Kourtney Kardashian says drugs for freezing her eggs made her 'crazy'
Kourtney Kardashian is a mother of three, but she hasn’t ruled out having more kids in the future. In a sneak peek for Sunday’s episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the oldest Kardashian sister said that she’s in the process of freezing her eggs.
“I’ve been so up and down emotionally because I’ve been doing the shots for the egg freezing,” she tells her friends in the teaser. “It’s like crazy. I feel like I want to jump out of my skin. I’m so crazy, I can’t take it.” Kardashian also showed off the bruises on her stomach from taking hormone injections. “The injections themselves weren’t really a big deal because I have a really high pain tolerance,” she says. “But I think everything was just really heightened. Some days I would feel so anxious. It’s just very emotional, so that I think is the hard part.”
Kardashian says she even had to reassure then-boyfriend Younes Bendjima that her mood swings weren’t because of him. “He thinks everything is about him,” she says. “So I’m like, ‘No, this has nothing to do with you.’” She later added that she feels “fine … I just cry myself to sleep every night.”
Kardashian, 39, admits that she’s not sure if she wants more kids but doesn’t want to completely close the door on the possibility. “I just feel like this is for safety,” she says. “I hope that going through all of this is worth it. I don’t want to put my body through something like this again. The emotions of it all are just a lot.”
That Kardashian is feeling like she’s going “crazy” on the medications for freezing her eggs is “completely understood,” Spencer Richlin, a reproductive endocrinologist with RMA of Connecticut, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Before an egg retrieval, a woman will take gonadotropins, which are medications that stimulate the ovaries to produce eggs, he explains.
“The reason that you have to give patients these hormones is because normally the body only produces one egg during each cycle,” Jane Frederick, a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist at HRC Fertility, tells Yahoo Lifestyle.
But “during stimulation … which takes approximately eight to 12 days, we want to stimulate the ovary to make multiple large follicles each with an egg,” Richlin says. “We want to retrieve as many eggs as we can for our patients.” (In a perfect world, that would mean getting 10 to 15 eggs or more during a cycle, Frederick says.)
The medications and added hormones involved in the process “can, for some, bring more emotions to the surface,” Richlin says. Add that to the fact that a woman is likely feeling anxious and excited about the outcome, and she can be especially emotional, he says. The eggs themselves can make women feel more emotional, David Ryley, a reproductive endocrinologist with Boston IVF, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “The eggs produce large amounts of estrogen,” he says. “Some women (not all) get more emotional from estrogen levels that are higher than normal.”
Many women will just report feeling “different,” Frederick says. “It’s kind of like when you’re on your cycle but the symptoms may be more ramped up. But I’ve never had someone say they were ready to tear their hair out.” She tries to put things in perspective: “The good news is you only take the medication for 10 days. It’s a very short, focused period of time, so you can ensure that you have preserved your fertility.”
Overall, most women seem to think it’s worth it. Richlin says he has “never seen a patient stop in the middle” of egg retrieval or IVF due to the side effects. “The process of egg-freezing can take as little as two weeks,” he says. “It is incredibly worthwhile, helps keep options open and is rewarding, as we keep the opportunity of pregnancy open for the future.”
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
Woman’s photo shoot celebrates freezing her eggs — by posing with edible ones
This 100-Year-Old Fertility Technique Can Boost Your Chances of Getting Pregnant
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