Nat:
My name is Nathalie Criou, I am a Product Manager at Google in
California. I am 33 years old and when I was 32 I was diagnosed with a
very rare form of cancer. In my case, it was a gynecologic cancer, so I
knew that my ability to have children was going to be impacted. So I
went to see about 17 oncologists. I was very shocked, all of these were
gynecologic oncologists so they should really know about fertility
issues, only one of them mentioned fertility preservation to me. That
was Dr. Amreen Husain at Stanford Cancer Center and she did everything
she could to help me.
Dr. Husain:
In Nat's case, we initially attempted to
preserve her uterus, however, we decided to go ahead and do a complete
hysterectomy on her.
Nat:
The hysterectomy was meant to save my life but it felt like I was ending a life. Treating cancer was definitely a priority at the time but the main concern for me was the ability to have children.
Dr. Westphal:
So
Nat came in to see me and discuss fertility preservation techniques and
she went through ovarian stimulation, and we retrieved eggs and
fertilized embryos.
Nat:
The process itself is pretty easy. It just requires
some injections and we are trained to do those injections ourselves.
They are completely painless. The egg retrieval procedure itself is a
very short procedure.
Dr. Westphal:
Most of the time when patients come in,
they don't have much time, and sometimes patients don't have any time
and they're not able to do anything before they start their cancer
treatment. Usually, we can do most fertility preservation techniques in
two to three weeks.
Nat:
After my eggs were retrieved, the next step was literally frozen in time
Dr Behr:
These
frozen eggs represent potential life. Oocyte cryopreservation otherwise
known as egg freezing is a process where we can indefinitely store a
woman's eggs in a nitrogen tank so that they may be thawed out and used
at a later date.
Nat:
I would have been very depressed feeling like a mother who's just lost her child if there hadn't been any way for me to
preserve my fertility. With this treatment at least I have hope.
Dr Behr:
This
really is a tremendous breakthrough for patients who are gonna encounter
sterilizing therapy and primarily what I am talking about here are
cancer patients.
Cancer is not prejudiced. It affects all people, all genders and
all ages and really is something that must be considered in terms of
survivorship.
Nat:
Today, there are options for cancer
patients and it's really not a matter of choosing between their
treatment and preserving their fertility. even though it was far from
being a perfect solution, I just felt that I had options. I could still
have fertility conversations down the line, I could still think about a
family and I think this is what allowed me to go through surgery and to
go through treatment. It gave me a lot of hope. And my hope now, even
now that I am not completely done with treatment, is because I know
that in a tank somewhere at the fertility clinic, there are a few
mini-Nats that are waiting to be defrosted.