Healthy, young and cervical cancer: ‘I’ll never know what it’s like to be pregnant’

Emma Heesters share this miseryk on Instagram the video below shows that she has started the process of freezing her eggs. “Freezing my eggs before starting my cancer treatment,” she wrote.

The images show her injecting herself. Emotions run high for the singer as well. Her boyfriend, Wesley Hoedt, also appears in the images. Below the video she is flooded with messages of support.

Annual About 2,200 women in the Netherlands are told they have uterine cancer. Cervical cancer is less common, about 900 women are diagnosed. It usually affects women between 30 and 59, but it can happen at a younger age as well, such as Charlotte Berman and Emma Heesters.

Same diagnosis

For Charlotte, the news of Heesters’ cancer diagnosis brings back many memories. It was only a year and a half ago that she received the same diagnosis and her life suddenly turned upside down.

Charlotte feels that Emma’s emotional imagery is very conflicting. “Now that I am no longer in the middle of the treatment process, which included chemoradiation and brachytherapy (ed. radiation from the inside), I notice that this makes back memories of feelings I didn’t allow at the time,” says Charlotte.

She is a healthy young woman who has clear plans for the future with her boyfriend, when disaster strikes and she ends up in an overnight nightmare. They had just sold their house a year and a half earlier and quit their regular jobs to travel.

“How often do you hear that people don’t reach their pension and it’s too late later on. That’s why we wanted to start enjoying ourselves, even before we started to have children.”

During the trips they make together, they collect memories so that they can be placed later in the nursery school of their future children, not knowing that the future may not go give them that. When Charlotte experiences unexplained bleeding, she is checked into the hospital.

“Nobody thought about cancer when a young 26-year-old girl showed up.” A smear is taken only when other causes have been ruled out. “I got a call that they wanted to talk about the results of the smear test. It turned out I had PAP3b.” This means there is a fairly high chance of early stage breast cancer.

A tumor the size of a fist

Flesh is removed from the cervix, and Charlotte appears to have cervical cancer. To assess the severity of the condition, she will receive a PET scan. This scan shows that she has a tumor in her cervix the size of a fist. In addition, metastases are found in the lymph nodes in her pelvic area. When asked how long she can live without treatment, the doctor replies: “Months.”

Chemo treatment, external beam radiation and brachytherapy are started almost immediately.

She has to make decisions about her future, even if she doesn’t know at the time what it will look like. The doctors quickly come to the conclusion that Charlotte will not be able to bear a child after her chemo treatments and that the treatment process will cause her to enter menopause early, making her infertile.

Everything to live

She is offered emergency IVF treatment. She is advised to freeze her eggs, as is the case with Emma Heesters. “While I was still undergoing the PET scan, I had to start injecting hormones to grow my eggs. Mentally there was no room for thought. It was a crazy rollercoaster. I didn’t know how to deal with what I had to do. get through the day, let alone make choices for my future. When you get a treatment plan, you deal with it because you have to keep going.

Charlotte has always been afraid of injections, but due to her cancer diagnosis and IVF treatment she can no longer ignore them. Her friend helps her with it.

“He put the syringes for the eggs for our future children. I would like to have children in a more natural way.”

Pregnancy with a tumor

In the last video that Emma Heesters shares on Instagram, you can clearly see how she jumps from one emotion to another. “I had that too, I was angry, vulnerable and cried a lot. My emotions went in all directions. And I felt like I was a bit pregnant. It was very intense to think that I had never been closer to a man who would become pregnant. Charlotte swallows her tears during the conversation we have with her.

“I was pregnant, yes, with a tumor. A normal couple looks at their baby’s ultrasound image together, we looked at the ultrasound to see if my eggs were ready to puncture and if I saw a tumor. I shouldn’t put too much in this situation.”

Charlotte is currently recovering, but still struggles with the effects of the treatments every day. She has to return to the hospital every three months for a check-up. She still has a lot to process mentally.

“From now on, cancer will always be a part of my life. My eggs have been frozen, but the harvest was short and I no longer have a healthy uterus in which to grow. So frozen eggs are not guaranteed. The future will tell if we will have a child together one day I hope the cancer stays away and I stay healthy and we find a way to move on for now I hope life smiles on us again soon.”

Information about eggs and their freezing

At the time of childbirth, a woman has an average of one to two million eggs in her ovaries. From birth to early parturition, the supply of eggs in her ovaries decreases to several hundred thousand. The number also continues to decrease during the childbearing years.

A woman’s fertility is at its peak in her twenties. Above the age of thirty it gradually decreases and after the age of 37 fertility decreases rapidly. This means that the fulfillment of the child’s wishes may be jeopardized. Women are increasingly opting for social freezing: frozen eggs.

According to Wouter ter Horst, spokesperson for the LUMC, this is happening for two reasons:

• Due to a medical indication, due to diseases such as gynecological cancer, which includes breast cancer, vaginal cancer and ovarian cancer. In the case of a medical indication, the health insurer is reimbursed for the entire process.
• In addition, there are women who do not yet have a stable relationship or are not yet ready to have children for other reasons. They choose to freeze their eggs until they are pregnant at a later date, without feeling the pressure of declining pregnancy.

According to Ter Horst, these costs, which are between 2,000 and 3,000 euros, are only partially reimbursed. This has not been done for a long time at the LUMC, which is why there is a waiting list. On average, two women are helped each week. “There is no room for more at the moment. The waiting time can be up to a year. That is why we advise women who are in a hurry to move elsewhere,” says Ter Horst.

‘Just don’t do that’

According to Ter Horst, one should not be too simple on the idea of ​​freezing the eggs. “Yes, for some it is not very stressful. But what we often find is that it can be physically difficult and emotionally taxing. The doctor always co- consultation to reach a well-considered decision. It is always necessary to take into account whether it is possible at all, the cancer cells can be stimulated by the hormones. doctor advised against it.” Not everyone dealing with gynecological cancer has the option of freezing their eggs, it depends on a number of factors. For more information you can here reasonably.

The success rates of social freezing are different, as can be read on the Van Freya’s websitesociety for people with fertility problems. The age of the woman at the time of freezing plays an important role. In addition, the quality of the eggs is important. In general, the younger the woman is when she freezes her eggs, the better she is able to have a successful pregnancy in the future, Freya writes. “Several treatments are usually needed to get enough eggs. Success is not guaranteed.”

In Charlotte’s case, even a surrogate mother now has to be involved.

Gynecological cancer can be a very lonely process. The Oil Base creation This foundation brings fellow sufferers together. Charlotte got a lot of support from this too.