I was pregnant with my second child when I was first diagnosed with breast cancer. Unfortunately, I lost my unborn child, but not hope in having another baby. I knew that following my chemotherapy and radiation treatment, my doctor planned to put me on the drug tamoxifen for five years. I was already 34 years old. There was a chance that my body would be in permanent menopause at the end of the five years on tamoxifen. My husband and I didn't want to take that chance.
Even though some women go on to have children after a breast cancer diagnosis, with my cancer being hormone-receptor positive (HR+), we weren't comfortable with my carrying another pregnancy. We decided to use a surrogate to carry our baby for us.
Dr. Knopf's Notes on Pregnancy and Breast Cancer:
Pregnancy is tricky after breast cancer because of a concern that the high levels of estrogen produced during pregnancy would stimulate cancer cells to grow. Pregnancy is a time of the highest estrogen a woman naturally produces - very important for pregnancy, but potentially bad for breast cancer.
During my chemotherapy, I put my oncologist on the spot. I made him give me a specific time frame in which he would be "comfortable" allowing me to take a short break from the medicine, just long enough to harvest some eggs from my ovaries. Although he was more comfortable with my staying on the tamoxifen for the standard five-year period with no breaks, my doctor finally relented. He said he would be fine taking me off at about the 2 ½ year mark.
Who Will Carry My Baby?
During those couple years we had to decide who would carry our child for us. Numerous friends and family came forward to offer, but so much can change in those years we had to pick wisely.
As the deadline closed in, a friend and co-worker, Kari, approached me. She had mentioned becoming our surrogate to her husband, and they had agreed it would be something they wanted to do. What an awesome gift they offered to us! After numerous meetings to make sure we agreed on everything, we decided to go ahead and start the process.
I approached my oncologist just shy of the date we had agreed on. He seemed a bit surprised that we still wanted to go ahead with the plan, but he was true to his word. He actually let me stop the tamoxifen immediately.
The next step was finding a reproductive endocrinologist, or a fertility expert, who would be willing to work with us. It was a hard process. I guess it isn't every day that someone walks into your office and asks you to place their growing baby into someone else's uterus. We had many hoops to jump through before they would be willing to work with us.
We needed to have a lawyer draw up a contract, get counseling, do blood work (all four of us), set up life insurance, and write a letter of alternative care to determine who would take the child in case something should happen to us. The list went on and on.
