Cancer Treatment's Effect on Getting Pregnant

Cancer is a word you never want a doctor to say to you. When you're older, it's traumatic enough, but when you're young and still thinking about your whole life and future family, it is devastating.

A friend of mine in high school was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma as a college freshman. She dropped out of school and underwent surgery and chemotherapy. When her year of treatment was over, we celebrated with a big party at a nearby lake. She is now in her 40s and has three children.

Of course, they told her that her chemotherapy may make it hard or even impossible for her to have children. She was rather careless, then, later on and was surprised to find herself pregnant!

It is true that chemotherapy can adversely affect your fertility as a woman. Less so for men because sperm are made all the time, but a woman is born with her eggs. Today, a young woman is likely to be offered the opportunity for egg harvest and freezing. Your best odds are still to fertilize those eggs and freeze the resulting embryos, but egg freezing is an option. If you have enough eggs harvested, do both. Younger women are likely to retrieve many eggs, giving them a good change later on to have a family.

I won't delve into specific chemotherapy agents. Essentially all of them are potentially hazardous to eggs. And definitely chemotherapy during pregnancy is not possible as most chemotherapy targets rapidly-dividing cells, which is exactly what a developing fetus is doing.

Another option is to have an ovary removed and frozen. This is still experimental, but it has been done successfully. I think that egg harvesting is the least invasive and still very successful procedure. And it offers a young woman hope and something to dream about while she goes through cancer treatment. We have come a long way with treating cancer, and there is every reason to believe that you, if given a cancer diagnosis, will survive. After all that, having a baby will be even more special! If, for some reason, you are not able to carry the pregnancy yourself, a surrogate mother can make the dream of your own biological child come true.