Cancer Diary

(cws for cancer talk and in/fertility talk)


So yesterday I missed two calls from the cancer nurse because I was sleeping. This morning, she called again. I answered, only for my phone to crash and restart as I was saying hello.

 

She called again once the phone had restarted, but after I answered I couldn’t hear her and the call failed. She was calling from a withheld number, so when she didn’t try again I searched every piece of paper in the living room until I found the one I’d written the gynae-oncology department number on, called, left a slightly garbled message on the answerphone... And then half an hour later she called me back and it finally worked, sob.

 

Anyway it was... Just a check-in I guess, nothing new. 

 

Now? I’m basically just waiting for the fertility specialist to get in touch with me to give me an appointment for assessing my fertility, which should be soon. In all likelihood I’m going to have a hysterectomy in the next few months to get rid of the cancer, but there is the option of trying to reverse the cancer with a mirena coil (I have one in atm) and then trying to get pregnant basically as soon as the cancer goes. Because once you take the coil out the cancer usually comes back. 

 

So people going this route are basically trying to race the cancer to get pregnant before it comes back, have a child/children (? I don’t know how it works for people trying to have multiple kids, if you have to get the mirena again after giving birth then take it out when you’re going to try and get pregnant again...) and then have a hysterectomy once they’re done so that the cancer doesn’t get a chance to spread much. But uh, while some people, out there in the world, have successfully had children this way, nobody at my hospital trying it has ever managed to give birth to a live child. The statistics are not encouraging. 

 

And most people trying it developed endometrial cancer as a result of a hormonal imbalance, whereas I think I likely got it through a genetic cancer syndrome that makes me much more prone to cancers like this at an early age than the average person. And I don’t know if they even have data on how well people with my condition respond to the mirena/whether it usually gets them to the point where they can get pregnant after they’ve been diagnosed with endometrial cancer (like, I don’t think my doctor would have suggested the mirena if he thought it wouldn’t work at all, but there are a lot of unknowns, basically).

I don't really know that I am in any way keen to go down the mirena-then-attempting-pregnancy route. But I want to know if it's even plausible, I guess. I might be worrying about something that just could not happen anyway. So that's where I'm at. I just want to know everything, please. I already know that I have PCOS, a genetic cancer syndrome, a heart-shaped womb (which means I'd likely be a high-risk pregnancy and at higher risk of late-term miscarriage), and cancer. I want to know what all of that adds up to. Because to me it says, not worth trying. To my surgeon, he said it could be that in the end, none of that really matters, and I am basically fertile. Only way to find out: to see the specialist.

So.

 

I mean it’s just very weird. I don’t have any symptoms really beyond the fact that I am still - still! - bleeding and I don’t know if it’s an epic period or whether it’s post-surgery bleeding, because I had surgery three weeks ago and started my most recent period a month before that, and have been bleeding now for seven weeks solidly. But I very much, uh, think a lot about how I do have cancer. And I can’t... Really... Do anything? I can’t do anything other than think about it and talk about it. It’s just this weird thing inside of me that would kill me if left untreated. I can’t see it or hear it or touch it, but it’s in there. And the surgeons will be able to take it out, along with some fairly significant parts of my body that I will be able to survive without. And so all of that is probably going to happen soon, but not yet. Now is for waiting.