Chemotherapy, the overlooked puzzle piece?

When I first met with Dr. Doom, excuse me, Dr. Torres, the Chemotherapy Dr, back in July/August of 2014 he was pushing what I guess he thought was best for me even though I wasn’t compatible with the drug. There was so much happening at that time, so many papers to sign, so many people telling me so many different things and what the potential side effects were to treatment that I really didn’t process any of it. I just signed on the dotted lines and away I went into treatment. I do remember him vaguely asking if we wanted to have children, because if we did then we should freeze my eggs because of what the chemotherapy will do to me. I didn’t really bat an eye to that because anyone that knows me knows that the inability to have children would actually be a selling point of a procedure. Lol, I kid. I kid. ;) But during that extremely emotional time while making huge life impacting decisions I didn’t really think of too much. Like, if the Dr is telling me that I should freeze my eggs because of what this drug will do to me, what else is it doing to my reproductive organs? 

Well if you’re reading this blog posting, you have more than likely read my other blog postings and you know what I’ve been going through for the past 12 months or so with my bleeding. My erratic there-is-no-sense-to-this bleeding. 60 days of straight bleeding here, a day off there, 40 more days of bleeding, to the point I begged for a hysterectomy and was given the opportunity to have one. One that I cancelled due to going into an essential dry spell of 40 days of no bleeding. Which isn’t the first time this has happened. So, like I tend to do, I laid in bed last night, phone in hand, researching the hell out of what is wrong with me. There has to be something wrong with me. It’s GOT to be hormonal. There has to be a reason that I feel like I’ve entered perimenopause, despite the fact I shouldn’t be for another 10-20 years. And then I found it. I guess it doesn’t take a lot to excite me, because I was pretty excited when I read that the chemotherapy treatment that I had undergone could actually be the culprit of this. From the American Cancer Society.

Chemotherapy:

Most chemotherapy (or chemo) drugs can damage a woman’s eggs and/or affect fertility. (Remember a woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have and they’re stored in her ovaries.) The effect will depend on the woman’s age, the types of drugs she gets, and the drug doses. This makes it hard to predict if a woman is likely to be fertile after chemo. The chemo drugs most likely to cause egg damage and infertility are:

· Busulfan

· Carboplatin

· Carmustine (BCNU)

· Chlorambucil

· Cisplatin

· Cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan®)

· Dacarbazine

· Doxorubicin (Adriamycin®)

· Ifosfamide

· Lomustine (CCNU)

· Mechlorethamine

· Melphalan

· Procarbazine

· Temozolomide

After chemo, fertility may not last as long: Girls who had chemo before puberty (the time when periods begin) or young women whose menstrual periods start back after chemo are at risk for early (premature) menopause. When a woman stops having periods long before the average age (about 51), it’s considered premature menopause. She becomes infertile because her ovaries stop releasing eggs. Early menopause also means that the ovaries stop making the female hormones estrogen and progesterone.

AHA! Now isn’t that interesting. What “young women” is classified as, I don’t know. I was 34 when I went through cancer treatment, and although I “only” did 2 weeks of chemotherapy, at which point I decided to stop that portion of treatment, I still did partial chemo. I still had Temozolomide  in my body on a daily basis for 2 weeks and I also had it in my body while not being compatible to it. I don’t know if this is the source of my problems, but I think I may be on to something. I have printed the information out from the American Cancer Society and I am taking it to my GP on the 28^th so we can discuss my current situation and see if we can piece this puzzle together once and for all.

~Tara