Cancer and family planning: A guy’s perspective.

For my book Everything Changes, I interviewed a young adult cancer survivor whose body could no longer produce eggs nor carry a child.  When she met her husband, he was set on having children with his genetic material.  So, they found an egg donor and hired a separate woman as a surrogate who carried the children.  They now have twins, the surrogate is in their lives as an aunt, and while the survivor loves her children, she still has some residual emotional challenges about how they were conceived. What interests me as much as the decisions cancer survivors make in response to their complex family planning needs is the conversations they have both within themselves and with partners, and how they arrive at and live with their decisions. Tim Buckland is a 26-year old, two-time testicular cancer survivor.  When diagnosed, at age 18, Tim banked sperm.  Unfortunately it was unviable.  A year after treatment, he met a wonderful woman who became his wife.  Tim writes the following about the family planning challenges they are currently facing: “I initially dealt with infertility in an egotistical way. I naively thought that since I was the one that couldn’t have children, this was my ‘cross to bear’ and not my wife’s. It took a lot of opening up and a number of conversations before I realized that this was now our problem, not solely my own. There are a number of options available to have children and they all come with pros and cons. We considered everything from...
Source: Everything Changes - Category: Cancer Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs