There is a scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary that perfectly summarises an experience anyone over 30 and single in London will be familiar with. It’s at Una Alconbury’s turkey curry buffet, right after pervy “Uncle” Geoffrey has asked about Bridget’s love life. Una swans over and says: “You career girls! I don’t know! Can’t put it off forever, you know. Tick-tock-tick-tock.”

Bridget calls it the “question dreaded by all singletons” but I’d say the inevitable follow-up is considerably more dreadful: “Don’t you want to have kids?”

Here’s the quandary: if, for whatever reason, you don’t, you are likely to have to field yet more questions. If you do, you’ll be served a heavy helping of pity. Bridget may have been a creation of the 1990s, designed to epitomise the era’s thirty-something London-based singleton, but the example is still relevant. What’s changed, though, is that women now have another option when confronted with that tick-tock: egg freezing.

Nowhere is the relief of having the option to potentially buy a little more time more apparent than in the capital. The city’s fertility rate has fallen sharply, by some 21 per cent over the past decade, while London accounts for 78 per cent of all UK egg-freezing cycles in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s landmark analysis, despite accounting for only 36 per cent of fertility treatment cycles overall. The reasons women freeze their eggs are as varied as the women themselves — and those include me.

At 41 and single, I found myself wanting that little bit more time. As of last month, I have 20 frozen eggs safely residing on Harley Street until — or rather if — I decide the time to thaw them has come. What I hadn’t appreciated before was how much the process would take its toll on my body and spirit and how difficult it was to fit in around the rest of my life. The phrase “freezing eggs” is bandied around as if it’s simple — I can assure you, it is not.

Over in New York, democratic politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, at 36, undergoing the same process and has been uploading videos to Instagram that chart the day-to-day developments. AOC is freezing while continuing to work, taking her medication to events in a lunchbox, saying she thinks it’s “badass that I’m gonna be giving myself shots in the green room, get my glam on, roll out, talk international events, domestic policy, elections…”

Having gone through the process, I too think she’s badass for doing it. It’s a bruising process and, while I’m fortunate that I could afford egg freezing in the first place (it came in at around £6,000 for this round), I’m a freelancer who doesn’t have the benefit of paid-for sick days or any real job security, and I still had bills to pay. So I did the same as AOC and lugged my distended abdomen and exhausted body to commitments throughout.

Writing from home was fine on the days when I wasn’t besieged with tiredness, but some of my work involves hosting events, two of which fell within my egg-freezing window. The first, conducting a panel chat, was towards the tail end of the stimulation period, meaning my stomach was at its biggest and most tender. My mum, ever a pragmatist, took me shopping and told me to find something draped to cover it without causing any discomfort. But the nausea started to kick in on the morning of the event, so while the loose clothing made me look normal, I felt hideous. I clawed my way through the conversation while my hands became ever more clammy as I tried not to think about the weird sensations flying around my body.

Then came the collection. Twenty eggs were successfully frozen, challenging an idea put in my head by a doctor who had told me in my thirties that there was “no point” in bothering after 35. After the sedation, I assumed that, rather like a period, the worst bit would have been everything leading up to it. No such luck. As my body recovered from the egg stimulation, I was served a cocktail of emotions, puffiness, achiness and yet more nausea. As I walked up on stage to pontificate on the second panel I’d committed to, the cold grip of nausea engulfed me again and each point I made felt like a triumph in the face of fighting the rising urge to vomit, despite being on anti-emetics prescribed by the clinic.

This is the part of egg-freezing I don’t think we talk about enough. It seems almost administrative, clinical — the two words sound as simple as popping to the corner shop for ice cream. But, in my experience, it’s all-consuming. Days are organised around injections and scans, ovaries swell, the body increasingly seems like an alien thing you inhabit and recovery takes time. All the while, ordinary life happens around you and if you must continue to work, it all adds up to a gruelling time.

Looking back, my advice to anyone undergoing the process would be to take time off, kick back, and not worry about anything. But for plenty of women, that simply isn’t how life works. And so, yes, we can now tell the Una Alconburys of the world that while the tick-tock hasn’t been stopped then it has the very least slowed. There is a cost, however — not only a financial one, but a toll on the body as it does this extraordinary thing of releasing eggs to be frozen.