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Sunday, September 23, 2007

Chemo Safe during pregnancy?

OK. I got a comment recently and couldn't really tell if it was rude or not. How is chemo safe during pregnancy? Well, ideally no you would not want to have drugs like that during pregnancy. But we don't live in a perfect world do we? Bad things happen. And unfortunately this happened to me at the same time as pregnancy. Without chemo I would have died, and so obviously would have my baby. But to answer this question, not much is known about the safety of chemo during pregnancy. You can't actually do a large scale study on pregnancy women on chemo. So, all you can do is go by what cases there HAVE been. And so far, every doctor I have talked to, every bit of information I have read, and even my high risk OB have all said that every situation they saw where a woman had chemo during pregnancy the baby came out fine. Why? I don't know. I have heard that they are not sure that chemo even crosses the placenta to the baby. Chemo is a larger molecule drug that may not be able to cross the placenta. The medicine is not ingested, but put through an IV. All I know is that my baby is doing wonderfully. This baby has handled the chemo fine...and is growing and progressing normally. Tell me why a woman who loses all her hair and is very sick during chemo can have a child with a full head of hair? If the chemo got to the baby, why would that child be born with hair? Many questions still need to be answered and there are not any answers as of yet. But this is something I already have been through. The same question has been asked many times and this is the only answer I have. Go to pregnantwithcancer.org and read some info there. It happens. It sucks, but it does happen.