Our decision to undergo emergency IVF and how we made it

Marci: It did postpone my chemotherapy for a month so that I could have one ovulatory cycle and after talking with my oncologist we felt that that was sort of a fair trade, that it was safe to do that and would hopefully preserve at least some of my fertility but still get to treatment in a somewhat expedient way.

David: I think the thing that concerned us was that with chemotherapy there is the risk for menopause. If you’re going to harvest eggs, this is the only time you’re going to get that opportunity, and if the doctor says to you it’s ok, you can push it back a month, you sprint to the finish line and you do it.

Marci: I’d say another factor sort of unique to our situation is given my age—I was 39 at time that we were making these decisions—and so even if chemotherapy didn’t completely put me into menopause it would be at least another year or possibly longer before I could consider getting pregnant. By doing emergency IVF at that time, we were getting my eggs as young as they could be. When you get to that age every year counts in terms of embryo health, and so that was another reason we said, “Yes, we should do this and we should do it now.