What has Cancer Taken Away from Me: Let’s Talk About It

Dec 27, 2025
4 min read

While my cancer news has been overall very positive lately, it has been bringing up some thoughts about what I’ve lost. I try not to think about this sort of thing too much, as it does make me sad. But I think that it’s important to talk about the things you lose when you deal with this disease.

TW: self-harm, miscarriage, and fertility issues

Let’s start with perhaps the most obvious - I lost my ability to have my own children. Not in a temporary kind of way, in a permanent, life-long way. For those who might not know, I have experienced 3 miscarriages, all early in pregnancy, typically around the 10-12 week mark. That loss is something that I know many go through, and while many women who experience this kind of loss someday go on to have children in the future (with or without medical intervention), I will not have that opportunity.

When I first found out about my diagnosis, there wasn’t any time to freeze my eggs or prepare to save my fertility in the future. We needed to move, make decisions, and the amount of time and energy needed to do the fertility saving process was not something that I could do, and make decisions about my cancer at the same time.

Sometimes when I see others who are pregnant - especially people that I know - it can make me feel a little bit mixed up. I am happy for them and wish them happiness. I am sad for myself. I’m angry at my body. This was a dream that I’ve had since I was a child - it was one of the first things that Adrian and I talked about when we first started dating. As a matter of fact, I think we talked about it on our first date at the Waffle House. Having children together was something that tied us together, and we talked about it a lot during the first years of our marriage.

When I got diagnosed and had to choose to move forward without trying to save my eggs, it was probably one of the hardest choices I have ever had to make. I knew that I was giving away not only a part of myself, but also the future that I had planned with Adrian. After making that choice, even knowing that it was a conscious choice, I was extremely depressed and had to deal with a significant amount of sad feelings. As part of my therapy work, I devoted quite a bit of time and energy to working through letting go of this dream. I had to reshape how I saw myself, how I saw the definition of family, and replan my future with this new reality in mind.

Now that I'm further into this journey, and I've done the work, I have made peace with my new reality. The likelihood that I will ever have my own biological children is almost zero. But family is what you make it - Adrian and I have decided to pursue adoption from foster care, focusing on my pets, focusing on our home, and focusing on having adventures with Adrian. I've also made strides in my incorrect belief that somehow I could have prevented this, and that giving up my opportunity to have children made me broken. I know now that I still have much to offer, even if it's not a child.

For a while, cancer took away my self-esteem and seriously threatened my mental health. I don't talk about it much, but early in the journey, I had a lot of thoughts about self-harm and suicidal ideation. Most of my thoughts centered around wanting to make things "easier" for others, especially my parents and my husband. I was having a lot of the "if I weren't around....", "I'm not worthy of having these people take care of me", and other thoughts like that. I was also having pretty significant self-loathing, thoughts about how ugly I was, and generally, obsessive thoughts about my appearance. I spent the first few months of my treatment in oversized hoodies, sweatpants, and hats, all with the intention of trying to hide myself and generally make myself smaller or invisible.

Starting therapy really helped me see how unproductive these thoughts were. They kept me from focusing on getting through treatment and becoming healthy again. It also helped me to keep from spiraling out of control or performing self-harming behaviors. It didn't stop all of them, but I got a series of tools, routines, and rituals to help keep me in control that prevented the thoughts from taking over.

I haven't needed to use these tools as frequently as when I first started this journey, but every so often, I pull out that tool kit when I need support. I am pretty much back to my "regular old self" or my pre-cancer self mentally. My self-harming behaviors stopped, and, while my anti-depressant does a lot of heavy lifting, I am much more myself now. Even knowing that this will be something to manage for the rest of my life, I feel much more at peace with it than I did at the beginning.

Here's what I hope that you get from this post: Cancer is going to take things from you, but how much you let it keep from you is entirely up to you. Cancer can take away some of life's most precious things, but you can take them back - by hook or by crook.

Here's something else I hope you get: get yourself a really, really good therapist when you're going through something tough like this. They can give you the tools you need to deal with the most difficult and complicated parts of your journey.

And here's the last thing: things can and do get better. Maybe not in the timeline you want or how you might expect, but they do get better. Not saying that it's easy and you will be changed forever, but one day things will be in a place where you can look back knowing that you made it to the other side.

Love you

Olivia