Your cancer treatment, powerful enough to save your life, comes with its costs: financial, physical, and emotional. One of the most stressful side effects may be potential damage to your reproductive health. This could mean that alongside managing your diagnosis, you may want to pursue fertility preservation, such as egg or embryo freezing, and sometimes this decision has to be made in a hurry.

This is so unfair, this extra hurdle to leap. Fertility can feel personal and sacred, and you may have options available to try and prevent cancer from taking that away from you altogether. Looking back, Tracy Weiss, who pursued fertility preservation at the time of her cervical cancer diagnosis as a 30-year-old newlywed, finds an optimistic power in the act of preserving her fertility.

“You can decide whether or not you pursue fertility preservation,” she says, “you get to decide what to do with your future because you’re going to have a future… Since no one chooses cancer, you’re choosing how to problem-solve in the best way that you can.” (Weiss is now the Executive Director of oncofertility support organization Chick Mission.)

Talking to your doctor about fertility is a way for you to think about life after cancer.

Jenna Shersher, who was diagnosed with grey zone lymphoma at 29, also found that meeting with fertility specialists and organizing her preservation plan before cancer treatment ended up being a source of comfort, even though its outcomes were uncertain.

“It also changed the narrative for me,” Jenna says. These meetings helped her start “thinking about life after cancer from the get go, as opposed to thinking about how scary cancer is.”

Like many women with early onset cancer, you may want to pursue fertility preservation, typically before starting cancer treatment. If having biological children is on your mind, or if there’s a chance it might be on your mind, you have options.

Fertility is a complex, super personal subject. Jadey has put together a number of resources to help you navigate this decision. Our collection of fertility articles include:

  • information on how your treatment might impact fertility and what to ask your doctor about
  • a guide to thinking about your options
  • an overview of available preservation techniques
  • advice about how you can pay for it

This can be one of the hardest parts of cancer. Through trusted guidance and support, we want you to know that you’re not alone.