Infertility Awareness Week (April 23-29): Cancer Treatment and Infertility

When someone is diagnosed with cancer, there can be a lot going on in their mind. There are a lot of important decisions to make, including how treatment will affect your fertility. At New York Cancer & Blood Specialists, doctors recognize the complexity of these decisions and provide guidance to patients on how cancer treatments may affect their ability to have children. By offering options like egg or sperm freezing, patients can take steps to preserve their fertility before treatment begins.

This is important to highlight because, in many cases, cancer surgery or treatments can be more likely than cancer itself to affect your reproductive process and your ability to have children. However, it is important to know how cancer treatments affect your future health, even if they may harm reproductive organs and glands that control fertility. The way these treatments affect your body may be temporary or permanent.

Knowing your options prior to treatment is the best way to make an informed decision. The process is different for men and women, but the most common way for this to occur is to freeze your eggs or sperm. 

The process of freezing your eggs takes about two weeks. Physicians work closely with fertility specialists to specialize treatment protocols. If you decide to freeze your eggs you will have a procedure in which mature eggs are removed from your ovary to be frozen and stored for possible use in the future. They can be frozen as unfertilized eggs or fertilized with sperm and frozen as embryos. It is best to do this before treatment because some chemotherapy medications destroy eggs. This decrease in the number of eggs may lead to infertility after treatment. 

For men freezing your sperm can be a much easier process. It simply involves collecting a sample of semen and freezing it. Sperm must be banked before any chemotherapy or pelvic radiation therapy begins in order to avoid storing damaged sperm. The sperm can be thawed later and used for intrauterine insemination or in vitro fertilization.

Ultimately, the decision to address fertility concerns before treatment is up to the patient. However, having a thorough understanding of the options available and potential effects on fertility can help inform decision-making. Make sure to speak with your doctor either way and discuss the best options for your treatment.  

At NYCBS, knowing your options is key. Your physician works closely with you as well as fertility experts, to modify your treatments and prepare for your best possible options.