Fertility & Cancer

Going through cancer is hard enough and then you get the devastating news you may not be able to have children. It’s a different type of pain, a pain which I’ve tried to push down for many reasons so many times with it always coming back to the fore front of my mind. The grief can get too much sometimes.

When I was first diagnosed back in 2014 I was never told or given the option to freeze my eggs, at the time of my diagnosis I wasn’t thinking about it, the main thing I was thinking about was not dying and getting through the treatment plan that my consultant had planned out for me. I didn’t want to believe this treatment may have an impact on my fertility but looking back now that wasn’t the point. The point is I was never offered to have my eggs frozen, I wasn’t given the option to maybe have a family in the future and my healthcare team failed me when I relapsed again, I may not have been in the position a second time as it all happened so quickly but a talk about it would have been fine, just an acknowledgment that it was thought about for me at age 23. I had no-one to turn to.

Ultimately the treatment did land me into early menopause with hot flushes being one of my main symptoms as well as brain fog and bone pain and I was put onto HRT to help with them. The menopause is hard to deal with at 50 but at such a young age to be going through something like that was devastating for me. I’ve cried numerous times, I’ve become someone who I haven’t liked when I became angry and helpless.

I struggle and feel isolated as I feel I can’t be fully open with a lot of people in my life who truly don’t understand it. I don’t know many other women in the menopause at young age. My family try to understand and I get the comments of but try to look at the fact you’re alive and healthy and even though I am truly grateful that I am here and alive the grief still gets me. It’s truly hard to explain my feelings to someone who already has children or is pregnant.

The pain of buying baby grows for someone else. the pain of going to a baby shower for someone else, the pain of holding someone else’s baby in your arms not knowing if you’re ever going to have that feeling of love, the pain of seeing your friends babies growing up, the pain of seeing someone post photo’s of their new nursery, It’s unfair. It’s unfair to have that taken away from me.

Our healthcare and eduction system around fertility and cancer needs some serious work. These are the topics that need speaking about and not diminished. You aren’t alone if you’re going through the same right now and you are allowed to cry whenever the grief gets too much, allow yourself some time.

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