Nicole Lapin Shares Video Diary of Egg Freezing Process

— -- Financial guru, television personality and author Nicole Lapin said she wanted to “be in the driver’s seat” of her life when she decided to freeze her eggs.

“When I was in my 20s, I was career, career, career,” Lapin, now 32, told ABC News. “I realized that I was in the backseat of my own life and I wanted to take control and I wanted to be in the driver's seat of my own life.”

Lapin not only froze her eggs but she documented the emotional journey for Redbook magazine. Lapin is a financial columnist for Redbook.

“Today is the day I took charge of my future,” she says in the video diary.

Lapin told ABC News she felt her biological clock ticking when she turned 30 and was in a long-term relationship with a person she says did not want to have a family and children.

“I always wanted to have a family. I wanted to be married by my late 20s. I wanted to have kids by my early 30s,” Lapin said. “You know, it didn't happen for me that way.”

Lapin says the process of freezing her eggs cost her $14,000 and was not easy.

“I had the craziest cravings,” said Lapin, who also felt hormonal and bloated during the process of getting daily shots for three weeks.

Lapin said her egg retrieval left her with less eggs than she expected so she plans to have a second freezing. She does not plan to use the eggs right away.

“I don't want to use them,” she said. “I want to be married and I want to have kids on my own but it gives me the most options possible for when I do want to become a mother.”

Lapin hopes sharing her story through her video diary helps to inspire other women to take charge of their fertility.

“I think it's taboo and people don't talk about it,” she said. “I hope to break that taboo, hopefully by sharing my own story, to help other young women feel empowered to do the same thing.”

Dr. Jennifer Ashton, ABC News Chief Women's Health Correspondent, described the process Lapin and other women go through to freeze their eggs as thought of in three different stages.

The first stage is the "workup" that consists of ultrasounds and blood tests.

"In terms of money, [it is] a couple of hundred to maybe a couple of thousand dollars. Not that much time, days to weeks, and physical discomfort [is] little to none," Ashton said today on "Good Morning America."

The next stage, the stimulation process, jumps into the thousands of dollars, according to Ashton.

"This consists of injection of high-powered hormones and monitoring every day by ultrasound to look at your ovaries," she said. "Again, it can take weeks just for one cycle. If you have to do more than one [cycle], months. And physical discomfort, a little more. A lot of women describe this as, ‘PMS on steroids.'"

The final stage is the retrieval process that is an operating room procedure performed under anesthesia.

"This jumps up again [to] thousands of dollars," Ashton said. "Time wise it’s just one day and physical discomfort varies, usually none but in rare cases you can get something called [ovarian] hyperstimulation syndrome which is very uncomfortable."

Ashton stressed the importance of recognizing that the process varies from individual to individual.