Our helpful cancer and fertility resources

Andy: Going through the cancer and the process of being diagnosed, having surgery, and then going through radiation…doctors are going to cure you if the cancer is caught soon enough. If it’s not a life threatening process, you’ll be ok physically. Mentally it’s a long, long process. If you don’t know where to turn, ask the right questions, talk to somebody who’s already gone through it, your process is going to be extended tremendously. By a group such as Imerman Angels, where it’s a one on one cancer support group, free service where they match you up with someone who’s gone through a very, very similar, if not the exact same cancer, the same age, the same sex…so you could actually talk to that person. It’s such a tremendous amount of help. We didn’t know about that. So our process from being diagnoses in March to being able to talk to someone who has went through it….all we could do was ask questions to each other because we didn’t know what questions to ask the doctor or what the next day was going to be like…so a group like Imerman Angels or a cancer support group or if you do know somebody who will sit down and talk to you about what you’re about to face, you can’t even talk about how worthwhile that type of service is.

Elana: And in terms of the fertility side, we found tremendous resources in our friends who had been through fertility. Now most of them hadn’t been through the cancer…but we had a lot of friends who had been through fertility issues. So, we really leaned on them. We also got hooked up with a group called Resolve…the Resolve network and I found that incredibly useful and informative. And then if you pick a good fertility doctor, they can be incredibly helpful too. Asking them the right questions in terms of the physical side of things… on the emotional side of things, it was a little bit different. Again, talking to friends was tremendously useful for us. We really relied heavily on people who had been through what we were currently going through.