A few months ago Savannah Chrisley revealed that she’d been diagnosed with endometriosis and undergone multiple surgeries to manage the condition. And now she’s taking a major step for her health and her future: The 23-year-old star of Chrisley Knows Best and Growing Up Chrisley will pursue freezing her eggs, she told People.
“I have been blessed with such an amazing career and the financial means to [freeze my eggs],” Chrisley said in the interview. “For me, I’ve always said, ‘God meant me to be a mother.’ I know I would be devastated if that couldn’t happen for me.”
Endometriosis is a condition in which the tissue that normally lines the uterus (or tissue that’s very similar to it) actually grows on other nearby organs, most often reproductive organs like the ovaries. That can cause severe period pain, pain during sex, and heavy period bleeding, among other symptoms.
The condition can also affect fertility in a few ways. Endometriosis can cause certain types of ovarian cysts (called endometriomas or chocolate cysts) that can damage the eggs inside of the ovary. The scar tissue the condition creates can cause the reproductive organs to stick together, making it difficult for them to function normally. And the inflammation that endometriosis causes can also negatively impact fertility in general.
If you have endometriosis and are concerned about the condition making it difficult for you to conceive in the future, there are a few options to consider. First, know that some medications commonly prescribed to help manage endometriosis (particularly hormonal birth control) can also help prevent it from impacting your fertility. However, you would need to stop taking birth control to become pregnant, of course, so you would need to find other endometriosis management strategies that make sense for you. Some minimally invasive surgeries used to treat endometriosis by removing cysts or scar tissue can also make it easier to conceive.
And then there’s egg or embryo freezing. The success of these procedures depends on several factors, such as the number of eggs that you freeze and the age at which you freeze them. For many, these procedures are prohibitively expensive. So they’re not a 100% guarantee of a successful pregnancy down the line, and experts recommend against thinking of them as a type of “insurance policy.” But it can provide a sense of relief knowing that you have that option.
“I’m blessed there are these options out here,” Chrisley said. “Just because you have to do things a little different than some other women doesn’t mean that it’s any less special. That’s how I look at it. It doesn’t matter how we get there, just as long as we get there.”
Related:
Savannah Chrisley Had a ‘Huge Cyst’ Removed During Her Endometriosis Surgery
How Does Endometriosis Impact Fertility?
Olivia Culpo Reveals She Has Endometriosis—And Urges People to Take Painful Periods Seriously