I Have Stage 4 Breast Cancer, but I'm Not Giving Up My Hope of Starting a Family

With the MBC diagnosis, I had to restart treatment immediately, and I would be in some kind of treatment for the rest of my life. This time around, inducing menopause would be a crucial part of knocking the cancer back. Even if I lived, I would not be able to carry a child, ever.

The losses seemed endless as I grappled with the diagnosis. Grief ripped me apart; the fear darkened everything. I felt held down by the weight of all that I would not experience in my life, all that I would leave behind, as if I were trapped in a pile of rubble. Try as I might I could not fight my way out, could not see the light, did not have the energy to try.

The idea of never becoming a mother trumped all other thoughts. In those first few weeks, I woke up sobbing; I spent my days huddled in the corner of my living room unable to catch my breath, my mind a never-ending reel of the moments I would never experience with the kids that would never exist. I pictured lying on the couch with Evan as we felt our baby kick; tears streamed down my face as I remembered that this would never happen.

So when my doctors gave me one more shot at fertility preservation, I wanted it. Even though I would never be able to feel a child growing within me, if we froze embryos, and if I surpassed the expected survival timeline, we might be able to find a friend whose body would be healthy enough to compensate for the mistakes of my own, who would be willing to carry our child for us. It was a long shot—surrogacy is an amazingly difficult, long, expensive process—but we weren’t ready to give up.

We borrowed $10,000 from my parents and drove to another doctor’s office, one where the waiting room was filled with joyous and expecting couples. It was disorienting to see a medical facility full of hopeful, happy young people my age. I was so used to the cancer center. But fertility clinics are not built for the dying; they are built for the hopeful, for new life. So we took our borrowed cash to this foreign place, and I injected myself into my abdomen every night for two weeks with medication that stimulated everything my oncologist wanted to suppress, and the fertility specialist took out 23 eggs, which turned into seven frozen embryos that now live in a metal cylinder.

Those were my last two weeks of true fertile womanhood, and they were worth every penny.

With our embryos safely removed from my hazardous body, I began receiving monthly abdominal injections designed to shut down my 29-year-old ovaries forever. I took pills every day to mop up the remaining estrogen in my body like a sponge.

I threw myself into researching our family planning options. Aside from surrogacy, the only other spark of hope was adoption, but medical histories are crucial aspects of the prospective parent evaluation process, and my diagnosis moved us to the bottom of the pile, to say the least. Plus, if either surrogacy or adoption ever came to be, we then had to hope beyond hope that I would have time to experience motherhood. Not time in my day, but time in my life.