Tonight, at 11pm, one of TV scientist Dr Emily Grossman’s friends will call her. ‘Are we ready?’ she’ll ask. Emily will say she is, and start ‘stabbing my belly with hormone injections’.

She will do so every night for two weeks, with her friend on the line for emotional support, until she is given a trigger injection to release ten or so eggs from her swollen ovaries. Thirty-six hours later, Emily will go to a clinic to have those eggs sucked out and placed in a freezer.

Emily is one of a growing number of single, thirtysomething women choosing to put motherhood on ice in the hope of starting a family with Mr Right, if and when he shows up.

‘I see my ovaries every other day in a scan during the second week of injections,’ says Emily. She’s just embarked upon her third cycle — three cycles are recommended to get the maximum number of healthy eggs. The total cost is close to £10,000.

TV scientist Dr Emily Grossman (pictured), revealed she is freezing her eggs until she meets the right person to start a family with

‘I develop a real relationship with my eggs over those two weeks. I do yoga and meditation and imagine the hormones helping them grow into nice healthy eggs.

‘I have a local anaesthetic, so I’m conscious and feel really connected to what’s happening. There’s a bit of discomfort, but I have that moment where I feel my little eggs being sucked out of me and I say to them: “You’ll be safer in the freezer than you are in my body. I’m getting older. You stay at 38 and I’ll come back when I need you.” ’ Which all sounds, well, a bit daft.

But Emily is not daft. In fact, she is one of the brightest thirtysomethings around, with a double first in natural sciences from Queens’ College, Cambridge and a PhD in cancer research from Manchester University. This week, she was named, with astronaut Tim Peake, as an honorary STEM ambassador, working to inspire Britain’s youth in science and tech.

Emily, a resident expert on Sky1’s science panel show Duck Quacks Don’t Echo, recently spoke out at the British Science Festival in Brighton about her highly personal decision to freeze her eggs.

She hopes other women in their 30s will consider doing the same. She’s clearly thought a lot about this, and insists her decision is backed up by science.

‘Fertility in women drops rapidly from the mid-30s onwards,’ she says. ‘It halves between 35 and 40 and again between 40 and 42. I’ve seen how devastating it is for friends who meet the love of their life in their 40s, then struggle to start a family. I don’t want to be in that position.’

The number of women freezing their eggs in the UK has nearly tripled in the last five years (file image)

She is not alone. While we are yet to see egg-freezing parties, as thrown in LA and New York, the number of women freezing their eggs in the UK has nearly tripled in five years, from 284 women in 2009 to 816 in 2014. Companies such as Apple and Facebook are even offering workers egg freezing as a perk of their job.

There are, though, those who fear a generation of women are being misled. An investigation by this newspaper earlier this year revealed fertility clinics were peddling false hope, with promises of 65 per cent success rates, whereas official figures show only 15 per cent of IVF cycles using frozen eggs are successful.

‘That’s not the whole picture,’ insists Emily. ‘Those [lower] figures include two techniques, and were for women of all ages. The older technique was to “slow-freeze” eggs, but the latest, vitrification, freezes them very quickly, preventing ice crystals forming, which can damage the egg.

‘If the newer technique is used, and the eggs come from a woman under 35, there is a 90-95 per cent success rate of the eggs surviving thawing, compared to 50-60 per cent. Vitrification has been shown to lead to live birth rates of around 40 per cent per cycle of frozen eggs, which is comparable to the use of fresh eggs in IVF.’

Emily hopes to meet someone in the next few years and conceive naturally

Which means exactly what for a woman Emily’s age — she’s nearly 39? ‘The success rate for a woman my age is 25-30 per cent,’ she says, her brow furrowing.

‘Even if it was 25 per cent per cycle, I’m doing three cycles. In my world, that’s nearly a baby.’

A statistician will tell you the chances of success are 57.8 per cent, so perhaps more like half a baby? The brow uncreases.

‘Which is why I want women younger than me who haven’t reached their mid-30s to consider freezing their eggs,’ she says. ‘At that point, they’ve got a 40 per cent success rate [per cycle].’

But isn’t it all rather too engineered? What happened to boy meets girl, settles down and lives happily ever after? ‘I would love to fall in love and conceive naturally. I know I cannot rely on these eggs in the freezer.

‘Ideally, I wouldn’t go back to them. Ideally, I’ll meet someone in the next few years, but . . .’ She shrugs. Emily has lived with two men, one during her 20s and a second lengthy relationship that ended last year. ‘In my 20s, I wasn’t thinking about marriage and babies. I was having lots of fun and was more focused on my career. I’d always had in the back of my mind that, one day, I would get married and have kids, but it wasn’t a primary objective.

‘I had thought my more recent relationship might lead to a future. We eventually decided that, while we would both like a family, our relationship was not going to lead to that.

‘Reaching that decision was difficult, because I wanted children and I was nearing my late 30s. My biological clock was ticking, but I hadn’t met the person I wanted a family with.’

Emily’s story is familiar. She is from a generation of bright, educated women brought up to believe they were equal to men in all things, until the time limit on their fertility exposed the deceit.

She was the only child born to the highly respected professor of neuroendocrinology Ashley Grossman and travel writer Susan Grossman

‘I was at a talk at the British Science Festival in Cheltenham two years ago called The Fertility Time Bomb, in which experts talked about how a lot of women are losing the opportunity to have kids as they are leaving it increasingly late.

‘They also said we’re in danger of having a generation of “lonely onlys” because those who have children later in life are only managing to have one. Please, God, if I get to have children, I would like to have more than one. Being a single child can be difficult.’

Emily was the only child born to the highly respected professor of neuroendocrinology Ashley Grossman and travel writer Susan Grossman, who divorced when she was four.

An academically gifted child, she struggled through much of her early life to find her place in the world, and would have loved nothing more than to have had a brother or sister as ‘a buddy’.

‘Both my parents remarried and had children I loved to pieces, but it was certainly difficult for me having two families and two homes and never quite knowing where my base was,’ she says.

She says she hit a brick wall in her career soon after turning 30

‘There were two parts to me: the part that loved science, represented by my dad, and my creative side that loved theatre, like my mum. It took me a long time to reconcile the two.’

Indeed, after her PhD at Manchester, Emily attended drama school, before embarking on a career as an actress.

‘By the time I was in my late 20s, most of my friends from school and university were getting married. There was one summer I went to nine weddings. I thought: “I’ve got plenty of time. I’m living this amazing life.” I loved what I was doing, but I was also pushing myself so hard.’

Soon after turning 30, she hit a brick wall. ‘I’d sort of burnt out,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t sustain that level of intensity. I knew I didn’t want this life any more.’

She gave up acting to work as a maths and science tutor and bought herself a flat in North London, where she lives today.

‘I did a lot of soul-searching. I saw a counsellor at one point, to help me understand who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with life. I was very lost.’

As luck would have it, five years ago, her mother spotted a BBC advert offering media training to expert women from various areas of academia. Emily was one of 30 selected from 2,000 applicants.

It has since led Emily to a career she loves as a science communicator, and which combines her skill-sets. A couple of years later, she met her last serious boyfriend. ‘My biological clock put a lot of pressure on the relationship,’ she says. In the end, it lasted two years.

‘Soon after coming out of that relationship, I knew time was ticking, but no one wants to be that woman who goes on a date looking for a baby father. I didn’t want to rush into having kids with somebody I didn’t really know.

Emily admits right now that she wouldn't want to defrost her eggs and raise a child alone, but that it feels great to know she is being proactive in taking control of her fertility

‘I’ve seen other friends my age do that. Often, the baby’s born and the relationship doesn’t last because they haven’t taken enough time to really get to know each other.

‘I’d like to give my children the best possible chance of having a family where the parents are united and together.’ Emily says she’d toyed with the idea of freezing her eggs since that science festival, but finally decided to book an appointment at London’s Gennet City Fertility clinic in January.

Within two weeks of that consultation, she began her first cycle of fertility treatment. ‘I was really excited to get started. This feeling of pressure had been hanging over me for so long. All I thought about was this terror that I was getting older and it would be too late and I wouldn’t be able to have a child.

‘That was all-consuming and I wanted to do something, not to make it go away — it isn’t foolproof, that’s for sure — but to take off some of that pressure.’

What if she never meets Mr Right? Would she defrost the eggs and raise a child alone?

‘I’ve thought about that and, right now, it isn’t something I’d want to do,’ she says. ‘So I am dating. There’s no one in particular, but I’m putting myself out there and exploring what sort of man I want to have a future with.

‘The beauty of having frozen eggs is they will remain at the biological age I am now and, even if I pass the menopause, I can defrost them and use them for IVF up to ten years in the future.’

As if on cue, the phone rings. It’s the clinic. Her face lights up. The results of a scan and blood tests taken earlier in the day show she is ready to start the hormone injections. You’d have thought, given her sheer joy, she’d just been told she was pregnant with twins.

‘It’s just great to know I’m doing something proactive by taking control of my fertility,’ she says.

‘I know there are no guarantees, but we have to give ourselves the best possible chance and then accept what life throws at us.’