One frozen embryo left. Do we transfer it now or do another collection first and bank a few before we use it?

This is not the question I expected to be stuck on and it has been keeping me up.

We have one frozen embryo. One. It is the last thing from our collection in the spring and it has become, in my head, an enormous thing that I am terrified of spending. My husband's view is straightforward: it exists, we are not getting younger, transfer it in the autumn and see. My view keeps flip flopping. Half of me agrees with him. The other half wants to do another egg collection first so that if the transfer does not work we are not back at absolute zero with nothing in the freezer and no money left.

I know this is partly not a medical question. But is there a normal way people think about this? Does waiting a few months to do another collection first cost you anything? And does anyone else find the last embryo weirdly hard to use, or is that just me being strange about it?

Not strange. Extremely not strange. Mine sat in the freezer for eleven months while I told myself I was "not ready", and what I was actually doing was protecting the version of the future where it still might work.

What broke it for me was a friend pointing out that an embryo in a freezer has a 0% chance of becoming anything. Blunt, and I did not thank her at the time, but it was true and it got me to the phone.

I did it the other way round and would do it again, so here is the case for banking.

We did two collections back to back before transferring anything, mostly because our clinic thought I would respond less well as time went on and it made sense to gather while the gathering was good. It meant a very long stretch with nothing happening emotionally, which was hard, but when the first transfer failed we were not devastated and empty, we were disappointed and had two more goes lined up. That mattered more than I expected on the day.

The honest cost though is money and time, and if you are already stretched on either then it is not a free choice. Ours was only possible because we had funding for the collections.

Niamh, both of the paths in this thread are reasonable, and the thing I want to say first is that there is not a right answer hiding behind your indecision. There is a set of trade-offs, and they are yours to weigh.

The pieces that usually decide it, in the order they tend to matter. Age, because both the number and quality of eggs decline over time and the decline steepens from the late thirties, so a delay of several months can matter more at one age than another, which is exactly the kind of thing your own clinic can put in context for you. How you responded to stimulation last time, because that is the best available guide to what another collection would realistically yield. Money and stamina, honestly counted, since a collection is a full stimulation cycle again with the injections and the scans and the recovery, not a small addition. And the practical detail that frozen embryos are stored under consent forms with limits and annual fees, so it is worth knowing where you stand on those before you plan around a freezer.

Two things worth correcting, because they came up in my own version of this. A frozen transfer is not a lesser attempt or a consolation prize; it is a standard route with its own advantages, and frozen embryo transfer explains what it involves. And "we would be back at zero" is doing a lot of work in your post. A transfer that does not work is not zero. It is information about how your lining behaves and how that embryo did, which is part of what shapes the next decision.

On the last embryo feeling enormous: it is not just you, it comes up here constantly, and I felt it too. Ours was the third round and I remember being angry at how much meaning I had let one straw in a tank take on. What helped was writing down, with my husband, what we would do next in each of the two outcomes, before the transfer, so that the embryo was part of a plan rather than the whole plan.

The write-down-what-happens-next thing is underrated. We did it on the back of an envelope before our second transfer and it took about forty minutes and a small argument.

What it gave us was that on the morning of the negative result we already knew what Tuesday looked like. We were not making decisions in the worst hour of the month. Cannot recommend it enough, whichever way you go.

Different angle, and I say this with love: notice which option you are choosing to avoid a feeling rather than to get a baby.

I banked for a year and told everyone it was strategy. Some of it was. Some of it was that while the freezer was full I did not have to find out. I am not saying that is your reason. I am saying it is worth asking yourself in a quiet moment, because I did not, and the answer cost me a year.

Have read this thread about nine times, including the uncomfortable bit, which I sat with for a few days.

We have a review appointment booked for the middle of the month and I am taking a list: how I responded last time, what they would expect from another collection at my age, what our storage consent actually says, and what they would do in our position. Leaning towards transferring in the autumn. Not certain. But it is a decision with reasons attached now rather than a thing I lie awake avoiding, and the envelope exercise is happening this weekend whether my husband likes it or not.