Three years after revealing she battled cancer at age 25, Cobie Smulders says the hardest part was worrying about whether she would be able to have children.
“It was a mess,” the “How I Met Your Mother” actress told People in a new interview. “I think it was messy mostly because I had a great fear of not being able to have kids.”
Smulders, who has two daughters with husband Taran Killam, continued, “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 an 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.”
In 2015, the actress, 36, revealed to Women’s Health she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer during the third season of “How I Met Your Mother.” She said she had tumors on both ovaries and the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and tissue. The battle lasted two years before she beat the disease.
“For me at the time, I just wanted to deal with it on my own and with my family,” she told People. “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.”
Smulders recently teamed up with Tesaro’s “Not on My Watch” campaign, urging women with recurrent ovarian cancer to look into maintenance treatments.