"I just decided that this was not going to be the end of me."

Antoinette Ramos was getting ready for her college roommate's wedding last year when she first realized something wasn't quite right with her body. As she was pulling up her hair, she noticed that one collarbone seemed less defined than the other. Feeling around, she found a lump the size of a ping-pong ball.

Initially, the 25-year-old wasn't terribly worried. It must just be a tight muscle from exercise or the unfamiliar hotel bed, she rationalized. But when the lump was still there weeks later, she paid her doctor a visit.

The news wasn't good; Ramos had Hodgkin lymphoma, stage 3B. Lymph nodes from her abdomen to her collarbone were swollen.

"I took the news quite well," Ramos says. "My aunt had had this cancer before."

Still, she wasn't fully prepared for what would come next.

"When I sat down to get the full diagnosis…and what the treatment would be, that's kind of when my world crashed around me," she recalls.

Chemotherapy would be absolutely necessary. Her doctor went through a laundry list of possible treatment side effects with her. One of the last ones he mentioned was infertility.

"He just kind of passed right over it," Ramos recalls. "He said, 'Don't worry, I've had lots of patients who've gone on to have children.' "

But Ramos did worry. Even though she was (and still is) single, she has always wanted to have children one day.

"The fact that that choice might be taken away from me really rocked my whole existence," she says. "I didn't cry when I found out I had cancer, I cried when I found out it could affect my fertility."

What followed was a frantic search -- before cancer treatment began -- for a way to preserve Ramos' ability to have children in the future. She originally planned on embryo freezing, but ultimately wasn't comfortable asking a friend to be a sperm donor or using an anonymous donor. That led her to an experimental procedure: egg freezing.

It also led her to Fertile Hope, a non-profit organization created by a young cancer survivor to help others in the same boat cope with the fertility issues that often surround cancer treatment. The group's Sharing Hope program helped Ramos pay the $10,000 cost of her procedure.

For 2 weeks, Ramos injected herself with hormones to stimulate production of her eggs.

"I hated needles, but I had to get used to that," she says. "Then I'd go in every other day to have ultrasound to monitor egg development."

The effort paid off. Her medical team harvested 19 eggs, which are now sitting in deep freeze in Los Angeles, waiting for the day Ramos needs them. The day after harvesting, Ramos moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where she began the chemotherapy treatments she had postponed for about a month to have the fertility procedures.

From May through August of 2005, Ramos got chemotherapy once a week. Although her hair fell out, she says she never felt sick and did not lose weight from the treatments. In fact, she gained weight from the steroids that are part of the regimen.

After chemo, though, she had some scares. She needed more surgery to remove and biopsy other lymph nodes that looked suspicious on her scans, and she ended up hospitalized for low white blood cell count, a complication that can increase the risk of getting dangerous infections.

But even at her sickest, she refused to throw in the towel.

"I was in the hospital for about 5 days in an isolation ward, but even then I was trying to prove to everybody that I was OK," she says. "I would push my IV cart and do lunges and squats."

Now, Ramos is cancer free and getting on with her life. She has a busy job in commercial real estate in San Francisco and is planning to walk a marathon and a half next month to raise funds for breast cancer research.

She doesn't know if her cancer treatment damaged her ability to have children, but she knows she did all she could to keep that option open for herself.

"I was so accepting that I'd covered all my bases before starting [chemotherapy], and so I was able to go on with confidence," she says. "If I hadn't been able to take care of that, I don't know that I would have been able to go through with it."