Ten Years Later (10 page)

She knew Fertile Hope would offer oncologists a fast and easy way to refer their patients
once they informed them that chemo could make them sterile.

“I’m not asking you to be a reproductive expert, but just like you advised, ‘Go get
your MRI, go get your flu shot, go get your X-ray, go do all these things before you
start chemo,’ just add, ‘Go talk to a reproductive doctor,’ or ‘Here’s a clinic.’
I’m not asking you to become an expert; I just need you to make a referral.”

A key problem Lindsay identified early on was that the world of oncology and the world
of fertility did not overlap. Not only did doctors in both fields never communicate,
they didn’t see a need for it. Lindsay was a living example of why there indeed was
a need; Lindsay and the more than 140,000 newly diagnosed cancer patients each year
ages zero to forty-five (still in their reproductive years) deserved to be informed
about their fertility options. She went about the business of presenting Fertile Hope.

“I had a business plan, plus I had two other plans of attack. ‘Here’s the market,
here are the five ways we will achieve it. We can’t do it all at once so here’s how
we prioritize.’ Yes, I had the patient story for when doctors said, ‘Patients don’t
care about this’; I could refute them. And when reproductive doctors said, ‘Egg freezing
is not an option; it doesn’t exist,’ I could say, ‘Actually, my eggs are frozen.’
But the real success of Fertile Hope stemmed from applying sound business solutions
to a real problem.”

As with any compelling cause, there was a risk of relying too heavily on emotions
to raise funds or to spread a message. Lindsay deliberately developed a measured tone
to promote Fertile Hope.

“I don’t have a ‘PhD’ or ‘MD’ after my name, so if I go too far in the heartstrings
approach, I lose them. They’ll think,
This is an irrational, emotional patient,
as opposed to a polished, professional, knowledgeable woman advocating for something
she believes in. I do think there had to be some patient component or an unbiased
third party involved, because if a reproductive doctor goes in to make the pitch,
in Gucci loafers and a fancy outfit, and walks in to the oncologist and says, ‘Hey,
send your patients to me. I can help them,’ it’s too salesy. But when a patient advocate
comes in and says, ‘Patients want this. You guys need to start talking,’ it’s less
of a sales pitch. At the end of the day it benefits the reproductive center, but it
also benefits the patient.”

While Lindsay’s patient status added credibility, her age had the potential to diminish
it. She was twenty-five, heading up a nonprofit organization, and asking for money
and tremendous change in the medical world. Her youth turned out to be, in some areas,
helpful.

“Like with Dr. Rosenwaks, I felt that he was more likely to talk to me because of
my age. I reminded him of his children. ‘Let me help you.’ There’s something about
that generation, and that’s great. ‘You’re young, you’re ambitious, you’re smart.’
But it also meant for me that we had to be overprofessional. I had to be overprepared,
überprofessional, and I was criticized a lot. ‘This looks very for-profit,’ or ‘This
looks very professional. How much money did Fertile Hope spend on it?’ But I felt
like I had to err on that side.”

The Fertile Hope website looked so professional, Lindsay says people assumed Cornell
gave the foundation hundreds of thousands of dollars, when in reality, the grant was
around $4,000. She asked friends to write source code for the site and launched it
for thousands, not
hundreds
of thousands, of dollars.

“It would hurt us sometimes, because people would say, ‘Oh, do you have a staff of
forty?’ At our biggest we had six people. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we were
so polished and professional on the front side. We had to suit up with a strong medical
advisory board and an incredible board of directors. We had to pile on credibility
everywhere we could, and then my age and lack of advanced degrees would be less of
an issue.”

The year 2001 for Lindsay had been astounding. It began with a battle for her survival
and was now ending with the cultivation of Fertile Hope. Lindsay had no idea she was
in store for another milestone in just a month.

In January, Lindsay was invited to a friend’s birthday party at a New York City bar.
She was introduced to a guy named Jordan Beck, who was with a woman she assumed was
Jordan’s girlfriend. Lindsay was quite put off when Jordan started hitting on her.

“I thought,
You creep! Your girlfriend is here!
So, then he buys me a drink! And I take the drink and basically run away to the bathroom.”

The bathroom was located downstairs in the bar, and as Lindsay made her way there,
she accidentally made her mark on someone heading up the stairs.

“I spilled my drink on a guy, who happened to be Marky Mark. Mark Wahlberg! Ha!” She
giggles. “It’s so New York, right? So now, Mark Wahlberg has a Cosmo, a pink drink,
all down his shirt. And he says, ‘Don’t worry, baby,’ and he takes off his shirt!
And then, off he took.”

(Lindsay says the shirtless Mr. Wahlberg danced the night away at the bar.)

Jordan, who worked on Wall Street, e-mailed a mutual friend a few days later to ask
if Lindsay was single. When he learned she was dating someone else, he asked the friend
to let him know if that ever changed.

“Two weeks later,” Jordan says, “I got an e-mail saying,
Hey, you might want to give her a call now
.”

The call cleared up the identity of Jordan’s “date” for the birthday party. He was
there with the girlfriend of his roommate, who was not a fan of large social gatherings.
Jordan asked Lindsay to go out, but the date of the dinner fell on the night before
she was scheduled to appear on
Good Morning America
with Nancy to discuss Fertile Hope. Hmm . . .

“I want to go out,” Lindsay recalls, “but I have to go to bed early, so I don’t want
him to think I don’t like him if I leave early. So I had to say, ‘I have this big
thing for work tomorrow morning.’ What I didn’t know was that my friends had already
told him that I was going to be on. So, the next morning he’s e-mailing me from the
trading floor where there are TVs everywhere, and he’s saying, ‘We’re all going to
turn on the show.’ And I haven’t told him anything about my cancer, my fertility,
Fertile Hope, nothing!”

A panicked Lindsay e-mailed him back, telling him she didn’t think that was a good
idea and that she had some things she’d like to discuss in person.

“So, Jordan wrote right back and said, ‘I already know your story and I’m totally
fine with it and I’d like to learn more about it all and watch.’ At that moment, I
was like,
He’s the one
. It was my Kristin Armstrong moment.
He already knew and he still asked me out!
”

Lindsay appeared on the morning program and went for a drink with Jordan that night.
She told him he could ask her anything.

“And he thought for a minute, and I was really expecting a doozy of a question, and
he said, ‘What was it like? What was the set of
Good Morning America
like?’ ” She laughs. “And I was like,
Okay, he knows the cancer piece of me but it doesn’t define me.
I hadn’t had that experience yet. It was so cool.”

Jordan was intrigued by this unique girl from California.

“She was much different than any New York girl or any girl that I had met,” he says.
“Really smart, calm, easygoing. Just a nice, normal, intelligent, attractive girl.”

The topic of children came up early in the relationship, by chance, during Lindsay’s
third date with Jordan.

“He invited me to a client dinner and we were seated boy-girl-boy-girl around a round
table, and the girl next to Jordan was very chatty and flirty and asked him how many
kids he wanted. I thought,
Whoa, girl, I haven’t even asked that yet!
He said, ‘Four or five.’ And again, I thought,
You’re the boy for me.
”

Both Lindsay’s foundation and her relationship with Jordan were growing strong. She
was very up-front with him that she didn’t know whether she was fertile, but that
if she wasn’t, she had frozen her eggs and she was in touch with the best IVF doctors
in the world if they ever needed to go that route.

“Jordan would always say things like, ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
I want you, and if we want kids we’ll make it happen,
but we don’t need to worry about that today. We’re not trying to have babies today.’
For him it was like, ‘Why in the world would that be a reason I wouldn’t date you?’ ”

Jordan says he’s not sure why, but he never thought twice about it. He thought only
that she was the type of person he wanted to date.

“You could tell from the ambition that she had and the way she lived life,” he explains.
“And I could tell that very quickly. It was so opposite of any girl I’d ever met that
probably—very far back in my brain; these were not conscious thoughts—it was attractive.”

That summer, the nanny job was available again for the Nantucket family, so Lindsay
took it and Jordan visited every weekend. She could work on Fertile Hope from there
and enjoy a glimpse into family life with Jordan.

“It was almost like playing house. We thought,
Wow, we could do this! This is fun!
He’s an only child, so it gave him an idea of what it would be like to have five
kids. We got exposed to those things together in a way that we both liked and wanted.”

Lindsay’s life was fulfilling both personally and professionally. She was running
the foundation by herself and enjoying the challenge. The 800 number listed on Fertile
Hope’s website and literature rang straight to her cell phone.

“Callers would say, ‘I was just diagnosed. What do I do?’ and I was like, ‘Okay, where
are you? This is what you do.’ And again, they thought the organization was way bigger
than it was. They had no idea they were calling my cell phone as I was cruising around
New York.”

At first, she handled between ten and twenty calls per week, mostly from outraged
cancer patients who’d already been rendered sterile.

“And that for me was incredibly motivating because it was validating,” she says. “I
was still wondering,
Did I make this up? Does this really happen to people?
Most of the people I was talking to up front
were survivors who were really angry, and that really for me validated the need and
it fueled my fire.”

Lindsay’s business plan never included the arena of legal action. Fertile Hope’s mission
was to inform people of their options. Don’t assume you’re fertile or infertile—get
tested. Explore donor eggs or donor sperm. Is there any leftover sperm in the testicles?
Lindsay was still amazed that the risk of sterilization was not on the informed-consent
forms signed by cancer patients.

“The patient is in the land of the unknown. You don’t know what to ask. Of course,
if you knew fertility was a risk you would ask. But the cancer doctors are in the
cancer world; they know. The patient is thrown in and expected to sink or swim. What
if you don’t by happenstance ask the right question?” she asks. “That shouldn’t be
how you get critical information. And I think sterilizing someone is critical information.”

In November 2002, Lindsay’s friends helped her organize a large fund-raising event
for Fertile Hope in New York City. Kristin Armstrong, who was on the foundation’s
board of directors, asked Lance to speak at the event. The people and the fund-raising
dollars rolled in. Several cancer survivors who attended became Fertile Hope volunteers,
eager to donate their time to fund-raising, graphic design, and marketing. Just a
few months later, in January 2003, one of the volunteers became Fertile Hope’s first
employee. Lindsay was also able to rent shared office space and hook up a phone and
a hotline. Reproductive centers were now offering to sponsor Fertile Hope events and
pharmaceutical money was coming in. Doctors in the reproductive field were amazed.

“They wondered, ‘Who is this girl? Last year she was at the medical conference with
a flyer, and the next year Lance Armstrong is speaking to us about how important this
is, and in the meantime she has been in the
New York Times
and the
New York Post
and the
Wall Street Journal
.’ It was all happening fast.”

Fertile Hope launched with five areas to advance: awareness, education, financial
assistance, research, and support. Lindsay knew they could not achieve them all at
once and that each one would lead to the next with fund-raising as fuel for the forward
movement. She was speaking all over the country, but mostly to fertility doctors.
The reproductive world took quickly to the idea of Fertile Hope: new patients, new
money, and a way to advance the technology of egg freezing. But the cancer world was
not as receptive, an issue she hadn’t anticipated.

“Fertile Hope became the darling of the reproductive industry very quickly,” she explains,
“but the cancer industry was so hard to penetrate, it was shocking. And that was hard
for me, and frustrating. We had to really think harder. Every pharmaceutical company
in the world was trying to do the same thing: How do you change physician practice?
How do you integrate what you want into their day-to-day checklist? And here little
Fertile Hope was trying to do that. We ended up doing it in six years, which is faster
than most people can, but I expected from my dot-com glory days that that would happen
in six months or a year.”

A breakthrough came in fall 2002 after Fertile Hope sent out fifty thousand brochures,
one to every cancer doctor and nurse in the country. A follow-up focus group helped
the foundation to gather feedback and measure the impact of the mailing. What was
the most effective way to get oncologists to refer their patients to Fertile Hope?
Lindsay listened in as the focus group leader spoke with an anonymous doctor over
the phone. His response proved to be a game changer for the foundation.