Baby Drama

Being young with Multiple Myeloma presents some really difficult challenges. One of the biggies is that for men, chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transplant will most likely make you sterile. That means no more biological kiddos once this is all said and done. Knowing this, we took a chance at our two month window and got pregnant right away, which was pretty miraculous. The pregnancy is going well and it looks like the Brabbs kiddo count will make it to 3 (Ocean, Iris, Girl Child-to-be-named later).

Here's where the baby drama comes in to play. Due to all the additional rounds of chemo (RVDD), the first transplant is looking to hit a few weeks before the due date. The first issue with moving forward with the transplant before the birth of girl #2 is that we could run into the problem where Cassie goes into delivery at 38 weeks which would leave me behind to watch online courtesy of Skype or iChat. To add to the difficultly, just last week the Doc said that he does not think I should be returning to the hospital for the birth immediately after transplant due to my lack of immune system. Therefore, their suggestion is that if I want to be there for the birth, then continue to soak in chemotherapy (RVD) until the baby has arrived and then go in for my bone marrow transplant. Today we meet with Dr. J and we really want to see whether or not I could go up just for the delivery in my space suit and then return home.

The latter option seems much more difficult on our family given that Cassie will be caring and nursing a newborn while her hubby is on his back a few miles away at UMHS. My preference would be to get the transplant out of the way and start the recover process before the baby has arrived. There is definitely no right answer here and unfortunately for us most people diagnosed with MM are in their 60's so there isn't much to lean on in terms of folks who have gone down this path before.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I got tossed down the one less traveled by, And that has made for a roller coaster of a journey.

What to do....????

P.S. Today's stars Cycle #7 of RVDD...time to return my 24 hour Pee-Pod