Friday, Oct. 1, 2004 | 9:32 a.m.
The conventional treatment for cancer is to poison the patient -- to bombard the body with harmful chemicals and radiation and hope the cancer cells die.
But other parts die, too. One thing that often doesn't survive cancer treatment is the ability to reproduce. As advancing treatment allows more and more young people survive cancer, they may face an adulthood devoid of the joy of parenthood.
Technologies to freeze eggs, sperm or embryos offer hope, but they are not usually covered by medical insurance policies. Now a New York charity is trying to help, and a Las Vegas clinic is part of the effort.
On Wednesday, the Sharing Hope program was launched nationwide with the goal of helping cancer patients pay for fertility preservation. The Las Vegas-based Sher Institutes for Reproductive Medicine is one of 18 participating clinics across the country.
The program is also a beneficiary of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the cancer fund started by the cycling champion who rides down the Las Vegas Strip today.
"The average cost (of procedures to preserve women's fertility) is $8,000 to $10,000, not including the medication, and the average patient has two weeks from diagnosis to the start of treatment," said Lindsay Nohr Beck, founder of Fertile Hope, which provides information and now financial help for cancer patients' fertility prospects.
"It's really hard to come up with that amount of money in that amount of time, especially for people in their 20s and 30s," who probably don't have much savings, she said.
Beck had tongue cancer twice in her early 20s. The second time, the cancer had spread to her lymph system, meaning she would need chemotherapy. She found a program at California's Stanford University that would freeze her eggs for future use, but had to borrow money from her parents to do it.
Sher Institutes normally charges about $12,000 for the process of harvesting eggs for in-vitro fertilization -- the making of babies in test tubes -- which requires women to take fertility drugs, then have eggs suctioned out of their ovaries with a hollow needle.
Through Sharing Hope, which provides donated fertility drugs, the clinic's price for cancer patients is $3,500, about what it costs to perform the procedure, said Dr. Jeffrey Fisch, head of the Las Vegas clinic.
"We want to offer people the hope that they can have their own genetic children," Fisch said.
The best hope for a woman about to undergo cancer treatment is to have her eggs fertilized with her partner's sperm and then have the embryos frozen -- a technique that's been proven to produce healthy babies after the embryos are thawed and implanted in the womb.
What Beck did -- freezing only eggs, to be thawed out later and then fertilized -- is riskier; it is an untested procedure that is viewed as experimental by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, which recommends that egg-freezing take place only as part of a scientific study.
But for young, single women facing infertility, even a slim chance is better than nothing, Fisch said. "Even if it doesn't work, just giving these people some hope for the future is something we can do," he said.
Another potential fertility-saver for women is the freezing of ovarian tissue, on the theory that removing the tissue prevents it from being harmed by the cancer treatment, and it can then be re-implanted. A cancer survivor in Belgium last week became the first woman in the world to have a baby after having tissue re-implanted.
That service is in an even earlier stage of development than egg-freezing, and Sharing Hope does not offer it. But the story calls attention to the issue, Beck said.
In addition to the fertility clinics and the fertility-drug manufacturer, Sharing Hope is partnering with a company that banks sperm and with the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which has donated more than $300,000 to Beck's organization over the last three years.
Armstrong stored his sperm before being treated for cancer in his testicles, lungs and brain; otherwise, he could never have fathered three children by a woman he met after his illness.
And as a 32-year-old cancer survivor, Armstrong's goal is to call attention not just to curing cancer, but to what happens afterwards. More than 10 million Americans are cancer survivors, foundation spokeswoman Michelle Milford said.
"The cancer industry has long focused on curing people, and rightly so," Milford said. "But we want survival to be meaningful, and for many people, that means the ability to have children."
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