FYI, this is the weekend of the Penn State Dance Marathon, the largest student-run fundraiser in the world. Proceeds (now in the millions each year) go to my all time favorite charity (FertileHope is a close second), the Four Diamonds Fund:
The Four Diamonds Fund is named after a story that Christopher Millard wrote shortly before he lost his battle with cancer at the age of 14. In Chris’ story, a knight must find the four diamonds of Courage, Wisdom, Honesty and Strength in order to be released from captivity by an evil sorceress. The four diamonds are …read more

You already know that I love the organization called Fertile Hope.
Fertile Hope is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing reproductive information, support and hope to cancer patients and survivors whose medical treatments present the risk of infertility.
Fertile Hope helped me realize that there were options available to me, even though I spent my entire adult life assuming I was infertile and that was that. Had Fertile Hope existed when I was just beginning my cancer treatments twenty years ago, I would have even more fertility options open to me.
Luckily, Fertile Hope exists now. And it has joined forces with …read more

One of my first posts here at Fertility Notes was on the Family Building Act of 2007, legislation which would require the 90% of private insurance companies that don’t currently cover fertility treatments to do so.
If you aren’t among the lucky customers of the other 10%, there are places you can go to apply for financial assistance with your fertility treatments. Several fertility clinics offer shared cycle programs which defray the costs of using donor eggs. If you are planning to use in vitro fertilization (IVF), the International Council on Infertility Information Dissemination, Inc (INCID) offers scholarships to those in …read more

As you probably already know, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Kudos to Gloria at Cancer Commentary who encourages women to Change the Statistic by getting annual mammograms. Grace at Kids Health Notes offers some advice on how to talk to your kids about cancer. Did you know that about one in four new breast cancer cases occurs in women of childbearing age? I’m here to talk about the links between breast cancer and fertility.
While there is a connection, infertility does not have to be a foregone conclusion to breast cancer treatments. Most cancer treatments will affect fertility – …read more

Sounds like the name of a secret society or a collaboration of sinister characters one might find watching reruns of Alias or the X-Files. It is, in fact, a bold new initiative, funded by the National Institutes of Health, organized by Northwestern University that aims to protect the fertility of women who are undergoing radiation or chemotherapy.
Teresa Woodruff’s statement on www.kaisernetwork.org was music to my ears:
 
When a woman is diagnosed with cancer, the first priority is to save her life, Teresa Woodruff, chief of the Feinberg School’s new fertility preservation division, said. She added that although most women will survive, …read more