Surgery date set, and...

It's been hard not to update you on something that's been going on in the last couple of weeks. And you may have wondered why I had waited to schedule my surgery.

Sawyer and I were working on a project.

We weren't sure if the project would work out, and didn't want to lay more suspense on you that turned out for naught. Though I know I shouldn't be thinking of "you guys" when I write, I do. And I thought it would be too much of a sad saga for all of us to experience together if this didn't go well.

Some of you may know that Sawyer and I (taking our own sweet time, at ages 37 and 39 respectively) had been warming up to the idea (and practice!) of trying to conceive this year. While technically there hasn't been anything stopping things from happening naturally for over a year, we were really starting to get serious about it (and at my age you typically need to be at least a bit serious) this summer, with school out of the way and knowing we were landing back in Seattle with generous family support soon.

So, imagine our dismay when we realized I was getting benched from this whole fertility possibility for up to five years. I won't go into the details, but suffice to say that a body undergoing chemo and then hormone therapy (which is the typical follow up regimen for my type of cancer, for up to 5 years) is not a hospitable place to grow babies.  Also suffice to say that when I'm hopefully out the other side of this at 44, I might not have the physical or mental gusto or capability to start from scratch.

(Hold space for a maybe/who knows? with me here, but let's also be practical.)

So, we did a rush round of IVF to cyropreserve some embryos that we can hopefully use at a later date.

This required about 12 days of oral shots and injections, Sawyer being escorted to a small room to give "samples", me getting multiple ultrasounds, and finally, an egg harvest where I got feel-good drugs and had a not-unpleasant hallucination that the doctor was putting wads of paper up my hoo-ha.

Certain things about it sucked a bit, but in the whole scheme of things... easy peasy.

I mean, perspective folks. Compared to what my next 12-16 months look like, I would happily do IVF monthly.  Not to be overly dramatic, but it really wasn't bad at all.

And the good news is we harvested 5 eggs (points detracted from the Utah clinic, who is so used to working with 24-year-olds that they made me feel like my harvest was paltry when I think it was FINE FOR MY AGE  or even good consdiering I couldn't take the high doses of estrogen that other folks get to take because of the type of cancer I have).

Four out of five of them made it to the deep freeze.

This was a lot better odds than I was told to hope for (usually it whittles down to 20-30% after five days in the petri dish). We were hoping for one or two.

So, our little four cell ball potentials feel like great insurance. One more option for us as we take our fun-house tour of life and love with cancer.

The whole experience was odd, science fiction-y, ridiculous, and wonderfully humbling. Better living through science! We feel super grateful we had the option (which by the providence of so many factors was available to us on this short timeline) and through a grant through the LiveStrong Foundation's FertileHope program, we even got the meds for free - which defrayed the cost significantly.

Anyway, so I got the news about the eggs and that my surgery was moved up (a week from Monday - Oct 22) yesterday.

It was a good day.

I had told Sawyer the day before that I felt like I couldn't take any more bad news somewhat in jest, (because what are you gonna do if it's more bad news? Deal.) but I can't tell you what a relief it was to know that this particular gamble paid off.