Table 7.

Anticipated consequences of using CFM.

Anticipated Consequences
FRIENDS AND FAMILY CONVEYED THE INFORMATION ….but to be fair it was X [partner] that was looking and just breaking it down and telling me – cos I didn’t want to over think things because I’d got too much going on in my body that I didn’t want to be putting a load of other pressure on me. (Patient, age 30, lymphoma, fertility clinic) I didn’t want to see it [the word cancer]. So that’s why I kind of left it to him to filter for me. (Patient, age 30, lymphoma, fertility clinic) He [partner] probably understood it all a lot more than me……then he broke it down for me, explained to me in the way that he knew I would understand at the time……cos me ‘ead wasn’t in it. (Patient, age 30, lymphoma, fertility clinic) When I’d like read bits and kind of like I’d got down to between two and then sent pictures of the information to my parents and they gave me their opinions. (Patient, age 23, ovarian cancer, oncology clinic) Yeh, me mum helped me with making the decisions cos she’s been through it [fertility treatment]. She sat with me and we talked about it for a good two days straight. (Patient, age 25, ovarian cancer, oncology clinic) ….in the pink bit [treatment options] it was a bit too detailed for me….there was a little bit too much of what you had to go through. I’d like it more like just a summary and then if I wanted to know about one I’d probably want to go……I just found it a little bit upsetting. (Patient, age 28, breast cancer, oncology clinic)
DENIAL It’s really useful to have and you need to have it because if anything happened we need to read it. But it is good that it’s highlighted so I can just quickly go ‘I’ll skip through that bit’. (Patient, age 29, brain cancer, fertility clinic) So when you’ve got that [the title] staring at you, it’s ‘ard and I get upset. (Patient, age 30, lymphoma, fertility clinic) ….when I’d just been diagnosed, to have that [the word Cancer] on the front of it, that’s like just jumped out at you and I didn’t want to see anything like that. (Patient, age 30, lymphoma, fertility clinic) I’d got in my mind as long as I weren’t gonna die and as long as everything was fixable I didn’t like seeing it all black and white like. (Patient, age 34, breast cancer, oncology clinic) Cos you don’t want to see all these keep jumping out [flicks through booklet]……I asked him to hide it. All the paperwork he hid from me in the end cos I didn’t want to see it. (Patient, age 30, lymphoma, fertility clinic) The booklet….goes on to look at the percentage chance of you conceiving…….I sort of skipped over that. (Patient, age 38, breast cancer, oncology clinic) I know there’s the bit about how the cancer can affect it, how the treatments can affect it and that can be – I know for me cos I like to try and be positive and everything – it can be a bit of a, like it brings me down a little bit so I try and avoid sections like that. (Patient, age 29, brain cancer, fertility clinic) [How Cancer Treatment Affects Your Fertility] made me even more depressed than I already was. (Patient, age 25, ovarian cancer, oncology clinic) Some of it was overwhelming, some of it scared me. (Patient, age 38, breast cancer, oncology clinic)
EDUCATING OTHERS Her interest was because she’s a medical student and this is obviously not an area that she’s come across yet. So it was, all the ideas were new to her, which I’d heard of pretty much everything in here so it wasn’t such news to me. So it really was, she just takes the opportunity to learn something as she goes along. (Patient, age 43, breast cancer, oncology clinic) No. I mean she’s [patient’s mother] read more of the booklets and taken more of that, I think to get a bit more of an understanding whereas because it happened so quick and the actual treatment was so quick I think I was just in a whirlwind of getting from A to B whereas she took more information on than I did. I think it kind of went straight over my head most of the stuff cos it was just like in that moment what I had to do. (Patient, age 28, breast cancer, fertility clinic) He [partner] thought it was quite informative and it gave him some things to look up online. (Patient, age 38, breast cancer, fertility clinic)
EMOTIONS EXPRESSED RAISING EXPECTATIONS So I didn’t want to get completely like me ‘hopes up’ because I didn’t know that it was gonna get taken away. (Patient, age 30, lymphoma, fertility clinic) SELF BLAME I kept saying what am I doing to me body? Why am I doing this when I ‘ve got something else that I’m going to have inject into me body? (Patient, age 30, lymphoma, fertility clinic) GUILT It was as if I was checking facts and even after I’d made the decision, because I then sat in the fence a little bit and felt so guilty….yeh. (Patient, age 34, breast cancer, oncology clinic) SHOCK ….but I wouldn’t ever have thought that a person at sixteen had fifty per cent chance of getting pregnant but then at thirty years old they get ten per cent. I would never have known that. I mean that’s quite – that’s the bit that shocked me overall, out of the booklet. (Patient, age 30, breast cancer, fertility clinic) ….literally I were in shock that much there were bits that I didn’t….I don’t remember seeing all this bit ….I either didn’t read it properly at all cos of everything that was going on…… (Patient, age 34, breast cancer, oncology clinic)