Hi, my name is Sarah Crimmins. At age 28, when my daughter was only 11 months old (in December 2008), I was diagnosed with Grade 3 Invasive Breast Cancer.

Since then I have had a mastectomy of my left breast, gone through IVF, 4 months of Chemotherapy, 5 weeks of radiotherapy, hospitalised with meningitis and just recently in December 2009, I underwent a prophylactic mastectomy of my right breast with immediate reconstruction and a reconstruction of my left breast using the latissimus dorsi.

At the start of my cancer journey I spent hours on the internet searching for similar stories to my own and in particular, photographs of those women so I could gain an understanding of what I was about to go through and although I found some, I didn't find many.

This is the main reason for my blog. I wanted to be able to share my experience and photographs of my journey in the hope that it will help someone else with the decisions that they are about to face.

This is the story of the worst year of my life, from finding the lump all the way to my reconstruction surgery and beyond.........

Please feel free to post some comments, actually i would absolutely love it if you would xo

January 2009, IVF and more babies

My surgeon had suggested that we go through IVF because I'm so young and we really wanted to expand our family. So I spoke to my oncologist about it but she's definately not a 'kid person' and wasn't really interested in discussing it which made it really hard because this was a really big issue for me at this stage. To be told that I have to go through chemo and radio was hard enough but to also try and deal with the fact that I may not be able to add to our family really upset me.

So we started the IVF Treatments as soon as I got my period after the mastectomy. My periods came earlier than expected so my IVF specialist that was looking after me even came in to the office to sort it all out for us when they were meant to be on holidays and throughout the entire process they were absolutely fantastic and that was just what we needed. Seriously they have hearts of gold!

I was really nervous about starting the treatments at first, only because it was all happening so fast and I didn't feel ready. I thought that I would have had a bit longer to recover from the mastectomy before having to start it but my body had different ideas.

It was a hard time though. I did everything they told me to do and to be honest the thought of it not working didn't cross my mind because we'd fallen pregnant with Macy pretty easily and it just couldn't fail basically! I'd always wanted about 3 children and couldn't even contemplate the thought that I may not be able to have more. Don't get me wrong, I was still incredibly grateful for having Macy but that still didn't take away from the fact that I wanted more children.

So we started the treatments and all seemed to be going ok to start with but not long into it we started to see that my body just wasn't reacting to the drugs the way it should have. Only 1 egg was as big as it should be when normally women can have about 12 or so. From the advice of my Dr we decided to stop the IVF and not attempt to harvest the 1 egg that i had available. I would have had to put my body through a lot just for the one egg and it was such a high risk of not being viable that we thought it best to cancel the treatments and focus on the next stage of my treatment. My Dr even arranged for it to be put through medicare for me so that we didn't have to pay the thousands of dollars that it would normally have cost us.

This really knocked me around though to be honest. It was probably a mixture of all of the drugs that i'd had to put into my system for the IVF in the first place but I cried a lot about this. The fact that I even had to do IVF, that it didn't work, that my body had let me down and not done what I thought it could handle and the fact that my opportunity to have more kids may be taken away from me at the age of 28. This was the first time when I thought 'this isn't fair!'. At this stage I hadn't even cried about the fact that I had just lost my breast, but I cried about this.

I got my period twice while I was going through chemo (at the start) but then they stopped. When I had my reconstruction surgery I got them again however I think this was a withdrawal bleed from the Tamoxifen because I had to go off it for a few weeks and my oncologist said that can happen. I was originally quite excited that I got them because it was the last thing i was expecting after such a big surgery however as i haven't had them again it seems that I'm still in menopause unfortuanately. Apparently if my periods come back within the first 2 years after chemo its a really good sign that your ovaries are functioning again so the only thing i can do at the moment is hope that that happens.

It's a pretty hard thing to deal with though at this age. There's a fair few of my friends that we had our first babies together and most of them have had their second child now, just like we had planned to and I'm so clucky at the moment!!! Please don't get me wrong though, 100% appreciate the fact that we already have one beautiful healthy daughter but only those in my position understand that it doesn't stop you from feeling sad that you may not be able to have more.
Posted by Sarah Crimmins

1 comment:

  1. IVF CostJune 2, 2013 at 7:40 PM

    IVF cost may vary from clinic to clinic so make sure that you check with all the treatment procedures involved and amount of cost to be incurred accurately.

    IVF Cost

    ReplyDelete

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