Greta

Greta Hollar’s Story

A Family, One Way or Another

Greta Hollar and her husband started trying to start a family in the summer of 2022.

What unfolded was almost impossible to process in real time.

Greta went from trying to have a baby to fighting cancer, from urgent fertility preservation to cancer treatment, and from one unexpected medical turn to another before learning that the path she and her husband had counted on might not work.

It was one unexpected medical turn to another, before facing a heartbreaking revelation about the future she and her husband had been fighting for.

Through it all, they kept moving forward.

“We’re going to have a family one way or another.”

That determination sits at the center of Greta’s story. Cancer changed her body and her plan. And when the family-building paths they had counted on failed, Greta and her husband had to find the strength to hope again.

A Breast Cancer Diagnosis at 33

When Greta didn’t get pregnant, she and her husband started to worry. After consulting her doctor, she was prescribed an oral fertility medication to see if it might help them conceive.

After several months of treatment and trying, Greta and her husband decided to take a break.

A couple of weeks later, she found a lump.

Everything moved quickly after that.

What started as a pause in fertility treatment became a doctor’s appointment, then testing, then the words Greta never expected to hear: breast cancer.

By June of the following year, the question Greta and her husband had been asking was no longer only, “Why aren’t we getting pregnant?” It became, “Will we be able to get pregnant now?”

Preserving Hope Before Treatment

Because her care team already knew that Greta and her husband had been actively trying to get pregnant, fertility preservation quickly became part of the conversation.

Before starting chemotherapy, Greta was given a short window to freeze her eggs.

She did, undergoing the treatment on a Sunday, and started chemotherapy the very next day.

There was no time to process what was happening. Greta had gone from trying to grow her family without medical intervention to making immediate decisions to preserve that dream almost overnight.

Around that same time, doctors also discovered stage 4 endometriosis, which helped explain why Greta had been having difficulty getting pregnant and why her fertility was already more complicated than she knew.

Genetic testing also revealed a BRCA2 mutation, increasing her risk for ovarian cancer.

Greta went through four rounds of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and reconstruction. Then, because of her increased cancer risk and the extent of the endometriosis, she made the difficult decision to have her ovaries removed.

That decision changed what family-building could look like for Greta and her husband. Without her ovaries, Greta could no longer produce eggs, making the fertility preservation before chemotherapy even more important to the future they hoped to build.

The mental toll was unbearable. She was in survival mode.

The Backup Plan That Nearly Broke Her

For a long time, Greta and her husband held onto the hope that the eggs retrieved before chemotherapy would help them build their family.

Two years later, after being on hormone therapy, Greta was given the opportunity to pause medication and try to move forward with family-building.

But when Greta and her husband used her eggs to make embryos, it didn’t work. Doctors told Greta that even though she froze them before chemo, her egg quality was poor, likely due to her past endometriosis diagnosis.

After years of fertility preservation, cancer treatment, surgery, recovery, and waiting, Greta and her husband had finally reached the moment they had been holding onto.

Instead, they were grieving another loss.

Still, Greta and her husband did what they had already done so many times before.

They kept going.

They began exploring other paths to family-building, carrying forward the same promise that has guided them from the beginning: one way or another, they are going to have a family.

The Cost of Trying Again

Greta and her husband are both self-employed, which means they don’t have the kind of health insurance that makes fertility treatment conveniently accessible.

Fertility care was not covered under their plan.

In addition to cancer-related medical bills, they had already paid for fertility preservation. And now, as they tried to take the next step to have a baby, the financial burden was overwhelming.

While researching grants and support, they connected with Worth the Wait, which awarded a grant to help with their family-building journey.

For Greta, the support mattered not only because of the financial burden of IVF, but because it validated how real and difficult this part of survivorship can be.

Her cancer treatments ended, but their impact on fertility and family-building continues as she and her husband continue the conversation about what’s next.

No One Was Talking About It

Greta is a content creator, and she began sharing her cancer experience online after her diagnosis.

At first, her message was about awareness and early detection. She wanted people to understand that cancer can happen even when someone is young, healthy, and active. She heard from people who scheduled mammograms or got suspicious symptoms checked because they saw her talk about her experience.

But as Greta moved farther from active treatment and deeper into the fertility side of her story, her advocacy began to shift.

She started talking more about fertility after cancer because she was looking for support herself.

She could find people talking about breast cancer treatment, surgery, and survivorship. When it came to fertility after cancer, especially the complicated emotions and decisions that come with it, she had a harder time finding people who were openly sharing.

So she started talking, and people started responding.

Finding Hope in the Gray

Greta wants people to understand that family-building after cancer isn’t always black-and-white because the initial pathway seldom leads to the finish line.

But Greta also believes the gray can still hold hope.

That’s the message she hopes reaches other young adults facing cancer and infertility: there are options. There is support. There is still hope, even when one path reaches a dead end, and you have to try again.

You can follow her journey on Instagram, @GretaHollar.

Through Worth the Wait, Greta hopes to help others feel less alone and better prepared to ask questions about fertility, family-building, and life after cancer.