WHEN A HEALTH CRISIS PUTS YOUR BABY DREAMS ON HOLD

Aside from career goals or partner issues, women also choose to freeze their eggs for medical reasons. Cheryl Heykoop was 34 and had just completed her doctorate in 2014 when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin follicular lymphoma. Her doctors weren’t sure what effects the chemotherapy would have on her ability to have children, so she decided to freeze her eggs. “I was thinking about treatment and what I was going to do about work,” she says. “That was all top of mind, as well as the sense of ease and comfort it gave me that my ability to have children one day wasn’t something I had to worry about.”

It costs $2,000 to $4,000 for the drugs to increase your egg production prior to the procedure, roughly $7,000 to $10,000 to have your eggs frozen and another $350 to $500 a year for egg storage. Heykoop didn’t have the money, so she turned to an organization called Fertile Future for support. The Ottawa-based agency raises money to assist cancer patients who want this procedure. Some provinces, like Ontario and Quebec, will cover egg freezing for medical reasons but often not the related drug costs, which may be covered by health plans.

Since having the procedure, Heykoop has been busy working as an assistant professor at Royal Roads University in Victoria, and she has given an inspiring TEDX talk on living with cancer as opposed to fighting it. She is still single, is still working on her career and still has cancer. Her frozen eggs aren’t something she thinks about every day, but it gives her peace of mind to know that they are available. “Now I know that having a child is a possibility,” she says.