Fertility - A Chefs Account

Lauren Joseph, a Chef and Writer has been generous enough to share her experiences of balancing her career in kitchens with her fertility journey.

I’m writing you from the waiting room of the fertility ward at Lister Hospital, where I’m gearing up for round two of egg freezing. I spent quite a bit of November in this room; I’m an old pro. I know which coffee machine works and which nurse has the funniest chit-chat during a trans-vaginal probe. I also know that while I’d like to get back to work in a kitchen, it's probably best that I wait until post-surgery.

A little background on what egg freezing is and what it entails. (Broadstrokes, as I’m under-qualified for more.) During the two-or-so week process, I visit the clinic every other day for monitoring ultrasounds and blood tests. Each night, I inject myself with follicular stimulating hormones. The hormones grow a slew of eggs, which then, in surgery, are sucked out via a trans-vaginal needle. The eggs are then frozen. If I decide to use them in the future, I’ll continue with the IVF process.

Egg freezing is prohibitively expensive in the UK. One cycle at The Lister Clinic, where I’ll have treatment and surgery, costs upwards of £6,000. Women with certain medical conditions qualify for coverage via the NHS, but most pay out of pocket. That rules out many hospitality workers. I’m wildly lucky to be able to do this. I hesitated to share because of how rare it is for a chef to be able to afford this. My hope here is that even if egg freezing is a unique experience for a female chef, navigating fertility while doing this job is not. I’d like to talk about that issue until it’s a boring old thing long since addressed, like demanding women ride side saddle or not giving us the vote.

I chose to freeze eggs for two reasons. One, I’m not in a place career-wise to have kids in the next few years. I love my job. It also entails standing over the pans or a smoky grill for two services a day, running up and down stairs, lifting crates of produce, sleeping scant and irregular hours, eating scrappy bits out of 9-pans. I know women do it. My mother waddled to the last day of her medical residency at nine months pregnant, having never missed a day. I’m hoping I can do a job I love without conjuring that kind of toughness and inviting the lasting repercussions of it. I’m betting on my ability to find a way with the time I’m buying here. The other reason is that I have a medical condition which might impact my chance of carrying a pregnancy to term.

Three months after my doctor urged me to consider it, I was working a restaurant opening. I’ve only worked two but I’m getting the sense there’s a universal language of openings: running. During that first one, I wouldn’t have been able to freeze my eggs even if I had wanted to. I could barely get a period from stress and the above lackluster 9-pan meal pan.

In a conversation with my head chef, I told him what I was delaying, and that unlike our otherwise all male team, that I had a physical indicator every month of how hard we were working. Starting the next day, it became mandatory to take a seated break each afternoon, even if for five minutes. We cooked nourishing staff meals twice a day. A rota that switched between prep and service teams ensured a few weeks at a time of early nights and normal sleep patterns. Beers shifted to Lucky Saint most nights. That restaurant is often thought of as shiny and sexy which it certainly is, but one of its greatest strengths is a young, male head chef who quietly wrangled a brand new team into making that culture shift.

Still, despite his kind offer of a temporary less physical pastry rotation or if needed, time off post-surgery, I waited until I was between kitchens to do the egg freezing. I didn’t want to let anyone down by taking sick leave and I didn’t want to hold myself back or be seen as weaker than the guys for taking time away.

Before I was a chef, I used to run the same loop around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park most nights. When the days were short, women would drop off on each curve and I’d defiantly (and foolishly) keep jogging, until finally I deemed it not safe enough for me to run in the dark anymore. If you’re the only one having the conversation, holding your hand up and saying, this is too hardcore and it’s not good for us, the only one asking for time away for something as intimate and vulnerable as your reproductive health, the only one feeling held back by it, it’s easier to just try to grit through it.

When I finally did the egg freezing, I developed a fairly common complication which was distractingly uncomfortable for two weeks. My stomach popped as if I were six months along. My belly skin stretched so taut it hurt and I felt like I couldn’t get enough air in, now that my grapefruit ovaries were pushing all my other organs around. The upside was that I was totally fine in the end, and I now know I look cute as hell pregnant. But there is not a chance that if I had been in the go-go-go of a top London kitchen, where, chances are, I would have had to carefully advocate for time off or working within my limits, I would have. I almost certainly would’ve just gotten on with it, regardless of the health repercussions.

Egg freezing even with a complication or two is a small crumb compared to pregnancy and motherhood. The first shift I ever worked in a kitchen the pregnant grill chef clambered up to the extraction at midnight to clean, after inhaling smoke in an enclosed space all night. I felt quite awed by her power and sad for her. A chef that tough is an asset in your kitchen. I hope we stop making her prove it.