We chose emergency IVF to preserve my fertility before cancer treatment

My oncologist and I did speak at length about my desire to have children in the future, and the sense I got from her was that it was okay to take some time out before starting chemotherapy so that I could do egg retrieval and go ahead and ideally freeze embryos. But basically I had one opportunity to do it—one cycle—I couldn’t take months and months and months to see how many eggs can we get. It was something that we needed to be somewhat efficient about: do it, and then move on to chemotherapy.

I did research on my own, mostly on the Internet. I work in the field of obstetrics, so I was able to speak with an obstetrician—and my own personal gynecologist—about what they thought, and if they knew anything additional that I might need to think about. There wasn’t a lot of printed material that I could find—it was mostly by talking to people, and even just by talking to friends who would ask me questions that I couldn’t answer, and then I could take them back to my oncologist or to a physician and ask those questions as well.