Dr. Elizabeth Dilday is wonderful, and if I were rating her alone, it would be 5 stars without a…read moresecond thought. But this review is about my entire experience with egg freezing here -- and the frustrations have buried the highlights. I genuinely wanted to love this place. I just can't.
Start with billing, which has been a nightmare. I need my invoices for medical reimbursement -- that's money I'm owed back -- and despite staff promising to "expedite things," it took 2.5 to 3 months to get them, lack of email responses, calls with no number to call back, extensions that only goes to empty voicemails, after they'd sat marked "pending" for nearly two months. And when I finally reviewed the charges, the refund amounts had been added up wrong. So now I'm double-checking their math too. To fix it, I had to chase a separate department on East Coast time, which became an endless game of phone tag. Their billing is somehow both impossible to reach and disorganized once you do.
I came on a referral specifically for Dr. Dilday, and everything was fine -- until the morning of my procedure, when I was casually told she wouldn't be performing it. Instead it'd be whoever was on rotation. How is the day-of an acceptable time to learn that the entire reason I chose this clinic isn't the person operating on me? A heads-up days in advance is not a big ask. Dr. Dilday did visit me, which was genuinely sweet -- but one kind gesture can't paper over how poorly this was communicated.
Then the anesthesia, which still upsets me. I told the anesthesia team and every doctor that I come out of anesthesia rough -- clearly and repeatedly. Nobody believed me. The anesthesiologist brushed me off, saying that in all his years he'd never had a problem, and any issues before were because I hadn't had him. Well -- I had an adverse reaction. I woke up in traumatic, screaming pain, a 20 out of 10, exactly what I'd warned about. I wish he'd taken me seriously as he weaned me off the medication after the OR. My recovery was far worse than the two similar procedures I've had before -- genuinely concerning -- and I'm left wondering if it was the technique, the anesthesia, or both. When a patient tells you exactly what will happen to their body and you ignore them, this is what you get.
Now the pharmacy. CCRM uses an outside pharmacy, and that was its own disaster. The driver "missed the delivery window," and then management couldn't even locate their own driver for hours. When they finally found him, he had to meet me at a dinner venue -- where I walked out in front of all my friends to grab a giant cooling box for medication I did not want to explain to anyone. I was over an hour and a half late to my event, then had to inconvenience someone to store the meds in their fridge, which meant sharing a deeply personal situation I'd have preferred to keep private. I basically lost a whole day on the phone juggling team members over a pickup that should have been a simple delivery.
And all that chaos traced back to one decision: the clinic sent only a single day's loaned dose. So of course I then had to call the on-call doctor after hours to report I didn't have what I needed for day two. I still don't understand why they couldn't just loan two days' worth so nobody has to scramble.
It got worse. Right before my trigger injection -- the most time-sensitive, do-not-mess-this-up part of the whole process -- the on-call doctor clearly hadn't read the notes from the physician before him. He instructed me to start a medication I was never given and that was never ordered. I was at work, and he sent me into a full panic attack, because I couldn't drop everything to figure out what I supposedly had, literally the second-to-last day before my trigger.
The lack of professionalism, the broken handoffs, the total breakdown in communication between departments, physicians, and billing -- it has genuinely let me down. And it's worse because this could be such a great place. The talent is here, the reputation is real, and I drove two hours each way because of it. I could have stayed local, but I took the referral and did my research -- only to find out how much exhausting, unnecessary work this would be. Roughly four months later, I'm still chasing invoices that don't add up or aren't complete enough to even submit. Fertility patients are already carrying enough emotionally, physically, and financially. It should not be this exhausting.
The anxiety, the frustration, the helplessness, and the feeling of not being heard at times really don't make this experience with CCRM. I wish it wasn't so, and I am so sorry for leaving this review, but i really don't wish this upon anyone who is coming hoping for a good result.
