LOS ANGELES — I take a seat on the plush ultra-suede sectional, with a floor-to-ceiling view of urban sprawl before me, feeling more like I am hanging in a swanky hotel bar than waiting for the good doctor. Oddly enough, I feel a nervousness one might have before taking a college entrance exam. But the results of today’s tests are not supposed to have a significant impact on my life, given my personal decisions already determined long before this day. And yet, something inside me flutters, the awakening of that ever-persistent need to score well and high on anything tabulated, scored or graded.

The blood test is simple. I’ve had enough of those done in my 35 years. Squeeze the fist, then release slowly. Avert the eyes. Take a deep breath. Done.

The ultrasound, however, is new. Having never undergone a medical procedure more invasive than a few stitches, I don’t know what to expect. Fortunately, the doctor soothingly talks me through it, explaining all the different black and white blobs on the screen in easy-to-understand language (“Your ovaries are like the chocolate chip cookie and the follicles are like the chips”).

When I finally drive away from the mid-Wilshire high-rise, I have a strange feeling of relief — that I have passed at least one part of the exam.

At the CHA Fertility Center in Los Angeles, the world’s first commercial egg banking clinic, Dr. Thomas J. Kim, medical director and board-certified infertility specialist, along with his team of researchers in partnership with the renowned CHA Women’s Hospital in Seoul, are pioneering a revolutionary new protocol of egg cryopreservation — egg freezing — called flash freezing, or vitrification. A blood test to check FSH (Follicular Stimulating Hormone) and estrogen levels, and an ultrasound of the ovaries are just two of the prerequisites necessary to freeze eggs.

FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: An unfertilized human egg at the beginning of the dehydration process. • Completion of dehydration and immediately before flash freezing. • An unfertilized human egg, right after the thawing process.

Mind you, these are unfertilized eggs getting the frozen treatment — not embryos, or fertilized eggs, which researchers have been freezing for 20 years. For single women who don’t know who they want to father their children and don’t want to use a sperm donor, this is the only method currently available as far as preserving their eggs for future fertilization.

Currently, according to Kim, there are just over 60 patients who have opted to freeze their eggs. Only 11 so far, since the clinic opened in 2001, have requested thawing for in-vitro fertilization purposes. The rest are waiting — waiting for the right man, the right time, the right circumstances.

Indeed, it is this waiting game that women play, voluntarily or otherwise, that makes this technology so important today. For whatever reason, more and more women are choosing to have kids later in life. And they are now realizing that you can’t necessarily have it all — you can’t focus solely on your career for 20 or so years, or go prancing around the world, and then simply pop out a couple of kids whenever you’re ready to settle down. The fact remains that a woman’s fertility has a limited shelf life. One of the misconceptions that women have is that as long as they continue having a menstrual cycle, they can get pregnant, says Kim. But this is simply untrue.