Our experience choosing a fertility preservation method

Regarding fertility preservation we did decide to investigate. First of all, what kind of chemo was she going to get? Does this type of chemo leave everybody sterile? Is there nothing to worry about? What options are there? What things need to be considered? Vika and I are both pharmacists. We both went through all the classes that tell you what all the chemotherapy does to you. We knew that these are legitimate concerns, so I would say in the first week that was something I tried to address. I just searched the most common types of chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, asked some of the people that I worked with, “What types of treatments is she likely to get,” and found out that she was going to be getting ABBD in all likelihood. Early on I found out that one of the advantages of the chemotherapy that she was going to be getting over the older chemotherapy is that, although it didn’t necessarily improve survival over the previous chemotherapy, it was more tolerable. And part of the toleration is that it didn’t cause infertility at such a high rate. So that was good news.

We thought that possibly the fertility thing was maybe something we didn’t have to worry about. But that said, it’s still chemotherapy and infertility is definitely a possible side effect.

So we ended up just searching for fertility specialists in our area. This is actually before we even met with our oncologist the very first time, and I found a fertility specialist that was at our local hospital. We called her and our insurance wasn’t compatible with her, but she said, “You know what, I don’t care, come on over anyway. You’re going to be going through chemotherapy sooner rather than later and this is something that needs to be addressed early.” So she actually had us come over to her office and saw us free of charge.

So a couple of times along the way, it was the extraordinary effort of people who really cared that helped us get the information we needed.