Find Part Two of this conversation here.
I’m so excited to share this conversation with my Dr. Lucky Sekhon, author of best selling book, The Lucky Egg. She is a double board-certified reproductive endocrinologist and infertility expert, and in this episode, we dive deep into the fertility knowledge that everyone should have: whether you’re trying to conceive now or planning for the future. We discuss the common myths that create unnecessary stress and guilt, and Dr. Lucky shares the inspiring story of how her book came to be. This conversation is grounded, uplifting, and packed with the kind of clarity that helps you move forward with confidence.
Part One of our conversation:
Throughout our conversation, we explore the themes of education and empowerment in fertility care. She emphasizes how the lack of basic reproductive knowledge leads people to waste time, make uninformed decisions, and carry unnecessary guilt when things don’t go as planned. We talk about the importance of preconception planning, the reality of miscarriages and why they’re rarely preventable, and the truth about IVF and egg freezing: they’re powerful tools, but not guarantees. We also bust myths about egg counts, the male biological clock, and how long eggs and embryos can be frozen. This episode is about giving you the information you need to make thoughtful, informed decisions about your fertility journey.
In this episode, we cover:
- The magical story behind Dr. Lucky’s book and why fertility education matters so much
- What to focus on during preconception planning, including testing that’s often overlooked
- Common fertility myths debunked: low egg count, miscarriage prevention, IVF guarantees, and if sperm has a biological clock
- Why the male biological clock matters and what advanced paternal age means for pregnancy outcomes
- The truth about egg freezing, embryo storage, and realistic success rates
- How to avoid the “life in a bubble” mentality and unnecessary restrictions during fertility treatment
- Why everyone should learn about their biological clock in their twenties, regardless of family planning timeline
Resources:
- Dr. Lucky Sekhon’s book: The Lucky Egg (on Amazon)
- Dr. Lucky Sekhon on Instagram: @lucky.sekhon
- Website: theluckyegg.com
Full Transcript:
Dr. Aimee: Today, we’re celebrating clarity, empowerment, and the science of truly understanding your body. We’re also doing a little myth-busting and talking about the fertility patient mindset. This week’s episode is called “The Lucky Egg: Understanding Your Fertility and How to Get Pregnant Now.”
I’m delighted to welcome back my colleague Dr. Lucky Sekhon, whose new book just came out on January 13th. If you’ve ever wanted grounded and uplifting guidance that helps you make sense of your next steps, this episode is for you.
Dr. Lucky is a double board-certified reproductive endocrinologist, fertility expert, and the author of ‘The Lucky Egg.’ Today, we’ll talk about common fertility myths and what people need to know as they move forward.
Welcome, Lucky. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Lucky: Thank you. This is a real full-circle moment. I’ve been on your show several times, and I feel like you’re always so kind and generous with your platform. Thank you for having me back.
Dr. Aimee: Thank you for joining us. Like you said, you’ve been on the show before. It’s so awesome to have you back. Your new book is officially out now. Catch us up on how it came to be. What led you to write ‘The Lucky Egg’ and bring it into the world?
Dr. Lucky: It’s actually a crazy magical story. The natural progression was that I had been at least six years into practice and, at that point, had seen thousands of patients in all different scenarios. The common thread that just kept coming back up over and over was how little information people tend to have about how their bodies work and what it takes to get pregnant until they run into difficulty, and just seeing how it makes it so much harder to navigate decision making and how to move forward with confidence when you don’t know the basics.
I’ve spent so much of my career trying to bring people up to speed. That’s where social media came in because it felt like something that was easy, that I could tackle it in small increments of time, 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there to make a video. Short-form videos just felt like something I could do as a full-time clinician and as a mom of two kids.
I sort of grew frustrated with it a little bit. Don’t get me wrong. I’m going to continue to make content, but I felt like it was still too fragmented and there wasn’t a way to lay the foundation and bring everyone up to speed the way that I wanted to. In early 2023, I started to think maybe I will write a book one day, it would be so nice to put everything together in a cohesive way and have an index. But it felt so overwhelming that it was on the back burner.
I don’t know why, but I happened to mention it to a patient of mine. She didn’t say anything about it. She froze her eggs with me, and we remained in touch. One day, she called me back up and said, “Do you still want to write a book?” I had completely forgotten that I had even made the offhand remark. She said, “A good friend of mine who works where I work but is a book agent specifically, she’s going through her own fertility journey and she cannot find a good resource, she can’t find what she needs. She said she’s been relying on your Instagram for a lot of information, she’s been going online.”
A lot of our patients do that, but this happened to be a book agent who was also scouring all the books and not finding what she needed. She said to my patient, “Do you think you would be able to connect me? Do you think she would want to write a book?” She said, “I actually know that she would because she said it to me.”
The rest is history. We got together, we had an amazing brainstorm session, we were very aligned with what needed to be done. We made the decision at the end of a two-hour meeting, our first meeting, that we were going to do this together and she was going to walk me through how to write a proposal. I started with zero.
A week later, her transfer failed. She said, “Is it weird if I become your patient?” because she wasn’t my patient at my clinic, and then we’re writing this book. I was like let’s just do this. She ended up finding out she was pregnant the week that I got my book deal. I handed in my manuscript the weekend that she had her baby. I just felt like we were on this parallel path for different things and we both helped each other. It was such a beautiful thing that unfolded in my life and I’m so happy.
Dr. Aimee: I love that story. I love what you post. It’s so nice to see that so many people are seeing what you’re sharing and it’s making such a difference. Many people look for guidance while preparing for pregnancy long before they even see a fertility specialist. In your experience, what should people focus on during that phase?
Dr. Lucky: I think that education should be a huge part of it. I think that a lot of people don’t realize what it takes to get pregnant, and that can inadvertently end up wasting time. I think focusing on your cycle and understanding what is the pattern, is there a pattern or is there no pattern, and if that’s the case, maybe you should go directly to see a doctor and don’t wait. The guidance of wait a year or wait six months and then see a fertility specialist doesn’t apply if you don’t have a regular cycle.
It can take around three cycles at a minimum to start to see an established pattern. You can use a variety of methods. Whether you’re using the calendar method or you start using ovulation predictor kits, putting that data together can take time. I think that’s the first thing.
Obviously, you want to be on a good prenatal vitamin that contains folic acid. Ideally, you should be on that for three months preconception. I always say keep it simple. Think about it as whatever is better for heart health tends to be better for not only fertility, but pregnancy health as well. When you’re thinking of a diet, you’re thinking of a Mediterranean style diet. Again, better for heart health, better for your fertility.
Regular exercise, trying to fight the very natural tendency in today’s world to be sedentary. We spend so much time sitting at our desks, for a lot of us. Thinking about what are the things in your life that you could cut out that are not serving you, like smoking or vaping. Cutting alcohol down to a minimal level where it’s less than four drinks in a given week.
I think also preconception testing is something that we need to be talking about more. There isn’t necessarily a guideline that says this, but we know as doctors that treat women in what we call trimester zero, when they’re trying to conceive, we will offer preconception testing for things that are traditionally only found out about once you’re already pregnant, like genetic screening. Seeing what you and your partner carry, if you carry any mutations, now panels cover anywhere from 400 to 1,000 conditions.
It can be empowering to know going into pregnancy attempts that you and your partner don’t overlap. Or maybe you know you’re a carrier of something that could affect 50% of your future sons, or you both collectively have a one-in-four chance of having a child with a certain condition. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to do something proactive, but I think it allows you to make an informed decision and go into that pregnancy attempt prepared. If you do want to be proactive, it opens up the conversation of do you want to avoid being in that situation altogether, do you want to do IVF and make embryos, then test them for a specific condition.
In a similar vein of trying to prevent problems before they start, I always check things like are you immune to chicken pox, the varicella virus, or German measles, Rubella. These are conditions that most people have been vaccinated for or maybe they were immune at one point, but their immune system can forget the immunity, and those are viruses that can lead to complications if you contract them when you’re pregnant. I always try to avoid problems before they start, and that’s what I think about when I think about preconception screening or things that people could be looking into or doing.
I’d love to hear your take on this. It’s kind of controversial because it’s not in a guideline, but I’m a big believer, I think not everyone across the board has ever had a pelvic ultrasound at least once in their twenties or thirties. A lot of times, I see patients in their late-thirties and I’m the first one who has ever done a scan on them. I think it’s not a guideline because how many people would you need to scan to find something, but I do think that there can be a lot of different conditions, like fibroids, depending on their location. There are women that are born with something called a septum. I think there could be things that you can pick up early that people would appreciate having that information before they’re already pregnant, especially because some of these conditions can predispose to miscarriage.
I think going to your GYN or even your primary care doctor and saying, “I’m thinking about getting pregnant. What should I be focusing on?” Also, reviewing the list of medications that you’re taking because you want to make sure that what you’re on is pregnancy-safe. Thinking ahead about what you can do to optimize your health.
Dr. Aimee: I couldn’t agree more. It’s like a no-regret plan pre-pregnancy, so that when you’re pregnant, you don’t wish that you had known something first. When you’re planning, let’s say, a cross-country trip in your car, you’re going to go get your car checked. It’s the same thing. Pregnancy is like a cross-country trip and it’s so involved. What’s the big deal if you get a pelvic ultrasound? I couldn’t agree with you more.
What about some of the things that people worry about or try to control that aren’t actually helpful, what are some of those things that you see in your practice?
Dr. Lucky: I think people tend to be needlessly restrictive with their diets. It’s a lot of misinformation that they come across on social media. They may cut out entire food groups or entire categories of foods. I’ve seen a lot of people cut out dairy for no reason. Of course, if there is an intolerance or a reason that you need to not eat something, that’s a different story. But I think there’s a lot of baseless advice that people come across on social media. They’re overly restricting themselves and they’re focusing on things that burn them out but don’t necessarily make a difference in the long run to whether they’re going to get pregnant easily or not.
I think this mentality of life in a bubble – that’s what I call it in the book – is what I’m trying to avoid. Of course, we know there are lifestyle habits or exposures that are less favorable, and we’ve talked about some of them, but I think that people beat themselves up and there’s this tendency to blame themselves for everything that they didn’t eat or the supplements that they didn’t take or the things that they did do. I’ve had patients cry in my office about the fact that they feel like they drank heavily when they were in college, 20 years prior, and that now that’s why they’re dealing with infertility.
I think that we have to focus on the here and now and how we move forward. That’s the first thing I’ll say. You can’t change the past. Just because you did something that was deemed unhealthy or maybe could have a negative influence on fertility in the past doesn’t mean that it’s actively impacting your current fertility.
Dr. Aimee: Right. The things people see on social media, they internalize it. There are so many myths out there, and you cover a lot of them in your book. Let’s do some myth-busting right now. What do you say?
Dr. Lucky: Let’s do it.
Dr. Aimee: The first one… “A low egg count means you’re infertile.” Tell us about that myth.
Dr. Lucky: In order to understand this and why it’s a myth, it comes down to education about simple things that are happening in our body. When we’re ovulating each cycle, you are only releasing one egg. There are a bunch of other eggs that are available at the surface of the ovaries, and those are visible as those bubbles of fluid, they look like black circles on an ultrasound. Those are called follicles. Even that pool of eggs that you can find on ultrasound, the follicles, don’t represent all of the eggs that you have. It’s a representation of a very limited subset of the total number of eggs in your stockpile.
You are born with a certain stockpile of eggs. Imagine there are two pantries deep inside the ovary. Every cycle, you have waves of recruitment from the pantry in a way that we cannot influence. I don’t have the keys, it’s locked, and neither do you. Basically, the number that comes to the surface, I use the term pantry because it’s almost like rationing. The more stockpiled your pantry is at a certain snapshot in time, the more you tend to bring out of the pantry and put into the see-through kitchen cabinets, those are the ovaries, where you can count and look at what the follicle numbers are on both sides on the ultrasound.
Then your brain sends a signal, and only one of them randomly get selected, like a lottery, to be the one that gets to ovulate. Whether you have a high egg count, a high number in your stockpile, and therefore a lot get rationed to the surface each month, or a low number, it’s not going to influence the odds of that one egg that you’re ovulating actually turning into a baby. You’re on a level playing field with everyone else.
The thing that makes it different between one individual and another, there’s a lot of different factors because there’s a lot of things that have to happen between ovulation and actually becoming pregnant, but when we think about the influence of egg quality, what we’re talking about is what are the odds that when you have that random lottery where one of those eggs gets selected at random to ovulate, what are the odds that egg can turn into a healthy embryo? That’s never perfect for anyone, and it’s something that diminishes as we get older. Even in our forties, you still have some healthy eggs, and you can randomly ovulate a healthy egg.
That’s actually the driving reason behind the name of the book. Of course, it’s a play on my name, but it’s really to give people hope and illustrate that there’s a lot of randomness in this. You’re not out of the game just because you turned 35. Your fertility is not a cliff. It’s a continuum.
Dr. Aimee: It doesn’t happen that fast. That’s so true. How about this next one? “Miscarriages are preventable with enough progesterone or bedrest.”
Dr. Lucky: Miscarriages are very much not preventable in the vast majority of cases. That’s not to make you feel completely out of control or out of hope because you can’t do anything to modify it, but it’s to absolve you of the guilt.
If you’re listening to this and you’re someone who has had a miscarriage, it is a very normal kneejerk reaction, it’s human nature for us to think, “What did we do? Was it stress? Should I have rested more? Should I have taken more vitamins? What did I do wrong?” I’m here to tell you that the vast majority of first trimester miscarriages are because of ovulating an egg that had something missing or extra in terms of the amount of DNA. That’s 90% of the causes in the first trimester. That egg could get fertilized and it could get to the stage of being an embryo, get to the uterus and it was able to implant, but then the missing or extra DNA that was there caused dysfunction in its growth and development, and it stopped growing.
It’s not because your body knew. A lot of people assume that. They’ll say, “My body knew that this was not a good embryo and it stopped it.” No. Your body doesn’t know. Your body is kind of passive in this process. Think about the lining of your uterus like the soil and the embryo is like the seed. If the seed stops growing, it’s because it’s lacking something or it has too much of what it’s not supposed to have. There’s nothing you could have done to change that in the vast majority of cases.
Other common causes are something structural in the uterus, like a fibroid that’s in the inner lining that interrupts the embryo from being able to properly implant and expand. Again, not your fault. I think a lot of people get caught up on progesterone because basically when an embryo is implanting, it starts secreting a signal, that’s the pregnancy hormone that you see the two lines when you pee on a stick or when you do your bloodwork, your beta-HCG. That beta-HCG that’s being secreted by an implanting embryo is sending signals to the ovary and telling the ovary, “I know you just ovulated. Let’s have you keep making more progesterone because I’m here now and I need the progesterone. Keep stabilizing the lining and make it a nice environment for me. Eventually, once my placenta grows, I’m going to start making my own progesterone and you can go away.”
When people have an early pregnancy that’s not functioning normally, oftentimes it’s the genetics or other problems that you could not have controlled. That signaling is not doing what it’s supposed to be doing because that embryo is struggling, therefore you might see lower progesterone levels. It’s always like what came first, the chicken or the egg, pun intended. People are always thinking, “If I take progesterone, I’m going to be able to rescue that.” But I think a lot of times the low progesterone is a symptom, not a cause of the miscarriage.
Obviously, this is talking about if you ovulate and get pregnant. In the case of IVF pregnancies, you’re not necessarily ovulating, so we’re supplementing you with the progesterone. That’s why it’s important to always make sure you’re taking it as your doctor directs you to and not stopping it prematurely. Even if you have a negative test at home, you want to make sure because that pregnancy is relying on the progesterone that you’re supplementing if you’re not making it on your own.
Dr. Aimee: When I diagnose a miscarriage, and sadly it is a part of our practice, I always tell patients the first thing that you’re going to do is ask yourself, “What did I do to cause this?” Patients will say things like, “Is it because I bent over and picked something up?” We constantly have to remind people that it’s not your fault, you didn’t cause this. I totally agree with you.
Here’s our next one. “IVF is a guarantee and egg freezing is your insurance policy.” How do you debunk that myth?
Dr. Lucky: I don’t think we can ever talk in absolute terms. I think anytime you hear something that sounds that extreme, you should always question it. It’s always a little bit more nuanced than that.
IVF is, sadly, not a guarantee. We’ve gotten really good at it and it can work well, to the point where if you have a high-quality embryo that looks good, we grade it according to how it looks under the microscope, we can also genetically test them. If we know it’s a healthy embryo in all the ways that it can be, at best, we can say there’s a 60-70% chance of live birth. That’s as good as it can get. The one-third that don’t implant, that don’t result in a live birth, it’s probably sometimes still the embryo. PGT can only zoom in so far. We’re only looking at a small number of the cells that make up the entire embryo.
So, there are limitations. It’s not just about having the right amount of DNA. We have the right amount of chromosomes, but our bodies can break down in other ways. It’s one of those things where people can start to feel like a PGT normal embryo is a guarantee, but I always level set and remind people, even going into the transfer, “I feel really good about this. Your uterine lining looks great. We’ve looked at everything and we’ve controlled everything we can. Now it’s kind of up to the universe, but at best, it’s a two-thirds chance, and it might take more than one transfer to get there.”
There’s a big study that was done in recent years that gave a nice statistic that with three embryo transfers with one embryo being transferred at a time – cumulative, if the first one doesn’t work, then you do a second, then if that doesn’t work, you do a third – usually, that lends itself to about a 92% cumulative live birth rate. For the people that have had three or more failed transfers, I know that sounds so scary. Why am I in that outlier category? There might be other things going on. It might have to do with your uterine lining. A lot of my patients who have experienced three or more failed transfers, there might be something going on in terms of they’ve had scarring in the uterus and we’re working on trying to get that to a better place. Sometimes, though, you’re not going to have a clear reason. Those cases are few and far between, but they are really important to focus on because we don’t know everything that there is to know.
I think that’s where people find this whole process stressful. A lot of times, they go into IVF thinking, “I moved from IUI to IVF thinking this was the solution for my problem, and now this is unexpectedly difficult.” It can be difficult for two reasons. Either it’s hard to make healthy embryos or it can be hard to get those embryos to stick, or some people will have challenges in both of those arenas. It’s not a guarantee. You have every reason to not be afraid and to feel optimistic, but it is important to realize it’s not a 100% success rate per transfer.
Then, let’s talk about egg freezing. Egg freezing is not a magic fix for the inefficiency of human reproduction. If you tell a 20-year-old that there’s a 20-25% chance that the one egg they randomly ovulate that’s chosen like a lottery will fertilize, grow into an embryo, and implant, that inefficiency doesn’t magically go away just because you did egg freezing. Just because it feels high-tech and it feels like this whole process, you’re still working within the confines of that inefficient system. That’s why we always try to emphasize this point when we talk to patients and say things like it’s a ten-to-one ratio of how many eggs does it take to get to a live birth.
The nice thing about IVF or using eggs that were already retrieved and frozen is that instead of working with only one long shot, if you have a good number or you got a good number over several cycles, if you’re battling diminished ovarian reserve, at least you’re working with multiple long shots. You can kind of watch survival of the fittest when you go to thaw them out and turn them into embryos. That’s why it’s important to talk to your doctor about their experience with thawing the eggs, what they typically see in their lab, and for your age, how many is a reasonable number to try to get to your family building goal, if you need to rely on these eggs. Which, you might not need to rely on them.
Dr. Aimee: A lot of patients don’t have those conversations. They just do one batch of egg freezing, they forget about it, and they come back at 43, they froze their eggs at 36, and learn the hard way that they should have frozen more. Same thing, I see patients where they did three IVF cycles, they have one PGT normal embryo, and they’re surprised that it didn’t work because no one had these conversations with them. So, I’m glad we’re having them here today for people to learn from.
Dr. Lucky: Same here.
Dr. Aimee: Next myth. “The longer eggs or embryos are frozen, the worse the outcomes.”
Dr. Lucky: I always get asked this question. It makes sense why people would assume that. You’re thinking about freezing, you’re thinking about the chicken breast you’ve had in the back of the freezer for the last decade and how it probably has freezer burn. Thankfully, it doesn’t work like that when we’re actually keeping eggs and embryos at a very cold temperature, -196° Celsius in liquid nitrogen. It’s halting all aging and metabolism.
There are actually really miraculous stories of people using donated eggs that have been frozen for over 20 years that have resulted in live births. That’s pretty cool, too, because with that timeframe, our freezing technology got a lot better.
Now, I would say since 2010, most centers have been consistently using vitrification, which is rapid freezing versus slow freezing, which was the older initial technology. Now we can say there could be a 90% thaw survival rate of eggs, which is remarkable because eggs are just a single cell. That thaw survival rate and the ability of that egg to turn into an embryo and eventually a baby is not affected by how long it was frozen. The same for embryos.
Your uterus also doesn’t really age in a major way. That’s an uplifting fact that I like to include as part of the discussion on the biological clock. That is why freezing eggs and embryos can be really helpful. I’ve had patients who froze embryos at 39 as part of their initial IVF treatment with me, and they’ve come back for baby number two and baby number three, all the way up to 45, even older than 45, maybe even entering perimenopause and menopause, and they’re still able to get pregnant with the same level of success.
Dr. Aimee: The next myth is, “Sperm do not have a biological clock.” Bust that myth for us.
Dr. Lucky: This is a common one. This is still surprising in 2026 to many people. I’ve been having a lot of conversations in bringing my book to the world, and male factor fertility and male age have come up a lot. I think we’re only now coming around as a society to the idea that men and women should be tested concurrently because fertility is 50/50. That should be common sense, but it’s taken a while to get that knowledge out there.
I think the biological clock, a lot of people aren’t aware because they know it is a true fact that men are always making new sperm. New sperm cells are generated on a 74-day life cycle. Yes, men can make sperm in their 60s, their 70s, and even their 80s, and they can father children. But it is important to realize that men are not immune to the biological clock, it just ticks differently.
For women, we have a limited number of eggs and we don’t have repair mechanisms. The ability to get pregnant and stay pregnant tends to be very linked to age when we think about egg quality. For men, it’s not about getting someone pregnant, but it’s more about the quality of the pregnancy.
You can accumulate mutations over time as a man that are passed through the sperm DNA to a future child. There are many association studies that have found associations between advanced paternal age, which the literature hasn’t come up with an agreed definition of, but a lot of studies say over 45 for men, some say over 50. Definitely at the extremes of age, there can be associations with neurodevelopmental issues in children. Autism has been linked to advanced paternal age. There are even some papers that have shown a potential link to things like childhood cancer.
It does make me think as a fertility specialist, if a man knows it’s likely not in the cards that he’s going to want to have kids anytime soon and he’s in his forties, sperm freezing is so much less invasive, easy and cheap, compared to egg freezing, but you hardly hear of anyone doing that. Maybe it’s because no one in their forties sets out to say, “I’m going to have children in my seventies.” Right? I don’t know. I just feel like it would be a contingency plan, knowing what I know, that I would make use of as a male, if I was entering my forties or fifties and hadn’t had children yet.
Dr. Aimee: I couldn’t agree more. When I have a discussion with someone and the sperm provider is in their fifties, I always give them this talk first. Because I would hate for them to have a baby that’s autistic and say, “What caused this,” and have that be the first time that they had the discussion. I don’t think that’s fair. I’ve had couples choose a young sperm donor through a sperm bank because of the information that I’ve shared with them.
What do you wish patients knew about first on their quest to the lucky egg, and what do you think is missing in today’s world of fertility care?
Dr. Lucky: Not to sound like a broken record, but I think it’s the basic education and knowledge. Once we fill the fertility knowledge gap for everyone, regardless of whether they’re trying now or planning to try in the near future, everyone would read this book or just get themselves educated as they enter their twenties, I think it would lead to a better landscape across the board. I think it would allow people to have more realistic expectations of how long it may take to get pregnant. That might have subtle impacts on the things that they do in their personal lives, even subconsciously.
I know this from my own experience. I used to, as a medical student, say to myself, “It’s going to be such a long road for training and all of that. I can’t see myself even wanting to think about kids until my forties.” I’m not saying that there’s a wrong way or a right way, but I found myself personally in a situation where I was with my long-term partner, my husband, earlier than that age.
Even when we got married, we weren’t set up in the right living situation in New York City to have kids. I had already kind of primed him mentally, I had said to him when we were residents, I’ll finish my fellowship training and then we’re going to have many years to travel, and I set the tone of we’re going to start trying in our late thirties, early forties, like don’t even put it in your mind, and we’ll freeze some embryos because of course I’m a fertility doctor and I know that would be a good idea. Then as I got into my fellowship training, I was like, I had this illusion of control, and now that I’m in practice seeing all of these things play out, it kind of in a subtle way, or maybe not so subtle way, influenced my decisions.
One day, I came home in my early to mid-thirties and said, “Actually, I think we should change our plan. I think I should get off the pill.” He was just like, “What?” It kind of changed my mind to actually see the reality of things play out and to know that while you can have access to all of the things and the technology, you can’t control everything. It wasn’t a decision made out of fear, but in that moment, it was like I sprung into action because of all the things that I was seeing. It was like an epiphany. It was more of an epiphany than me being freaked out. I think my husband was freaked out.
I think that if everyone in their twenties learned more about their biological clock, they would be able to make a better informed decision about egg freezing at an earlier age than when a lot of people will typically present to talk about it. In turn, the success rates will go up because you’ll typically have more eggs retrieved in one cycle and they’ll be able to have a higher conversion rate into healthy embryos. I’m not saying that everyone has to freeze their eggs, but my hope in writing this book and all of the resources that are coming out and the conversation and dialogue opening up about fertility, my hope for the future is that the case of someone saying in their late-thirties or their forties, “I’m ready and I’m going to freeze,” but it can be difficult if they have bad DOR, and then feeling like it’s just not an option for them and they never got the option, when if they had known the information earlier, maybe they would have done something differently.
I just don’t want people to have regrets. I don’t think everyone has to freeze their eggs, but I think everyone should think about what they want out of life, their personal goals, and have a clear understanding, being able to overlay that with the biological facts, and to make smart and informed decisions for themselves. If the decision is they decide not to have children or they decide they don’t want to freeze their eggs, then fine. At least they did that decision making, they made that thoughtful decision based on accurate information.
Dr. Aimee: Right. I feel like my patients who were given the information, they chose not to do it, they’re not going to be angry in the future because they were given that information. The patients that feel like, “Why didn’t someone tell me,” they’re the ones that carry the regret and they feel like they missed an opportunity.
Dr. Lucky: Absolutely.
Dr. Aimee: I totally agree with you. For listeners who want to learn more, get a copy of your book, or follow along with your work, where can they find you?
Dr. Lucky: I’m on Instagram, @Lucky.Sekhon. I have a website by the same name, TheLuckyEgg.com. My book is available everywhere internationally. I think it’s a great guide not only for the people that are in the trenches of infertility with more complex cases, but it’s the book that helps someone understand what is the biological clock and what do I really need to know, what does my cycle mean, and what are the things that I need to be thinking about as I prepare for the future, and everything in between.
Dr. Aimee: I agree. Lucky, thank you for coming back and for sharing your wisdom. Your book offers such clear compassionate guidance, and I’m so thrilled people can learn from you in this new way.
All the links to what we covered today will be in the show notes. Be sure to subscribe to The Egg Whisperer Show on YouTube and Spotify. Remember to keep going with hope in your heart and a little sparkle in your step as you move forward on your fertility journey.
