Creating Life After Breast Cancer

(CBS)  When newlywed Heidi Fener learned she had breast cancer, the thought of becoming a mother was almost inconceivable.

"Losing my hair was a very scary issue, but it was nothing in comparison to losing the ability to have a family," she said.

Each year, about 40,000 women in their reproductive years are diagnosed with breast cancer. Doctors have traditionally discouraged them from getting pregnant because of concerns that the extra hormones produced, like estrogen, might fuel the cancer. Chemotherapy can also damage the ovaries and make conception difficult.

Dr. Kutluk Oktay has spent the last 15 years figuring out how women with breast cancer can have children.

How have things changed?

"Today, we cannot imagine treating a young cancer patient without thinking of fertility preservation," he tells CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook.

There's a precious window of opportunity between breast cancer surgery and starting chemotherapy. Heidi and her husband took advantage of this time to have her eggs harvested and fertilized using new techniques that don't rev up the hormones that could rekindle the cancer.

"They can freeze their embryos, they can freeze their eggs, or they can freeze their ovarian tissue for future transplantation," explains Dr. Oktay.

Heidi decided to freeze her embryos and try using a surrogate to carry her baby. Today, she has a 9-month-old daughter, Ruby Kate Kessler.

The long-term safety of fertility treatment and pregnancy in women who have had breast cancer is still being studied. The treatments are pricey - from $10,000 to $15,000 - and often are not covered by insurance.

But Heidi had faith she could beat breast cancer and become a mother.

"I can't believe she's here," she says of her daughter. "I can't believe what we went through, what she went through to get here."

[whispyseas]

'' ... three hundred folk x 300 weeks = 90,000 little online museums of medical you are here map song dance skit kit ... ''



'' ... to protect their fathers, the girls opted to ban naked get well feed world men rallied round hundreds millions sick beds drifting among the tens millions sixteen acre trail crossings, and replaced them instead with dressed get sick tax world girls rallied round the racing well beds ... now they refuse to allow their fathers at the trail crossings because they are not safe, though statistics show the men are more safe with the 90,000 at the regions trail crossings than with the three hundred in the girls own travelling troupes ... ''



'' ... not a flicket in oblivion, not a unwilling unwitting victim in eternal hell (for more than twenty seconds or twenty minutes here or there), but infinite eternal storyboard dragons swimming and drifting infinite eternal ocean dragons of infinite eternal storyboard dragons ... like virtual peas in virtual pods dreaming computer lights on lights out take me someplace in space in a trail patch or someplace far far away even with so many magical whith whom to dance ... ''

[jessieerin-2009]

While fertility preservation is expensive, there is a nonprofit organization (Fertile Hope) that provides financial assistance for these treatments. For more information, go to www.fertilehope.org.