I'm a bird. Haven't met my bee.

   I want to have babies. Not right now, probably not in the next few years, but at some point I want to have a whole bunch of kids. I want to get married, and get pregnant, and get fat and happy with a big chaotic mess of family around me. And up until now, I’ve always sort of taken for granted that that would probably happen for me at some point. I certainly wasn’t in a rush to get married, but when it comes to life dreams and goals, this scenario is pretty high up on the list.

yes please!

   Well, here we are. Bertha knocked out one ovary, and chemotherapy is angrily threatening the other. I’ll talk more about my specific kind of chemo in the future, right now I’m just thinking about my reproductive health. I’m embarrassed to say that I’m startlingly ignorant about how my lady parts work every month (I had two ovaries, one of them pops out an egg, I get my period. End of story). Having just one ovary wouldn’t really affect my chances of getting pregnant in the future, but chemo definitely will. A good 20% of women who get my kind of chemo never have another period again, and therefore will never be able to get pregnant. That seems like a lot to me!!!! And yes, I have youth and health on my side, but even then this is still a real possibility. So for those of you who are curious, here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Go in and freeze a bunch of my eggs after chemotherapy. Why not before? Beause I don’t have time :-(  Of course, this only works if I don’t fall in that bad 20%.  Even if I can still get pregnant after chemotherapy, the amount of years that I’ll be able to bear children will be reduced (not may, will). So, if I happen to meet my prince charming in my mid 30’s, say, I don’t need to freak out about whether we’ll be able to have kids. There will be a neat little refrigerated back-up plan. 

oh, hey guys.

2. Lupron. This lovely wonder drug temporarily shuts down the message from my brain that tells my body to keep baby-making-machinery going. The upside is that with less activity in that area, chemo may not do as much damage. The downside? I’m effectively getting thrown into menopause cold-turkey… starting NOW. The side-effects aren’t supposed to kick in for a couple of weeks, but after that I will be on the hot-flash, mood-swing rollercoaster that we like to call “the change of life” or “that time that Julie was really mean”. Fun!

   So that’s a lot of really personal information about my inside parts, but all in all I am actually very positive about this. I’m young, I’ve got a lot of eggs in reserve, I think I’ll be okay. So bring it on, potential baby-daddies. Bring it on.