When you get cancer, your whole world falls apart, and every aspect of your life suffers. If you are young and have not yet had a family (or not yet completed a family), the devastating blow to your reproductive and sexual health can be particularly damaging to your emotional wellness and wellbeing.
There is new hope, however, that cancer need not necessarily mean the end of your child-bearing days.
That’s not to say that the risks are not real, however, as cancer is certainly an emergency situation, and as such, treatment of the cancer has to be a first priority. Saving fertility or sexual health will never take precedence over treating the cancer, and if they have to be the things to go in order to save your life, then so be it.
Nevertheless, many young people are devastated to realise that the cancer treatments that they are being given or are about to be given to save their lives could render them infertile.
The option is now offered to them to preserve their fertility, and this is frequently done through freezing eggs. Whilst the treatment may still kill off the ovaries and even the body’s ability to carry a child, there can then still be hope of a future genetic baby using the genetic material gathered.
This is even more of a serious consideration when the cancer is located on the sexual reproductive organ, such as on the ovaries. The treatments for these (such as chemotherapy) almost undoubtedly damage the organs and the surrounding organs too.
Thanks to modern technology, however, the dosages of chemotherapy are getting more specific, and the same goes for radiotherapy. No longer are these treatments turned up to ‘full volume’ to whack out the disease, as the science is getting more exact. These more finely-tuned doses of therapy are often less damaging to the body overall.