So, I have cancer. Why does this prevent me from having a child?
1) We don't know if I can get pregnant or if my eggs are viable. Who knows if I can even have a baby. (Or whether my eggs are ruined by chemo and not capable of making a normal healthy child.
2) I have to have CT scans every 3-4 months. Can't have a CT scan when you are pregnant. I don't think the standard of care is to go 10 months without a CT scan. And what if I need chemo or surgery again?
3) My doctors tell me all the time that the cancer will come back. Do I want to go through the whole journey of fear and anger and sorrow and weaning again?! Do I want to put my health in (even more) danger?
4) Is it fair to my son and my husband for me to put my life on the line?
5) What would happen if we had two children and I died? (See number 4.) My husband feels he can handle one child but with two how could he afford the child care alone, much less college and retirement?
6) Let's pretend all the cancer stuff does not exist (haha wouldn't that be great?!). There are several other reasons that might prevent us from choosing, as a couple, to have a child. I prefer to keep those private.
So, dear blog readers, that's about as starkly unhappy as I've been in a post for a while. I hope to be able to soar beyond this as well, to remember (in this season especially) how grateful I am for my amazingly lucky life full of love, comfort, and (dare I say it) adventure.
7) This is the secret part that I don't allow myself to think about. So, not really secret. The chance of reoccurance is greatest within approximately 2 years after NED (no evidence of disease*), so maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe...
* The CT scans show a stable lesion in the apex of my left lung; no one knows if it is cancer or not without cutting me open (again). So we do not know if I am NED or not.
3 comments:
*hugs* That's really crappy :(
*hugs* my problems pale in comparison and I feel like a heel for dumping them on you tonight......you are such an awesomely strong woman....you amaze me ^_^
That's a big one. I don't have the answer, but I'm thinking of you. A lot. I wish I could help. Perhaps we are both rather cerebral people - I have found that with myself, the best decisions that I make tend to be the ones that I think the least about, because I tend to think things through so completely that I wind up in an endless round of pros and cons, etc. This was true of the second baby question, though I didn't have the cancer variable - still the mortality problem does come up in some capacity (as do finances, marriage, the state of the world). In the end, I decided to not prevent it, but not try either. Naturally it did not turn out to be that simple, but it did circumvent my usual process and lead to a baby that I can't now imagine life without.
Given everything that you've been through in the last four years with both your illness and having Captain Adorable in your life, would you do it all again? All I know is that motherhood has made me more vulnerable than I ever imagined possible, but it has also made life so much richer. So I don't know. But I'm thinking of you.
Post a Comment