Jaida Wand: “I was at home watching TV and not thinking about having babies”. Photo: Dallas Kilponen
Like most 16-year-olds, Jaida Wand did not give her fertility much thought beyond a vague idea that one day she would grow up and have children.
Then she was diagnosed with cancer and all her assumptions were thrown into doubt.
Less than a week after she tested positive to Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Jaida found herself sitting among couples in the waiting room of a fertility clinic, wearing pyjamas because she had come straight from the ward.
Jaida, Dr Antoinette Anazodo and Professor William Ledger watch a video of the song that was performed by medical staff and friends after Jaida’s final cancer treatment. Photo: Dallas Kilponen
“I was like, ‘I’m still a kid’. Literally two days ago I was at home watching TV and not thinking about having babies and now I’m like, ‘I might not be able to have babies any more’,” Jaida said.
“Not to mention being diagnosed with cancer,” added her mother, Handan Wand.
“Oh yeah.”
But the fertility specialist had no answers on what the disease might mean for Jaida’s future fertility and, in any case, the disease was already too advanced for doctors to take pre-emptive action by harvesting her eggs to be frozen. Chemotherapy began soon afterwards.
Nearly a year since the cancer was extinguished, Jaida is still wondering how the chemo will have affected her chances of having children, and her doctors are little wiser.
She is among thousands of young cancer survivors participating in an online registry that will help inform the fertility outcomes for patients of different ages, cancer types, treatments and stages.
The Australasian Oncofertility Registry will track the fertility outcomes of patients from the point they are diagnosed, to help oncologists provide accurate risk projections for the chances of a patient having children after treatment.
It is a world first, because although other international studies have tracked fertility and cryopreservation, none has looked at the fertility of cancer patients.
About 11,000 Australians aged under 40 are diagnosed with cancer each year.
Chief investigator Antoinette Anazodo, of the Sydney Children’s Hospital at Randwick, said the registry would enable her to give more-informed advice to patients such as Jaida.
“We may actually find, five years after, that Jaida doesn’t have to worry, that she’s actually in that group that her fertility is going to come back,” Dr Anazodo said.
“So we’re, hopefully, going to be able to reduce the number of people who need fertility preservation.”
Royal Hospital for Women obstetrician William Ledger said it was important for clinicians to be able to assess the fertility prospects of cancer patients, because a growing number were surviving.
“These young people want to go back to normal, and part of being normal is being a mum or dad,” Professor Ledger said.
“It’s really tricky to get it right with someone who’s young and who assumed that she was going to be a mum when she got older and all of a sudden she’s hit a wall and told, ‘You’re going to have treatment and it may make you sterile’.”
Jaida, who met Professor Ledger for the first time on Tuesday, has decided to freeze some of her eggs in case the chemotherapy has damaged their long-term survival prospects.
She was pleased to learn that eggs frozen for as long as 23 years have resulted in healthy babies.