We can’t face discarding [our embryos], so they sit, suspended in solution, waiting for a life that will never be.

This was the annual bill that we pay to keep our seven embryos frozen in a storage facility. Our future babies. Well, once upon a time, they were our future babies, back when we thought my cancer would stabilize enough for us to unfreeze one or two and start the process of beginning a family. Now they are just seven frozen embryos, lives not yet living. Our world isn’t secure enough to bring them into it, but we can’t face discarding them, so they sit, suspended in solution, waiting for a life that will never be.

When I was first diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, seven years ago, my doctors spoke with me about fertility preservation. The harsh chemotherapy regimen that I was about to endure would likely be too much for my ovaries. They expected me to emerge infertile. I had to decide: start treatment immediately or delay chemo in order to freeze my eggs.

But I was 25, single, and scared. As much as I wanted kids, a family seemed so far away and hypothetical. The thought of delaying a treatment that would immediately save my life in order to maybe preserve my fertility so that I could possibly have kids one day with an unknown man was too abstract. So I dived straight into chemo, hoping that I would finish treatment and enter remission with a fighting chance at motherhood.

Remarkably, I did. My oncologist told me that I was the first patient he’d had in 30 years who wasn’t thrown into menopause by the drugs. Maybe I am meant to be a mom, I thought. Maybe all is not lost.

Even though I was in remission, I had to spend the next five years on an antihormone drug that made pregnancy dangerous. But I was only 26 and needed time to meet the right man and settle down anyway, so waiting five years didn’t seem unreasonable. A year and a half into remission, I met Evan. We got married. We both wanted kids; we talked about names and how many we would have. It’s all coming together, I thought.

In 2014, just three weeks after we stood in the dappled shade of an arch of sunflowers and lavender and said “I do,” our palms sticky from the summer heat and excitement, we sat in my oncologist’s office once again, clutching each other’s hands as we heard words like metastatic, terminal, and so sorry. Less than three years after I was told that I was cancer-free, the cancer had returned and spread to my bones and distant lymph nodes. I was now a stage 4 metastatic breast cancer (MBC) patient. MBC is terminal, with a median survival of two or three years. Some 30 percent of early-stage breast cancer patients later metastasize, sometimes after decades of remission.

With the MBC diagnosis, I had to restart treatment immediately, and I would be in some kind of treatment for the rest of my life. This time around, inducing menopause would be a crucial part of knocking the cancer back. Even if I lived, I would not be able to carry a child, ever.

The losses seemed endless as I grappled with the diagnosis. Grief ripped me apart; the fear darkened everything. I felt held down by the weight of all that I would not experience in my life, all that I would leave behind, as if I were trapped in a pile of rubble. Try as I might I could not fight my way out, could not see the light, did not have the energy to try.

The idea of never becoming a mother trumped all other thoughts. In those first few weeks, I woke up sobbing; I spent my days huddled in the corner of my living room unable to catch my breath, my mind a never-ending reel of the moments I would never experience with the kids that would never exist. I pictured lying on the couch with Evan as we felt our baby kick; tears streamed down my face as I remembered that this would never happen. So when my doctors gave me one more shot at fertility preservation, I wanted it. Even though I would never be able to feel a child growing within me, if we froze embryos, and if I surpassed the expected survival timeline, we might be able to find a friend whose body would be healthy enough to compensate for the mistakes of my own, who would be willing to carry our child for us. It was a long shot—surrogacy is an amazingly difficult, long, expensive process—but we weren’t ready to give up.

We borrowed $10,000 from my parents and drove to another doctor’s office, one where the waiting room was filled with joyous and expecting couples. It was disorienting to see a medical facility full of hopeful, happy young people my age. I was so used to the cancer center. But fertility clinics are not built for the dying; they are built for the hopeful, for new life. So we took our borrowed cash to this foreign place, and I injected myself into my abdomen every night for two weeks with medication that stimulated everything my oncologist wanted to suppress, and the fertility specialist took out 23 eggs, which turned into seven frozen embryos that now live in a metal cylinder.

Those were my last two weeks of true fertile womanhood, and they were worth every penny.

With our embryos safely removed from my hazardous body, I began receiving monthly abdominal injections designed to shut down my 29-year-old ovaries forever. I took pills every day to mop up the remaining estrogen in my body like a sponge.

I threw myself into researching our family planning options. Aside from surrogacy, the only other spark of hope was adoption, but medical histories are crucial aspects of the prospective parent evaluation process, and my diagnosis moved us to the bottom of the pile, to say the least. Plus, if either surrogacy or adoption ever came to be, we then had to hope beyond hope that I would have time to experience motherhood. Not time in my day, but time in my life.

I knew how unlikely surrogacy and adoption were for us, but I struggled to accept the possibility of a future without children. Not having kids left a void deep down in my belly that nothing could fill, though endless tears attempted to do so. At my age the issue of fertility and family planning is unavoidable—just about everyone I know is getting pregnant or has young kids—and it was a constant reminder of what I did not have. If I went to a friend’s baby shower, I would come home crying, holding a box of pink and blue cookies that I won in the baby-sock-folding competition, because I felt desperate for baby socks of our own to fold.

So every year, when that white Reprotech envelope showed up in the mail, I immediately paid it, fueled by a flicker of hope that our embryos were safe and sound, that one day they might get shipped back home. As long as we had them, there was still a chance.

So every year, when that white Reprotech envelope showed up in the mail, I immediately paid it, fueled by a flicker of hope that our embryos were safe and sound, that one day they might get shipped back home. As long as we had them, there was still a chance.

Then one day I woke up with a headache that did not go away. A week later I lay in a hospital bed waiting to have one of two brain tumors surgically removed, and the other radiated. The breast cancer was back once again, and it had spread even further.

Developing brain tumors made it almost impossible for me to fathom the idea that I could live long enough to hear a child call me mom. Up until then, my cancer had been responding so well to treatment that I was beginning to let myself flirt with the idea that I might be one of those rare patients to live with MBC for decades. If that were the case, I wanted to do so with a family.

But the harsh reality was that my health and prognosis could change in an instant, at any time. Brain tumors could show up out of nowhere. I decided that as long as my health was that volatile, I didn’t want kids. I didn’t want to go down that road if I likely wouldn’t be around to raise my children, to send them off to high school—or even kindergarten. I cemented over the void in my belly that had caused me so much pain, and I convinced myself that it was for the better.

Why keep handing money over to Reprotech to store embryos that would never grow to be a child? Why pay the bill sitting on my desk? I didn’t see the point. It sat on top of a pile of “handle this later” paperwork for a month.

But I couldn’t not pay it. If I ignored the bill, all hope of a family would be over. They’d toss the embryos without the money. And it was more than that. Not paying the bill felt like I was deciding that my situation would not improve, that I would not get better, that I would not live.

I kept checking the bill’s due date and cross-checking it with the calendar, then sighing with relief when I realized that I still had time to pay it. It got closer and closer to the deadline.

With five days to spare, I wrote the check and put it in the mail.

This piece was originally published on Glamour.com. It is reprinted here with the permission of the author. You can view the original article here.