the collection itself was very quick and easy. I was put under and it took about half an hour, apparently. I woke up, still high on the anaesthetic and hoping beyond hope that eight of my little mini-me's had been put on ice. I was ecstatic to hear that in fact 15 were! That was beyond what I could have hoped for! Obviously, this gives me more options when and if the time comes. And it means, for me, that very fortunately I won’t have to do that process again.

It took a few weeks of commitment to my body and my future but it meant that I had secured the option of having kids in the future. A weight was immediately lifted off my shoulders and I didn’t feel the same level of stress and pressure that I felt before. The anxiety around not knowing how fertile I was, of not knowing if I would meet anyone, of worrying about what I should do... I don’t think I really noticed how much I’d been ruminating on those things until I no longer felt them as intensely.

More than anything, I was thankful to be in a position in life where I could afford to do it, which I know is a huge privilege. It was a choice I thought long and hard about; a considered decision. 

I know that freezing my eggs is not a guarantee or a bullet proof insurance policy, because pregnancy from egg freezing isn’t guaranteed to work, but now I have options, and a better chance if and when the time comes to try for kids. And for that, I am grateful.

This is an edited extract from We Love Love by Brittany Hockley and Laura Byrne. Published by Penguin Random House Australia, RRP $35.

Image: Supplied.

Feature Image: Supplied/Darby Condon.