‘TLC’ Star Shauna Rae, 24, Who’s in Remission from Brain Cancer Desires Motherhood, Froze Eggs, But Unsure If Boyfriend’s Commitment – How Cancer Affects Patient’s Parenthood Wishes
‘TLC’ Star Shauna Rae, 24, Who’s in Remission from Brain Cancer Desires Motherhood, Froze Eggs, But Unsure If Boyfriend’s Commitment – How Cancer Affects Patient’s Parenthood Wishes
Reality TV star Shauna Rae, 24, known for her TLC series “I Am Shauna Rae,” has been weighing motherhood and how to achieve it for months while in remission from a rare form of brain cancer.
Her diagnosis left her with the side effects of pituitary dwarfism, which is caused by insufficient human growth hormones in the body as a result of the treatment she received for brain cancer as a child.
Rae’s fertility options remain limited thanks to her diagnosis, leading her to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy.
Rae was diagnosed with a brain tumor at six months old. She underwent brain cancer surgery and chemotherapy to enter remission. The risk of the cancer returning in the years to come still looms.
Cancer patients are also faced with the possibility of infertility because treatments, including chemotherapy and radiation, also have options, including IVF.
Before undergoing cancer treatment, patients must speak to their doctors about fertility preservation if they wish to have a family in the future. Egg, sperm, and embryo freezing are common approaches to fertility preservation, but other options exist.
Reality TV star Shauna Rae, 24, would love to experience motherhood, but given she’s in remission from a rare form of brain cancer that left her with the side effect of dwarfism, her condition also affected her chances of having children naturally.
Moreover, she’s uncertain if her current partner, whom she’s been with for “quite some time,” is the one for the long term.
Rae’s since frozen her eggs for possible use via surrogacy one day in the future. However, she’s entered a new stage in her journey – who she’d like the father of her children to be? Making her situation more complicated, she’s unsure if her current partner is willing to make such a weighty commitment.
“I do see them [her partner] as being my future, but asking them to be the donor to my eggs and make an embryo so I can freeze it for maybe ten years or so in the future is a huge commitment,” Rae said in a video blog.
Rae said on her video blog she had given up on having children and becoming a mom altogether during her teenage years because of her diagnosis. However, while filming her TLC reality show, “I Am Shauna Rae,” conversations about motherhood and alternatives to natural conception caused her to reconsider.
Rae admits she hasn’t had a serious conversation about asking her partner to offer his sperm for a child years down the line.
“I don’t know if it’s going to lead to a disruption in the relationship. I don’t know if it’s going to end the relationship. I don’t know if it’s going to cause issues with anything like family or anything like that. There’s a lot of factors with asking someone to be a donor,” Rae said.
The conundrum Rae is dealing with is something many cancer patients and survivors also wrestle with. A cancer diagnosis may impact fertility because the treatments involved can cause infertility. In other cases, women may have organs vital to childrearing removed altogether to mitigate cancer risk.
Cancer treatments like chemotherapy can damage sperm in men, and hormone therapy can decrease sperm production, according to the National Cancer Institute. Radiation treatment can also lower sperm count and testosterone levels, impacting fertility.
These possible side effects of cancer treatment should be discussed with your doctor before starting treatment. For male cancer patients, men may have the option to store their sperm in a sperm bank before treatment to preserve their fertility.
This sperm can then be used later as part of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure in which a woman’s egg is fertilized with sperm in a lab. The embryo is then transferred to a woman’s uterus to develop.
WATCH: Family planning after cancer
Cancer Treatment’s Impact on Fertility in Women
Just as cancer treatment can impact men’s fertility, women may also be affected. Some types of chemotherapy can destroy eggs in your ovaries. This can make it impossible or difficult to get pregnant later. Whether or not chemotherapy makes you infertile depends on the drug type and age since your egg supply decreases with age.
“The risk is greater the older you are,” reproductive endocrinologist Dr. Jaime Knopman told SurvivorNet.
“If you’re 39 and you get chemo that’s toxic to the ovaries, it’s most likely to make you menopausal. But, if you’re 29, your ovaries may recover because they have a higher baseline supply,” Dr. Knopman continued.
Radiation to the pelvis can also destroy eggs. It can damage the uterus, too. Surgery to your ovaries or uterus can hurt fertility as well.
Meanwhile, endocrine or hormone therapy may block or suppress essential fertility hormones and may prevent a woman from getting pregnant. This infertility may be temporary or permanent, depending on the type and length of treatment.
If you have a treatment that includes infertility as a possible side effect, your doctor won’t be able to tell you whether you will have this side effect. That’s why you should discuss your options for fertility preservation before starting treatment.
WATCH: How chemotherapy affects fertility.
Research shows that women who have fertility preserved before breast cancer treatment are more than twice as likely to give birth after treatment than those who don’t take fertility-preserving measures.
Most women preserve their fertility before cancer treatment by freezing their eggs or embryos.
After you finish your cancer treatment, a doctor specializing in reproductive medicine can implant one or more embryos in your uterus or the uterus of a surrogate with the hope that it will result in pregnancy.
If you freeze eggs only before treatment, a fertility specialist can use sperm and eggs to create embryos in vitro and transfer them to your uterus.
When freezing eggs or embryos is not an option, doctors may try these approaches:
Ovarian tissue freezing is an experimental approach for girls who haven’t yet reached puberty and don’t have mature eggs or for women who must begin treatment immediately and don’t have time to harvest eggs.
Ovarian suppression prevents the eggs from maturing so they cannot be damaged during treatment.
For women getting radiation to the pelvis, Ovarian transposition moves the ovaries out of the line of treatment.
In addition to preserving eggs or embryos, positive research has shown that women with early-stage hormone-receptor (HR) positive breast cancer were able to safely pause endocrine therapy (ET) to try to get pregnant, and they did not have worse short-term recurrence rates than people who did not stop endocrine therapy.
Understanding Shauna’s Diagnosis
When Rae was six months old, she was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor. Rae’s cancer journey lasted for more than three years, which included brain cancer surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible.
However, often, surgeons cannot get all of the cancer cells during surgery, so follow-up chemotherapy is usually recommended to get the remaining cancer cells. Her procedure helped her reach remission. Although she’s been in remission for years, there’s always a chance of her brain cancer returning.
(@thereal_shaunarae99/Instagram)
During a 2022 episode of “I Am Shauna Rae,” she explained to her doctor that she frequently experienced migraines, which could be a symptom of a brain tumor. Her mom said at the time, doctors told her the cancer could always come back.
After undergoing brain cancer treatment, Rae’s mom noticed her daughter wasn’t growing, leading to her pituitary dwarfism diagnosis.
Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine says pituitary dwarfism derives from a “deficiency of growth hormone or lack of peripheral action of growth hormone.”
Research published in the medical journal Pituitary, which focuses on clinical aspects of the pituitary gland, says, “Poor longitudinal growth and growth hormone deficiency (GHD) is often a consequence of cancer treatment during childhood.”
