Are you tired of blood draws and ultrasounds and dependency on hospitals? Imagine being dependent on hospitals for life. Blood draws every week. Immunity scares and wearing a mask everywhere. Injections after injections. Weekly drips after weekly drips. Getting so tired and sick and crazed, and tight in the chest, spasm until you can breathe or eat or wash yourself.
Imagine what you would feel like, with one boob and a scar across your back.
Did you want to get off blogs and websites about fertility? My browser is now full of cancer sites, cancer sites and guess what, almost none of them say anything good. Except those that offer you hope. Some life. Whatever life life affords you once you have it.
Could I have always gotten it? Sure, I know a woman who had two children naturally and got breast cancer at 32. It could have been there, all the time, waiting to happen. We always don’t want to believe our fate, but I’m cognizant that it’s cell replication error, plain and simple. Babies get it. Why me and not the other 10,000 women? Who knows. There aren’t answers.
But look at it this way too. I can hand over heart say that I have one of the cleanest diets of anyone I know. I’m Asian, I live in a house that has home cooked food, fresh every day. I don’t eat any junk food, I don’t even like it. I don’t even like burgers or fried chicken. Because I had a random attack of edema a few years ago and because I like feeling clean, I juice every day, I eat tons of green veg and very little meat. I have incredible low cholesterol and a low resting heart rate.
Yes I had a stressful job and travelled, but I also loved it. Stress you like isn’t stress, boredom is stressful if you don’t like it or don’t have a choice. Sure, radiation can hit anyone but that isn’t specific to me.
I don’t have the BRCA 1-2 gene. They tested. I have never had anyone in my family or extended family have cancer. Until I had this lump, I didn’t know personally even know anyone who had cancer.
I was just like you.
5% of women get breast cancer before they are 40. I’m sure that split is 3% after 35 and 2% below 35 or even worse in my favour. A full 80% of women who get cancer are over 50.
And the cancer isn’t triple negative. If it was, it would be hormone resistant. Even then you can’t say that IVF caused it, but you can also try to say it didn’t affect it. Who knows. But it would be more likely the inherent kind, the kind that you see in young people, the aggressive kind, the kind that was just going to be there, the kind that is inborn. But mine is It is the kind that women get when their hormones change. Neither was Giuliana Rancic’s. It is 30% estrogen receptive. On an IVF, you shoot your E2 levels to stratospheric levels. All unnaturally. On a FET, you take estrogen Progynova.
So I can’t say that the IVF didn’t cause it. Honestly I don’t think it did. But I can’t say also that it didn’t affect it. Because it did. It grew over aggressively over the year that we did IVF and transfer. It might have been there when we started two years ago. Or not. It might have nothing to do with the two years. But it seems unlikely.
If I was successful, would I be saying what I’m saying now. Or accept it as a matter of course, of price? Well, I can tell you all that effort, all that expense, all that crying, it was for nothing. Nothing came out of it, we weren’t successful. But this, this is beyond the level of successful, this is beyond the level of living, having a child. This is literally, life and death. I wish I had never heard of IVF, I wish I had never done any of it. Of course I do. You would too, if tomorrow you were me and I was you. I can’t make that decision if the price is worth it. I can only tell you that for me, none of it was.
Can you get past fear? Yes, you can. You all know you are already getting past a lot of fear, to be where you are. But there is a point at which stupidity and illogic is more present than fear and when it’s too late, when you see ads everywhere for breast examinations, when you see people dying young of breast cancer, when you see cancer stats everywhere and when you see discharge from the nipple, it is too late for you.
We all think we’re normal, till we’re not. You’ve already experienced that. You already get the sense that the odds are not with you. But there are other kinds of abnormal that could also be you, waiting to happen, which will make your blood run cold and destroy your life.
Of course when I think back, I must have been crazy to put myself through what I did and to go to Thailand as a patient? What an idiot. What accountability is there. What accountability is there even as a gynae in Singapore. You have all known that crazy. You all know your gynae sees you very little, in retrospect of how much time they have and that time is very quickly forgotten once you become a liability. Their lives will go on they will see other patients and record their clinics as they should. And you, you will live for three months, six months in your home clothes, having the nightmare of your life, getting shot up with all kinds of drips and medicines, and then after, you will live, watch and pay for surgery to cut off a breast, or a uterus, your body will never be the same again, your clothes, your work, nothing. That’s how final it is.
Do you know what the rates are? Amongst young women, the rate increases 56%. Did any doctor ever tell you this before beginning IVF? Did they even insist you do a breast evaluation and ultrasound, or a PAP smear? Did they make you take a cancer marker test?
And don’t ask doctors if IVF gives you cancer. Of course they will say no. It’s like asking a gynaecologist if they like babies. Or asking a gastro enterologist if his patient might need a new heart. His no might be the scientifically right answer. Ask them if they have ever had a patient, personally, who did IVF and developed cancer within 2 years. Because I know there are at least 4 doctors in Singapore and 1 in Thailand who cannot look you in the eye and say no.
At the Breast Cancer Foundation, they supported another woman who was just diagnosed too. 35 years old, IVF, 3 miscarriages, then diagnosed 2 months later. On the newspaper, they talked about reconstruction surgery with a 37 year old lady who couldn’t have children, adopted and within 6 months, was diagnosed.
The statistics are 55 women in 10,000 in Singapore will get breast cancer before the age of 40 every year. Who are going to be the 52 others? How many of them were post IVF?
Is the link between childlessness and cancer, not IVF and cancer? Sure. Not having a child before 30 increases your risk by 1.5-2x. You are already in that pool. Are you sure you want to take your odds with the second pool?
I’m not telling you not to do IVF. But don’t do IUIs with additional medicines. Do natural IUIs. The statistics on medicated IUIs may not warrant the additional risks. And if you do IVF once and it works, that’s great. Thank your lucky stars. Or a second fresh round. Great. But more?
Everyone gives you hope by telling you about the person who did rounds here there and everywhere, till they got it on the tenth time. The 40 year old Russian lady with twins. You are a mecca for punishment and pain. Fine. But if your odds aren’t good in the IVF game, don’t go to where the odds are worse and there isn’t any success to be had.
You can do it, but what is it, when it happens? It is when you can read all the tragic infertility blogs and they will all sound like complaining because they all got some measure of success in the end. Your success? What is that? Your whole life is a joke. Your whole IVF career is a joke. You can have a child, sure, you may not ever see them graduate. And forget pregnancy, you will be like Giuliana Rancic, you will need a surrogate, a world of extra costs and worry. And she did it at 40, which you would still have to live 7 cancer free years to even get to. You think explaining to people is hard?
Try being a burden to your parents when they have to feed you, wash you and house you, while you know you may never be able to take care of them later on. Days of stress, years of stress, adjustments, no life for them. Short tempers, frayed nerves, and that’s just at the state of the nightmare. The nightmare that will be you, for years. You will become a whatever. You will suffer for months, and years. No one will be able to say anything to you that matters. No one will try.
I wanted a grandchild for them to run around after, not be a child for them to stress over, worry over, cry over, mourn over. You might think fertility is two of you, your husband and you are in this fight together. If this happens to you, you are fighting on your own, he can’t fight it for you and what happens to a husband who loses his wife at 35, or 37, or 42? What is he going to tell you, that he is happy you did IVF, or that you should be, or that it doesn’t matter? None of it will be true. Sure, you can have a family still, but everything is a burden, you have to survive, everything is couched in beating cancer and that’s if it’s even responsible to bring a child in the world, when you could relapse in two years, four, six, eight, ten. And when you have no immunity for kid germs. How effective are you going to be? How effective as a person? Let’s not even talk about work. Your life has just shrunk into a shell of what it was.
Forget nurseries, forgot storing toys, forget swimming, or being able to taste your favourite foods. It will all become immaterial. And everyone will have all of that. But not you. You will become a storyline, a cautionary tale, a person spoken about. You will be at best, brave and unlucky. Is that what you want? Is that even a risk you want to take? Yes, maybe up to the point that it’s really you, right.
If you are holding on to the biological child of your dreams, let it go. At least you can let it go, if you get cancer, you can only hope it lets go of you. Or it might never. Stop focusing on the negative emotions, the emptiness or the need and do something about it. In a way that’s not going to land you in a hospital, injected with radical dye, hoping your whole body doesn’t light up like a Christmas tree after what you’ve willingly done to it. There is no irony like having to take anti hormone jabs for all the hormone jabs you put in your body.
Concentrate on your husband’s eyes and get an egg donor. Or concentrate on a bundle in your arms and a kid at graduation and adopt. I’m not telling you it’s easy. I’m not telling you you deserve that, or that infertility should happen to anyone. I’m telling you it’s not the worst thing that can happen to you. It’s not the end of your life. But cancer after IVF, it is.
I know that no warning, no censure will ever stop that ability of women to put themselves in harm’s way for their child. For a child. It is part of human nature. It is the best part of human nature. And it shouldn’t stop. Hope that you can beat the odds. I know how that is, when nothing will stop it. But if IVF is not working for you, stop doing it. Quit. Early. I know enough never feels like enough, when it is so far from enough. But if you can feel it’s too much, it probably already is. Know where your threshold is, before it is made clear to you.
Don’t keep extending it. If you’re going to join this community, let it happen naturally, not when you can’t not think that you egged it on. If you’re going to get something 80% reserved for people’s mothers and grandmothers, let it happen because it was fated so, and not cause you shot hormones into your body when you didn’t know if you needed them or not. Don’t let unfortunate, become unlucky and fixable become condemned. Sure, if you have to do it anyway, and that is every woman’s right, then do it, but don’t let people tell you you aren’t playing roulette with anything less than your life.
Sure it’s life. And life goes on. If you’re not stage 4 by the time they find it. But your life, is never the same again. And it’s not yours either. Once it happens, it’s final. There are no options, no other ways, no alternative means. It’s curtailed. Once you know that, you are never the same again. You think you’re broken? Try when getting to whole is a lifetime and it doesn’t include anyone else.
