Breast cancer diagnosis forces urgent fertility decision, leaving future motherhood uncertain

At 31, Arathi Devandran received a breast cancer diagnosis, a life-altering event that compressed critical decisions into an impossibly short window.

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In the next 30 minutes, you need to decide if you want to go ahead with fertility preservation so we can start the process today.

Two weeks before beginning chemotherapy, she was given just 30 minutes to decide whether to undergo fertility preservation. This meant a demanding process of hormone stimulation to prepare her body for egg harvesting, a significant toll on her system. "Let's do it. I want to give my future self a chance," she told her husband, opting to freeze 12 embryos.

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Let's do it. I want to give my future self a chance.

This experience underscored a difficult truth about serious illness: it forces a confrontation with the present while making the future feel abstract. Motherhood, inherently an act of imagining forward and believing in a future self and child, became a complex proposition at a moment when any future felt uncertain.

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This is one of the things about disease that no one tells you about. It compresses time, collapsing decisions that should have taken years into windows of 30 minutes. But it also forcibly suspends you in the present, because the future becomes a place you cannot fully trust.

Devandran admits she never definitively knew if she wanted to be a mother, partly due to a complicated relationship with her own mother and family. However, through therapy, she began to understand that motherhood didn't necessitate repeating past patterns. She recognized her agency to define her own path and to heal her own wounds around belonging and selfhood, even amidst the profound uncertainty cancer had imposed.

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Motherhood is an act of imagining forward, says the writer, pictured with her husband – it asks you to believe in a future where you will be there.