The decisions we had to make regarding cancer and fertility

There were a lot of decisions that we had to make together. For the cancer side of it we had to decide what treatment plan he was going to go through. For the initial surgery, there really was no time. You know, looking back, we probably did have time and could have asked for more time but we didn’t know. So when they told us to go in for surgery, we accepted it, we knew we were with an excellent physician and we went with his immediate recommendation to go into surgery.

But, in terms of the treatment plan, we did have some decisions to make and we really did have to think long and hard about them because it affected both our fertility, Andy’s overall health and his health for the future. We decided to make the decision to have him go through an intense version of radiation versus going through chemotherapy because we felt that just based on speaking with our doctors and kind of listening to the statistics that that was the best course of action for him. In terms of decision-making for the fertility, there was tremendous amount of that as well. And it took us quite a long time to be at the same place at the same time.

It took a lot of patience on both of our parts because I was really ready to move forward before he was. I wanted to get moving with our family, I felt that we would be so happy if we had a child, that that might help to alleviate some of the pain that we were feeling from it not being both of our biological children. And Andy needed a tremendous amount of patience because he wasn’t ready to move forward but he also knew couldn’t get too frustrated with me that I did want to move forward so really, at the time that we arrived at our decision, it was a long process.

We actually, I think have to say, we did it pretty well. We both sought therapy separately, individual therapy, and that was tremendously helpful. Because you do need patience for the other person because when you’re really ready to make a big life change and someone else is not, you know, going through therapy can only help, and for us, it actually made our marriage stronger because we did have to go through a decision-making process. And we did get outside help in order to make that decision. In the end we were able to come together and work it all out and we came to the decision at the right time for us.