Life doesn't always follow the plan.

I’m a single British woman in my early fifties, and for most of my adult life I’ve called the United Arab Emirates home.

When I first started writing this blog, I didn’t use my name. I wrote as ‘egg girl’. I wasn’t sure what a single woman in the UAE was and wasn’t allowed to do, let alone say out loud, and I wanted to respect the rules and the culture of a country that had been very good to me. So I kept my name out of it and let the story speak for itself.

The law has since changed. A single woman in the UAE can now have a child outside marriage, and with that change came a quieter one in me: I no longer feel I have to hide. That doesn’t mean the path has been clearly signposted. It hasn’t. Much of it has been uncharted water, and I’ve learned to swim along the way often in many different strokes!

I arrived in the UAE in 2008 for what was meant to be a two-year work adventure.

Nearly two decades later, I’m still here.

And it has been, by any measure, a good life. A career I’m proud of. A world’s worth of travel. Wonderful friends. A home in a country I still feel lucky to live in.

By my late thirties I had the job, the salary, the lifestyle. The kind of life that looks complete from the outside but felt lonely on the inside.

Two things were missing.

Mr Right. And a baby.

I know, of course, that the two don’t have to arrive together, and that families are built in all sorts of beautiful ways. But the picture I’d always carried was a simple one: meet someone, fall in love, have a child together. I simply assumed it would happen like that for me one day.

‘One day’ was taking its time.

So, shortly after my 40th birthday, with a gentle push from my older sister, I began to look into freezing my eggs.

I thought I was buying myself time. I had no idea I was starting a story.

This is My Eggsperience.

I’m sharing it for every woman navigating her own fertility, and especially for those who, like me, believed there would always be a little more time.

In May 2015, shortly after my 40th birthday, I made a decision.

I was going to freeze my eggs.

It wasn’t surrender. I hadn’t given up on meeting Mr Right. I simply wanted a little more time: time to find him, and time to become a mother the way I’d always pictured it.

My twenties and thirties had gone on other things. Building a career. Seeing the world. Saying yes to life. Motherhood sat quietly on the horizon, the way it does when you assume it will wait for you.

Then the biological clock I’d been so cheerfully ignoring began to tick louder. Loud enough that I could no longer pretend not to hear it.

So I decided to do something about it.

I was fit. I was healthy. I trained, I looked after myself. Freezing my eggs, I reasoned, would be a formality. A box to tick.

I could not have been more wrong.

The Test That Changed Everything

A little online research told me where to start: an AMH test.

AMH stands for Anti-Müllerian Hormone. It’s a blood test that gives an indication of ovarian reserve, roughly how many eggs a woman may have left. It can’t tell you whether you will or won’t get pregnant, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle when you’re considering treatment.

Simple, I thought. One blood test. One result. One plan.

The result came back at 0.1 ng/mL = Very low. Barely detectable.

Nothing like the number I’d been expecting.

I remember the panic arriving first. Then the shock. Then a stubborn, almost indignant disbelief.

How could it be that low? I was healthy. I exercised. I looked after myself. There had to be a mistake.

Perhaps it was because I’d only just come off the birth control pill after five years.

Perhaps the lab had got it wrong.

Perhaps I just needed to take it again.

Perhaps… perhaps… perhaps…

I was grasping for any explanation that didn’t mean what I was most afraid it meant.

Because in the light of that one number, the time I thought I’d bought myself looked very different.

What if I’d already run out of time?

Finding Answers

I needed answers, and I needed them fast.

I’d assumed the hard part would be deciding to freeze my eggs. It had never occurred to me that actually being able to freeze them might be harder still than the decision to do it.

And then there was where I lived.

At the time, fertility treatment for unmarried women in the UAE had restrictions. Pursuing motherhood as a single woman wasn’t an option as far as I knew. I wasn’t even sure what I could/couldn’t ask.

Which left me facing questions I had no idea how to answer.

Should I leave the country I’d made my home to have treatment somewhere else?

Could I find a doctor in the UAE who would sit down with me and properly explain my options?

And where on earth did I begin, when I didn’t yet know what I didn’t know?

There was privacy to think about, too. Egg freezing was slowly finding its way into conversation in other parts of the world, but as a single woman trying to preserve her fertility in the Middle East, I felt as though I was setting out with no map to follow.

That is a big part of why I chose to stay anonymous. I wanted to tell the truth without worrying what it might cost me, personally or professionally. And I wanted to talk about the things that so often only get whispered behind closed doors.

The appointments.

The confusion.

The highs, and the lows that knock you sideways.

The decisions.

The costs.

And the sheer, exhausting amount of research it took just to understand what my choices were.

What I Wish I'd Known

If I’d known in my twenties what I know now, I truly believe I’d have made some very different decisions.

Not necessarily about my career, my relationships or where I chose to build my life.

But certainly about my fertility.

I wish someone had sat me down and explained what age really does to it.

I wish I’d learned about egg freezing years before I turned 40.

And I wish I’d understood that being fit, healthy and active is no guarantee. You can do everything right and still find your ovarian reserve telling a very different story.

Some of what I’ve been through was unavoidable. Some of it, I believe, was made harder than it needed to be by a lack of information, a lack of understanding and, at times, a lack of compassion.

Yes, my own ignorance included.

Along the way I’ve also met a handful of truly wonderful healthcare professionals, people whose kindness carried me further than they’ll ever know.

But I can’t shake the feeling that it shouldn’t have been this hard to find my way.

My hope is simple: that by sharing what happened to me, conversations about fertility and egg freezing become a little more normal.

A little more open.

And a great deal less frightening.

I don’t believe every woman should become a mother. I don’t believe every woman needs to freeze her eggs. Far from it.

But I do believe every woman deserves clear, honest information early enough to make her own choices about her own future knowing the facts.

Not in a panic, wondering whether she’s already left it too late.

And not, as I did, by discovering all at once how much she never knew.

If these pages help even one woman ask her questions sooner, explore her options or simply feel a little less alone, then telling this story will have been worth every word.

Because if this journey has taught me anything, it’s that knowledge really is power.

I only wish I’d had a little more of it at the start.

So here it is: every round, every result, every decision. Everything I wish I’d known, so that you can start with more than I did.