Cobie Smulders feared she would never have children after her battle with ovarian cancer at the age of 25.
The 36-year-old actress has nine-year-old daughter Shaelyn and a three-year-old son with her husband Tarran Killam, but has said that when was diagnosed with the disease over a decade ago, her biggest fear was the idea that she’d never be able to experience motherhood.
She said: “It was a mess. I think it was messy mostly because I had a great fear of not being able to have kids. I’ve always been very maternal, I’ve always loved children and I’ve always wanted one of my own, and so having that not being option, especially at such a young age - kids were very much not on my mind at 25, but I still wanted them one day - it was really hard and it was a really depressing thing to go through.”
The How I Met Your Mother star had a “great” oncologist who helped her through the process, but when she was diagnosed in 2007, there weren’t enough resources out there to help.
She added: “I remember doing mad, crazy Google searches on my disease and trying to understand it better, and obviously I was talking to my doctors, but there wasn’t at the time and it was very bleak.”
Thankfully, Cobie’s surgeon was able to save one third of her ovaries for her to have her two children, and she has now been in remission for over a decade.
Cobie kept her battle a secret until a 2015 interview with Women’s Health, and now says she chose to speak up after realising her experience could help other women going through the same struggle.
Speaking to People magazine, she said: “For me at the time, I just wanted to deal with it on my own and with my family. I wasn’t interested in sharing it with anybody. It doesn’t really benefit the world until now, when I can say, ‘this is what I went through and I survived it. These are the things I did and these are the things I learned and these are the things I can show you.’ Before it just felt like something I want to deal with myself.”