worried about this process making you infertile because you’re probably already infertile.’”
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How sickle cell affects fertility
Even if patients don’t have the transplant, sickle cell disease can damage their bodies in ways that can affect their ability to have children, according to Dr. Leena Nahata, a pediatric endocrinologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio.
For women, chronic inflammation and the sickling of blood cells in the ovaries can make getting pregnant harder. For men, sickled blood can jam inside the blood vessels of the penis, causing painful, unwanted erections that last for hours. This condition, called priapism, can damage sexual function and decrease sperm count.
And it’s not just the disease. Researchers are evaluating how some widely used treatments may affect fertility — for example, by decreasing sperm count.
“It remains unclear how that translates directly to fertility outcomes but at least raises the concern that this may be an issue,” Nahata says. Even more concerning to Nahata were the results of a small study, which she co-authored, that showed some patients were unaware of the many fertility risks related to sickle cell disease.
Woolford says she was 19 and shocked when her doctor told her she was probably already infertile. But no one could be sure, so she held out hope that she might still undergo a procedure to preserve her fertility before having the chemotherapy required for the bone marrow transplant.
From extensive research, she learned that egg freezing could cost more than $10,000 and that her insurance wouldn’t cover it. She couldn’t afford to do it on her own. Woolford wondered whether she could find another way to pay for egg freezing. “So I started looking into financial resources,” she shares. “And I saw all these foundations [that] give away grants. But you had to have a diagnosis of cancer.”
In the end, Woolford had the transplant without freezing her eggs. She said she felt that being cured would “be a fair trade-off to give up my dream of biological children.”
Unfortunately, the partial-match transplant did not work. Woolford’s body rejected it.
“So, here I am,” she says. “I am 30, still have sickle cell disease, and I’m infertile.”
A grim thought sometimes pops into Woolford’s mind: If she had cancer instead of sickle cell disease, her dreams of