"No doctor could say whether chemo would make me infertile."
(ELISSA THORNER)
"I always wanted a houseful of children, and I thought my dream was gone after my diagnosis," recalls Thorner, who lives outside Baltimore. "I talked to several doctors, all of whom had no interest in speaking to me about fertility. When I pushed one oncologist about the topic, he said, 'Do you want to live or do you want to have children?' I responded, 'I want to live so I can have children.' "
Thorner talked to more and more doctors about her options, weighing her age and family history, but no consensus emerged. "Usually oncologists are pretty sure of themselves," Thorner says. "But for me they said, 'We don't really know what to do.' No doctor could say whether chemo would make me infertile."
The fact that Thorner had at least 20 more years of exposure to natural estrogen and progesterone to look forward to—which could be a risk factor for other cancers—led some doctors to advocate chemo. But because chemo effectively shuts down those hormones, there's always the risk that the hormones—and one's fertility—will never come back after treatment.
