Erin’s Egg Freezing Experience at Hannam Fertility Centre
Erin flew from the Maritimes to Toronto to get care at Hannam Fertility Centre.
Written by Corrina Allen
For years, Erin had focused her time and energy on her career, becoming Vice Principal at a school by her late thirties. It was only when she lost her father that she turned her attention towards fertility preservation.
“That was a big Aha! moment,” she says. “Life is passing us by whether we choose to believe it or not. I thought, ‘Okay, I need to figure out what I want here.’”
At age 40, she started her fertility journey, quickly realizing that she wished she’d started sooner. She underwent two courses of egg retrieval in the Maritimes but unfortunately, she was disappointed with the maturity of her eggs upon retrieval. Given her age and the immaturity of her eggs, she decided to give another clinic a try.
Her careful research led her to Hannam Fertility Centre (HFC). “Their lab is state of the art,” she says. “You're not getting anything else better in Canada.”
“Their lab is state of the art. You’re not getting anything else better in Canada.”
In addition to the cutting-edge lab at HFC, Erin was impressed by their team-based approach. At HFC, patients are assigned a care team and virtually all their correspondence is handled by a single unit that knows them and their fertility history. “I always had a point of contact. I was always able to email them and they would get right back to me,” says Erin.
She was also able to move through treatment at a quick pace, which was comforting since so much of fertility care comes down to timing. “The great thing about Hannam is that they're very thorough in terms of follow up. Every single time I had something done or tests run, they were always really great to schedule a follow-up with the doctor within a very short period of time.”
“So many people are struggling with fertility nowadays,” she shared, noting that many people are waiting longer to start their families. Egg freezing and retrieval procedures have seen a recent rise in popularity, and fertility clinics are busier than ever. At HFC, all the teams work hard to make sure that patients don’t feel the strain — and instead, they feel seen, heard, and cared for.
“I felt like they really made me a priority and that the timeline was very reasonable,” recalls Erin. “They made sure that if I wanted to push in any capacity, if I wanted my timeline to be aggressive, they were right there and ready to go with me.”
“They made sure that if I wanted to push in any capacity, if I wanted my timeline to be aggressive, they were right there and ready to go with me.”
Erin says that she appreciates the level of organization she encountered at Hannam and the attention to detail she saw exercised at every stage of her experience — from her first assessment to her preparation for retrieval to her aftercare.
“I always felt like [my doctor] was making decisions so that my physical, mental, and emotional health were at the forefront of what we were talking about.”
