One of the most asked question people have once i share with them what we are doing is “Why an ovary transplant?”
Its a great question! There are other ways to get pregnant, and other ways to bring a child into our lives. What is also true about Joy is that since the cancer treatment shut down her ovaries, she no longer produces hormones as her body did before, which means she is in an menopausal state. This has lots of ratifications across her daily life, and our lives together. Everything from bone loss, to her not feeling like herself, and many many other things. The current treatment for her state is hormone replacement therapy (HRT), taking a daily dosage of hormones, same pills as the “pill” i think. This does help lots, but will never match her own body producing exactly what she needs. There have been recent studies that suggest HRT leads to a higher incident of cancer in women. All in all, it would be a good thing to let her body produce what it knows best. Getting pregnant, we could go down the in vitro fertilization (IVF) route, which has come a long way in the last 20 years, yet success rates are still lower than natural conception. Each IVF “round’ can cost $10,000 or so, it could take one round, or many for one child, and if we wanted to have more kids, then we would need to do another round. There is also convincing naturally, something we both want to do.
When we looked at all the scenarios, doing the transplant is the best choice. It will bring her body back to producing all it needs all on its own, we will conceive naturally, and we can have numerous children without having to go and redo any treatment. It was still a hard decision, i had heard rumors of this procedure before we met Dr. Silber, and at first i didn’t like the fact that she would go “under the knife”. The more we talked, and really thought about it though, it was clear, the transplant is what we want.
i was just thinking about this a lot today, and wanted to write my experience.