Dr. Lucky Sekhon

If you ask a layperson on the sidewalk, they're going to say, well, I'm losing eggs all the time, right?

And so my egg count's dropping.

That's actually not what I, as a fertility doctor, care the most about.

So there's two separate components.

We're born with all the eggs we're ever going to have, typically 1 to 2 million.

By the time we get into menopause, which as you know, the average age is 50, 51, you are falling below a critical threshold of about less than 1,000 eggs at that point.

And so it's almost like your ovaries become resistant to the signal your brain is sending to the ovary to try to randomly select that egg to ovulate.

And so you stop getting periods, you stop ovulating.

So most of the people who are coming to see me are somewhere between those two time points.

And how many eggs they have is something I can actually assess in an individualized sense.

I can do an ultrasound on them and I can get a count.

And I'm not counting millions or hundreds of thousands of eggs.

I'm counting a small subset which represent a small number that have trickled to the surface

And it's kind of like rationing.

I always call it like the pantry in the ovaries is stockpiled.

And you get that stockpile from the time you're born.

You don't make new eggs and you can't repair or fix your eggs.

And every month the pantry opens up and allows some to kind of escape to like the see-through kitchen cabinets.

And that's what I see on an ultrasound.

So getting a count helps me because it kind of gives me a relative sense of what's in the stockpile.