Jessica Schaefer
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Jessica Schaefer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I had just sold my first baby. Wow. Bevel, this PR firm that I started and ran for seven years and had basically dedicated my entire life to work. And I had also just gone through a divorce. And so it seemed like something that was 100% necessary to do. Although I wish I had done it 10 years prior. Yeah.
You've been through the process. Yeah. So you go into the clinic and... They don't really share the cost of the variables, the fertility drugs, which can be quite high depending on how your body reacts to the stimulants, right? And so they basically say, oh, it's a fixed cost of $10,000. But then the cost of the fertility drugs can be anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000.
And then if you need to do it multiple times, then you're sometimes looking at close to $100,000 just to freeze your eggs. And what I thought was absolutely insane, we have Botox and fillers and IVs. But for one of the most important things, which is preserving your option to have a family, you are self administering the shots, which I just thought it was a little bit insane.
And then they send you to a link to a video from the 80s. And you're kind of like, I have no idea what I'm doing.
What am I doing right now? You know, this could injure other people. I live in New York City. You know, you bring your trash out on the street. Who knows what was happening after that?
I would say my journey isn't over. So I ended up actually taking the trigger shot early, which was triggering, which means I was supposed to have 28 eggs, but then I only was able to retrieve five and that's just not enough for a live birth. And so I'm planning to do it a couple more times. Thankfully, my AMH levels, which basically you can test how fertile you are.
And my doctor's, oh, you have the fertility of a 26 year old. You should just go get pregnant. And I said, that's not actually the point. It's not that I can't get pregnant. It's that I haven't found the person that I want to get pregnant yet with. So the first egg freezing, it was 15,000. But again, I'll have to do it a few more times.
Sure. So when you're going through the process, you have to take anywhere from one to three shots a night. So it can be very confusing and you have them all in your refrigerator. And so I accidentally took the trigger shot, which releases the eggs. And so basically I had 28 eggs.
And then when my doctor figured out what had gone wrong, he basically was like, okay, you can just do the entire process all over again. And I thought, that's crazy. One, I had spent a lot of money, but two, more importantly, it was my body and my time. And so it just felt like it was a bit of a cattle call. Oh, well, let's just go in for round two. They just turn around and do it all over again.
It's a little defeating. Yeah.
Sure. I had a lot of girlfriends who had done it and they were all, oh, I'll come to your house and help you with the shots. And I thought that was just a little bit weird. strange. Like one, not that I didn't trust them. I just felt like a doctor should be doing it. I shouldn't be doing it. They shouldn't be doing it.
So that was a little bit strange, but also you reach this peak of your career, but then you think that you're going to be married or you think that things are going to be different and now you're freezing your eggs. And so I think the process, there isn't a lot of community around it and there's so much opportunity to just change the way that it is now.
Yeah, it was an interesting time in my career because I had just sold my company and I had an earn out. So basically you're expected to stay. And that time when you sell a company, it's very intense. And now I had a boss for the first time and I can't tell you how long. So I... for sure was not used to that. And he didn't act, you know, he didn't really understand the egg freezing process.
So it's not something that feels natural to talk about. But I think that as women, we should be able to talk about it. We should feel more comfortable talking about it. And I think the workplace should make it so that it's not such a stigma and potentially give time off when you're going through this process, because you're also not supposed to be stressed. it decreases the quality of the eggs.
And it's very hard to do this because it's so time intensive and to work as hard as you're used to working.
I think employers need to start, actually, we need to turn the conversation so that we feel comfortable being able to go to your employer with this. 50% of companies now actually do offer fertility benefits, but it's still not the norm, I would say, especially for smaller companies. Some of the larger tech companies like Amazon and Google are offering it.
But actually, I think it's one step further. When you are going through this process, you should be able to take time off. You should be able to realign your schedule so that you can go and do it the appropriate way.
Yeah, I shared that I was doing it. I had a lot of women at the company. We were a majority women executive team. And so I thought it was also important that they freeze their eggs. There are so many women I know who have dedicated their life to their careers. And I think at least my generation, you were told, oh, you can do it all.
And I think you can do it all, but you can't do it all at the same time. And so really analyzing, do I want to dedicate my 20s to my career and then 30s to my family or flip it? But these are things that people need to think about because God forbid you have the conversation like I wanted to have kids and
I just didn't know that you could freeze your eggs or I didn't know that much about the process. And a lot of women wait until it's too late.
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