A Whole New C

There were several times last fall that the topic of having a baby came up: the fertility clinic we had used unsuccessfully to try to harvest and freeze my eggs prior to chemo needed us to update our records, a friend suggested subscribing to the “Adoption After Cancer” mailing list to start researching that long and complicated process, and Michael checked with our health plan to see if egg donation was covered using a flexible spending account. We resolved that 2008 would be the year that we would start making the decisions we needed to make in order to grow our family and to move into the future without dwelling on the past. In mid-December, I ordered an ovulation prediction kit online, figuring that a good place to start would be to get some handle on what my body’s rhythms were now that I was through my chemically-induced menopause.

It turns out that my body was already way ahead of me. Just days after writing my last blog entry in late January, I found out I was pregnant. With no fancy science experiments but pure calendar-driven guesswork, timing suggests that this was the best Christmas present ever, well worth the 41 weeks of pregnancy, 24 hours of labor, 90 minutes of pushing and ultimately the 20 minute caesarean section it took to finally get him here. Alexander Hagen Wilson was born at 12:21 a.m. on Wednesday, September 24, weighing 7 pounds, 3 ounces, and measuring 20 inches.

Over the past nine months, I have made and broken many vows to update this blog with the news. We dutifully documented my growing belly in photos and I composed many entries in my head that attempted to do justice to the overwhelming joy and relief we felt at getting to this point less than two years after my diagnosis.

But I couldn’t bring myself to post anything. It wasn’t just the blog. I also completely stopped logging in to check on the Young Survival Coalition message boards that had been my lifeline during treatment, even though I knew that just writing a brief update about my own happy story – pregnant just 9 months after finishing chemotherapy – would offer hope to many newly diagnosed women.

Looking back, I recognize that a number of reasons kept me away. I do most of my writing late at night, and pregnancy had an amazing way of eliminating my 4 a.m. insomnia bouts. (Confession: if you go back and check posting times for previous blog entries, my nocturnal tendencies may not be so obvious. More than once, I manually altered the time of a post to a more socially acceptable 11:43 p.m. or 12:38 a.m. to prevent family and friends from worrying about my sanity and wellbeing.) I also found myself focusing intensely on my work, trying to achieve a year’s worth of results in the nine months I knew I had in the office before spending the remainder of the year on maternity leave. When I wasn’t sleeping or working, I was studying for what will be a never-ending graduate course in child care, one that will come with no degree but hopefully will result in a happy, healthy and well-adjusted boy. Also, I wanted to make sure that friends, family and colleagues heard the news from me rather than from my blog, and tradition and paranoia kept me from spilling the beans widely before April.

But most importantly, I knew I needed to stay positive, and I was afraid that updating the blog might pull me back into a world of worry about recurrence, blood tests and five-year survival rates. And while dwelling in those dark places is still something I need to avoid, I am so awash in joy, love and relief that the time finally felt right to come back to this, just a few weeks shy of nine months after my last update, to write about what I believe is not a happy ending but a wonderful new beginning. (And, truth be told, I have found a comfortable position with the baby on a pillow on my desk, my arms around him and chest holding him in place, that still allows my hands to reach the keyboard. Since I am quickly becoming reacquainted with the late night shift, this lets me help him through the post-feeding “gas fussies” without losing my mind.)

So welcome to a new era of The C(ourtney) Word, where the most important C of all is the child whose eyelids are fluttering back to sleep as I finish typing and prepare to do the same myself.