Weighing the Decisions: Part III

So what did we do?

Part I / Part II / Part III / Part IV

This is my beautiful niece at her baptism. She
will be turning one year old tomorrow!
(I'll share photos next week)

Dashing and I always knew we wanted to have a family. We had no idea that we would be facing decisions on how that family came to be when we were unmarried (at the time), 24 years old, and facing the diagnosis of cancer. How could we possibly think about creating life in the midst of facing death. It was not an easy path. Now, 3 years later at the age of 27, we cannot even believe this is the path we've already walked.

We had to think about a mirad of things before we made our decision on how to proceed.

- If we did the fertility preservation, it would delay the start of my chemotherapy treatments. Was this ok?  My oncologist wanted to start as soon as possible as my internal masses (one the size of a softball) were compromising the blood flow to my brain.

- If we did the fertility preservation, would we stick with egg retrieval only, or would we choose to include Dashing in the process and preserve embryos? This is a major decision as we believe embryos are children - we would be creating life. Additionally, freezing eggs has a lower success rate than freezing embryos. If we just preserve eggs, there is a chance that none of the eggs would successfully make it through the process. We only had one shot - one cycle.

- If we chose to preserve embryos, we didn't know how many would survive the process, and what kind of commitment would we feel to them (as we believe embryos are babies).

- There are potential temporary side-effects to the hormone treatments received before the retrieval like fluid build up in the abdomen (that will go away). Was I up for this?

Really, the biggest decisions were the ethical ones, ones that would be with us forever. What would we do with these eggs/embryos down the road? What if we did the preservation but could conceive naturally after therapy anyways?

We had to make a decision on this immediately. Dashing and I talk it over together, and shared our decision with our family. Still today, we know we did the right thing for US.

I'll tell you tomorrow what we are glad we chose to do.