Mike & Megan's ai portrait of testicular cancer
headshot of mike and megan scherer

“The interesting thing about me and Megan is we didn’t necessarily know what we wanted, but we knew we wanted each other.”

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MIKE'S STORY

Megan and I have been together since we were 15 years old. We were high school sweethearts. During my cancer treatment, Megan saw the real me. She saw the nights when I didn’t know if I was going to wake up the next day.

When I was diagnosed, I can’t necessarily say I felt a lot of shock. I thought, “OK, I have to get through this.” I’d watched my dad have cancer three different times, my grandfather had it too. I just wanted to finish treatment, get through it and get on with my life. But now I can see that it changed everything about me. It clarified the things that are important to me going forward in life. And the more I’ve lived my life beyond my cancer diagnosis and started to deal with the emotions and the anger, and feeling, “why me?” It’s been clear, “why not me?”

When I think about my cancer diagnosis, and where it’s taken us, I don’t feel the anger I used to feel. Instead, I’m in disbelief and amazement at where we are with opportunities at this point in our lives. I can’t say I’m angry anymore because I can see the blessings that we have and how thankful we are for them. I even got a butterfly tattooed on my arm, it speaks to everything we went through with my cancer diagnosis, and the transformation that led to where we are now.

I recently asked my dad if, when he was young, he pictured himself as a father. He said no, and I agreed on my part, because I hadn’t either. However, after dealing with infertility struggles from cancer, and now that I’m a dad, I feel like this was what I was made to do. I didn’t know that I was built for this until my baby boy was placed in my arms. It’s why we’re working so hard to get others to think about their future in preserving their fertility. We wanted to turn our adversity into advocacy, which is why we started Worth the Wait.

MEGAN'S STORY

I was just really scared. We felt really alone – we knew no other person in their early twenties who had been diagnosed with cancer and was in the throes of treatment. People told us this could ruin our marriage. But we only came out stronger, and while it feels like we’re still just kids, we grew up a lot quicker.

There’s an artist we like – who’s actually a cancer survivor himself – named Andrew McMahon. In one of his songs, he sings, “wisdom is in the living / not the years.” That really resonates with me, because we’ve been through more than most. People who we’re close with, who are a lot older than us, might not know adversity like we do.

I’m glad for them that they don’t know it. But I do think there’s a lot of beautiful things that can come out of facing adversity, too.

There are times when I’m still scared, scared of what the future holds, for Mike, and for us. Scared of reoccurrence or what effects treatment could still have on him well into the future. But in those moments, I try to redirect and recommit to my life’s work: being a mother to our son and helping other cancer patients have families of their own. It brings me joy to be a parent with Mike and experience something we thought we might not have the opportunity for. And it brings me joy being able to take our worst part of our life, transforming it into something good, something that’s giving hope to other people.

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