Marci's primary concerns when first diagnosed with breast cancer

When I was first diagnosed, my primary concern was my health, and my future, and my life with my husband. Since we had been trying to get pregnant, secondarily I was worried that once I got healthy myself, could we continue trying to form a family, and what was going to happen to that.

When I was diagnosed I was actually in the midst of infertility treatment, and so my immediate question was, can I go ahead with what we are doing right now—I was taking hormones at the time—or should I stop all that and just put everything on hold and focus on the cancer and getting well, and then go back to the infertility? And the answer to that was a resounding yes—your cancer comes first, we need to treat that, and deal with the fertility later. So from the time of my diagnosis—it was about two weeks until I had surgery—primarily my concern and my discussion with my physicians was regarding what type of surgery I should have, and that sort of thing, and not really focused on the fertility preservation, but it was something that was in the back of my mind, and I was doing some research on my own to try to find out at least what I needed to learn and what types of questions I would need to ask down the road.

After my surgery was when I was able to focus on my future fertility, and it was after my surgery that I met with a medical oncologist, and that was the person who could better address what I needed to do in the short term to preserve my fertility—which, in my case, was to do emergency IVF, so we did ovarian stimulation to be able to retrieve eggs to fertilize and to freeze embryos.