When Mariana Fernández decided to undergo egg-freezing last year, it felt like the perfect time — even though, from the outside, it may have seemed anything but. It meant pausing Fernández’s career as a yoga instructor, Tread trainer, and meditation leader for Peloton. It meant changing her training for the Chicago and New York Marathons, which was in full swing. It meant finally connecting with a provider who helped her feel comfortable, something she’d struggled with for years.
But for Fernández, then 37, the time was now. She had been considering freezing her eggs since age 30, when the end of a relationship left her questioning her path and plan to raise a family one day. “When that didn’t work out… all of a sudden there was this big question mark,” Fernández tells SheKnows. “It was like, well now what?”
It was her siblings who reminded her of options like egg freezing. “They were the ones who were like, ‘Just don’t worry about finding someone. That’s just the stigma that we have, that you have to be coupled up,'” Fernández said. “I was very fortunate to have them in my ear all the time saying, ‘Just give yourself the opportunity, so that years down the line, if you still want to have a family, you have the option.'”
It wasn’t until summer 2023 that the stars aligned for Fernández, both financially and in finding a doctor she trusted. “I felt like I was in a factory,” Fernández recalls of her early visits to providers. “It was like 40 of us women in a waiting room, and you were just cycled in.” Feeling safe and cared-for was a major priority for Fernández, who would be going through the process without a partner, and it took a recommendation from a Peloton member — “I call her my guardian angel,” Fernández says — for her to find the right doctor.
“The doctor really broke it down,” recalls Fernández, who had felt overwhelmed during previous attempts to start the process. “I said, ‘Please talk to me like I’m a kindergartner.’ [She] held my hand throughout the process.”
That process started sooner than Fernández was anticipating, with the doctor suggesting she begin a few weeks after they met. Fernández decided to embrace that timeline, despite everything else going on, from her career to the two marathons she had on her calendar for fall.
“It was the height of my training,” Fernández remembers. But this time, she decided to put herself and her personal priorities first, ahead of her career and her fitness goals. “I said, ‘This is so important, there will never be a perfect time. Let’s start.'”
The first step was doing daily hormone injections for a few weeks to stimulate her ovaries, which was less of an imposition than Fernández expected. “I thought you would have to be bedridden for weeks prior, which, again, depend[s] on how your body’s reacting, [but for me it] just didn’t happen,” she says. “I was able to keep running and moving for a while prior to the trigger shot.”
The trigger shot typically consists of hCG, aka the “pregnancy hormone,” which prepares “the eggs to mature and then burst out from the ovary,” according to Healthline. In the lead-up to hers, Fernández was starting to feel the hormones and the physical effects. “All of a sudden, I feel like I have like dinosaur eggs in there… like a sloshing in my stomach,” she remembers.
The discomfort increased with her trigger shot and afterwards, as Fernández recovered from her egg retrieval and battled ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which occurs when the ovaries swell and become painful as a response to excess hormones, per Mayo Clinic. “The swelling would just not come down,” Fernández recalls. Her marathon training quickly shifted, as Fernández wasn’t cleared for any kind of physical activity until her symptoms cleared. That also removed a main source of stress relief for the longtime trainer and yoga instructor, who leaned on her meditation practice instead.
While her symptoms started to subside five or six days after the September retrieval, Fernández said it wasn’t until December or January that she “got back to an even place” with hormones. That meant running not one, but two marathons while feeling like not-exactly-herself. Fernández embraced the challenge, though, and now describes the Chicago Marathon as “not my fastest race, but my smartest race.” She ended up doing a walk-run pace, saying, “I took my time. I just changed the goal of that race, and I really enjoyed seeing Chicago without feeling like I had to run as fast as I could.”
It’s a pretty apt metaphor for Fernández’s fertility journey as a whole. When her first plan — to get married and have kids in her early 30s — didn’t happen, she shifted her mindset and discovered a way to do things differently, as well as a newfound strength.
“I felt really empowered by the whole process,” Fernández says. “That was my biggest surprise of it all.” She felt in tune with her body in a way she hadn’t before, even as a fitness professional who uses her body intentionally every day. “I just connected to myself in a more profound way,” she says.
Fernández says she’s “so happy” she went through egg freezing when she did. Now 39, she hasn’t decided whether she’ll do another round, given how tough the recovery was. But whatever her future family planning looks like, Fernández holds profound gratitude for her experience and is passionate about sharing it to help others. In doing so, she hopes to encourage “conversations and open dialogue,” she says. “So that whoever has questions or is worried, ‘Will I be able to have children one day because my ex broke up with me, and that’s no longer part of my fairytale plan?’ Yes, there are options… you can still have this dream.”
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