Clinic is doing a "freeze all" and cancelling our fresh transfer over OHSS risk. Feel robbed of this cycle

So egg collection was yesterday and I'm sitting here feeling weirdly flat about what's supposed to be good news. They got 21 eggs, which the nurse said very cheerfully, and then in almost the same breath told me my oestrogen has been high and they're now doing a FREEZE ALL, no fresh transfer this cycle, freeze everything and do a frozen transfer in a month or two once things settle.

And I know, I KNOW, 21 eggs is a lot and I should be grateful. But I built my whole head around a transfer this week. That was the plan. And now it's whipped away and instead I'm bloated like a balloon and being told this is for OHSS reasons.

I have two worries tangled up. One, does freezing everything lower our chances compared to a fresh transfer, are we giving something up here? Two, how worried should I actually be about this OHSS thing, because the way it got mentioned made it sound both routine and slightly alarming at once. Anyone been freeze-all'd against their plan and come out okay?

We were freeze-all too, so from the partner's chair: I promise the flatness passes and the plan is not being downgraded, it's being made safer.

The thing that reframed it for us was realising the clinic isn't taking the transfer away, they're moving it to a month when your body isn't in the middle of an over-response. A fresh transfer only helps if the ground is good, and a high oestrogen, lots-of-eggs cycle is exactly when the ground isn't. Ours transferred beautifully a few weeks later. Try, if you can, to read it as them protecting the embryos and you, not as losing the cycle.

21 eggs and high oestrogen, that was almost exactly me a couple of years back, and I had the same lurch of "but the PLAN." I did get properly bloated and uncomfortable for about a week and had to go back in once for a check, so do take the resting and the fluids seriously, but it settled. The freeze all felt like a detour and turned out to be the sensible road. Be kind to your poor swollen middle this week.

Gemma, first: 21 eggs with a high oestrogen level is precisely the picture where a freeze all is the textbook safe call, so your team are doing the careful thing, not the disappointing one. Let me answer both your worries directly and then give you the shape of it.

On chances: freezing all your embryos does not, for most people, mean giving something up. Modern freezing (vitrification) means the large majority of good embryos survive thawing, and frozen transfer success is now broadly comparable to fresh. What predicts success most is the age of the egg when it was collected, which a freeze all preserves exactly. So you are banking this cycle's work, not spending it.

On OHSS: ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome is an over-response to the stimulation drugs, and it is driven by the hCG in the trigger and, crucially, by the hCG of an early pregnancy. That second part is the whole reason for the freeze all: transferring fresh and becoming pregnant now would pour fuel on exactly the fire they're trying to avoid, so they delay transfer until your ovaries have quietened. Your risk markers are the classic ones: a high egg number (above 15 to 20 is a common threshold), high oestrogen, and often a high AMH or PCOS behind it. For scale, mild OHSS bloating like yours is common, up to around a third of cycles, while the moderate to severe forms are much less frequent, roughly 1 to 5 in 100, and a freeze all plus close monitoring is one of the most effective ways to keep you at the mild end. Our guide to OHSS sets out the full picture, and frozen embryo transfer explains what the next step actually involves.

The exception worth holding clearly: mild bloating that is slowly improving is expected and fine to manage at home with rest and fluids. But rapid weight gain, severe or worsening abdominal pain, breathlessness, or passing much less urine are not wait-and-see symptoms, they need same-day contact with your clinic. If you're ever unsure which side of that line a symptom sits, that uncertainty is itself the reason to call. What your own team can tell you that this thread can't is the plan for your specific FET timing, which is the right question for your follow-up.

Just adding a small human note under all that good information: the grief of a plan changing at the last second is real and you're allowed to feel it even when the change is the right one. Both things are true at once. Rest up, drink your fluids, and let the frozen plan become the new plan gently.

Coming back to say thank you, this thread talked me down off a ledge. The bloating peaked around day 4 or 5 and then eased off, I rested properly and drank an unreasonable amount of water, and I didn't need to go back in. We've got a good number of embryos frozen and an FET pencilled in for next month.

What Dr Nair said about "banking the cycle, not spending it" is the sentence I keep repeating to myself. I've gone from feeling robbed to feeling, honestly, quite looked after. Onwards to the frozen transfer.