(KSAT) -- Whether it was a case of bad luck, or the luckiest twist of fate, Elizabeth Logsdon's visit to the doctor to begin fertility treatments resulted in a discovery and a change of life no one expected.
First, a trip to the doctor to see why, after trying for a year, to conceive naturally had not worked revealed she had lumps in her lymph glands. Then the diagnosis that Logsdon never imagined.
"It was Hodgkin lymphoma,” she said. “Hodgkin's disease."
But instead of cancer treatment right away, she was sent to the Texas Fertility Center first, a place that filled her in on her conception options.
"I got filled in on egg retrieval, preserving your fertility. They don't know what chemo will do to you," Logsdon, who readily agreed to begin a fast track to preserving embryos, said.
It's a sensitive subject for her doctor, Dr. Summer James, a fertility specialist at Texas Fertility Center on Hardy Oak. She too was diagnosed with cancer and has been undergoing chemo and radiation.
“Radiation/chemotherapy can really wreak havoc on men and women's fertility, so it's nice to hopefully get an oncologist or oncology surgeon to have some discussion with them to send them to a fertility specialist so we can at least have that conversation with them potentially now before we reduce their fertility with cancer treatment,” James said.
The good news is in vitro fertilization has come a long way in the last few years. Newly diagnosed cancer patients now only have to wait two weeks instead of six to begin the process of egg retrieval, a huge difference when chemotherapy awaits.
"We used to say we had to start the treatment medication in order to do an IVF cycle at a particular time in a woman's menstrual cycle, and now we know that we can start at any time," James said.
Logsdon's cancer was treated, and then after two years of remission, she was allowed to be implanted with the embryos she and her husband had frozen.
Today she has a beautiful 4-month-old baby girl, and is ready to implant another embryo when she gets the OK from the doctor.
"We do blood work when we do fertility treatments and we happened to catch something we didn't expect, so yeah, it was amazing to create a life to save a life," James said of the turn of luck for her patient.
Many fertility specialists say studies show that most women diagnosed with cancer are ill-informed or misinformed about their fertility options.
It's often just a matter of timing, and of haste to begin cancer treatment as quickly as possible. For example, a study in the journal Cancer, which surveyed 350 women ages 18-35 who were treated for cancer an average of five years earlier. One hundred of these women were told they wouldn't be able to get pregnant or carry a baby to term because of their cancer treatment. One-hundred and seventy-nine who wanted kids or were unsure did not undergo fertility treatments either before or after their cancer treatment. For more information, click here.