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Sous-titrage en anglais de Life Vs Life
Nat:
My name is Nathalie Criou, I am a Product Manager at Google in California. I am 33 years old and when I was 32 I was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer. In my case, it was a gynecologic cancer, so I knew that my ability to have children was going to be impacted. So I went to see about 17 oncologists. I was very shocked, all of these were gynecologic oncologists so they should really know about fertility issues, only one of them mentioned fertility preservation to me. That was Dr. Amreen Husain at Stanford Cancer Center and she did everything she could to help me.

Dr. Husain:
In Nat's case, we initially attempted to preserve her uterus, however, we decided to go ahead and do a complete hysterectomy on her.

Nat:
The hysterectomy was meant to save my life but it felt like I was ending a life. Treating cancer was definitely a priority at the time but the main concern for me was the ability to have children.

Dr. Westphal:
So Nat came in to see me and discuss fertility preservation techniques and she went through ovarian stimulation, and we retrieved eggs and fertilized embryos.

Nat:
The process itself is pretty easy. It just requires some injections and we are trained to do those injections ourselves. They are completely painless. The egg retrieval procedure itself is a very short procedure.


Dr. Westphal:
Most of the time when patients come in, they don't have much time, and sometimes patients don't have any time and they're not able to do anything before they start their cancer treatment. Usually, we can do most fertility preservation techniques in two to three weeks.

Nat:
After my eggs were retrieved, the next step was literally frozen in time

Dr Behr:
These frozen eggs represent potential life. Oocyte cryopreservation otherwise known as egg freezing is a process where we can indefinitely store a woman's eggs in a nitrogen tank so that they may be thawed out and used at a later date.

Nat:
I would have been very depressed feeling like a mother who's just lost her child if there hadn't been any way for me to preserve my fertility. With this treatment at least I have hope.

Dr Behr:
This really is a tremendous breakthrough for patients who are gonna encounter sterilizing therapy and primarily what I am talking about here are cancer patients.
Cancer is not prejudiced. It affects all people, all genders and all ages and really is something that must be considered in terms of survivorship.

Nat:
Today, there are options for cancer patients and it's really not a matter of choosing between their treatment and preserving their fertility. even though it was far from being a perfect solution, I just felt that I had options. I could still have fertility conversations down the line, I could still think about a family and I think this is what allowed me to go through surgery and to go through treatment. It gave me a lot of hope. And my hope now, even now that I am not completely done with treatment, is because I know that in a  tank somewhere at the fertility clinic, there are a few mini-Nats that are waiting to be defrosted.