Free Ten Years Later by Hoda Kotb Page A

science so that when I need
     them in a few years, you’ll be more advanced . And I thought, Either I’ll do this and one day be able to use my partner’s sperm or down the road
     we’ll adopt . I just didn’t feel comfortable interjecting a third party at that point.”
    In order for Lindsay’s body to be stimulated by the meds, she needed a daily shot
     in the backside. Depending on whether she was at home or staying at a friend’s empty
     apartment in the city, Lindsay needed help.
    “I was often home alone at night or with my girlfriends. So I was thinking, Who can I see tonight that can give me a shot? ” She laughs thinking back.
    “Bob gave me the shots some nights, and there were even nights when girlfriends did.
     One of my friends was in physical therapy school so she practiced her first shot on
     me.” She chuckles. “I remember I was with another friend and she couldn’t stomach
     it, so her boyfriend gave me the shot. Ha!”
    In early February, it was time for radiation. Lindsay’s insides were in for a wild
     ride.
    “I would go to radiation in the morning, then I’d go to IVF clinic for blood work
     and ultrasound, then in the afternoon I’d go back to radiation, and then at night,
     I’d have the shots.”
    Lindsay’s friends were supportive but felt afraid and skittish about the topic of
     cancer, which was riddled with emotional land mines. Her fertility adventure was a
     much safer way to connect.
    “It was hopeful,” she explains, “because it was about me surviving, and because it
     was about boys, and weddings, and babies, and motherhood, and all of the things that
     all of us single girls in the city were dreaming about.”
    Because Lindsay wasn’t trying to get pregnant through IVF, doctors could hyperstimulate
     her ovaries in an effort to harvest as many eggs as possible. While the typical IVF
     patient (usually in hermid-to-late thirties) grows ten eggs, young Lindsay grew twenty-nine. However, there
     was one snag. The hyperstimulation resulted in a bloated belly for Lindsay, just as
     her chemo was scheduled to start.
    “So, I got in trouble. I had to call my chemo doctor and say, ‘I froze my eggs, everything
     went well, but I have a little problem.’ ” She laughs sheepishly. “I think it was
     delayed by maybe three days, but it turned out fine. I just spent a few days on the
     couch waiting for the hyperstimulation to go away.”
    As her chemotherapy date approached, Lindsay decided to put up one more fortress in
     her war against infertility. Dr. Westphal told her she could undergo a newly explored
     procedure to put her into a temporary menopause-like state. That way her ovaries would
     be protected during chemo. If it worked, she’d never need her frozen eggs. If it didn’t,
     her eggs would be there for her.
    “I felt like at that point, Sure, who cares! I’ve already been put through the wringer, so a shot a month in my
     butt? I’ll have hot flashes for three months? Who cares? ”
    Lindsay was spinning multiple medical plates: twice-daily radiation, chemotherapy
     once every three weeks, and a menopause-inducing Lupron shot once a month. Her journey
     was challenging, but it had a silver lining coated in ice: twenty-nine frozen eggs
     safely stored away.
    “I was actively planning for my future,” she says, “and on some level that made me
     believe I would live. I wanted to live now.”
    Lindsay’s social interaction was largely with people in cancer support groups and
     who were undergoing chemo treatments in the Bay Area. During her appointments, she’d
     sit in a room full of patients, all receiving chemo and related drugs prepared in
     bags that hung on IV poles. They passed the six to eight hours by listening to music
     or talking.
    “I remember I was euphoric from the egg-freezing experience,” she says, “so I was
     talking to the nurses and the patients sitting nextto me, and I quickly learned that this was not a good place to talk