Cancer, Fertility Preservation, Chemo
This is the story of one woman’s journey to start a family in her 30s during which she found a lump in her breast and learned she had breast cancer. She shares her experience with her initial struggle to get pregnant, facing cancer, fertility preservation, chemo, Lupron, adoption research and what got her through it all.
Corinne’s Story
We’d been trying to get pregnant for 6 months. We’d been married for 6 years by that point. I was about 33 years old and we said to each other, “Yeah. It’s time.” Niall had taken some convincing at first. He was the holdout, I would’ve had one before. Funnily enough it was seeing his parents the previous summer that convinced him it was time to start trying to have a baby. He was like, “I’m not ready, I’m not ready I’m not ready” and then when he saw his parents aging he thought, “Oh, my parents are getting older. It’s probably time for me to have a baby.”
I think it had been a year since we’d removed the goalie and I’d been on the pill. But we’d been actively measuring temperature and all of that stuff for 6 months. During those 6 months, I went through that same frustrating thing that I think a lot of women who are trying to get pregnant go through where you’re like “ugh” every single month when you get your period.
It was the day of the Susan B. Komen Race for the Cure. Niall and I went out for a run that morning in the Park. We were not signed up for the Race for the Cure. When we finished our run, the women were just starting the race. So, we stood there in the big balloon area applauding and cheering and everything. We went home, I took a shower and I felt a lump.
It was big. It was 2.2cm. It was not nothing. I remember thinking, “Wait did I really feel that?” and then I said to Niall, “I think I just felt a lump.” And he said, “I noticed it yesterday. I felt something but I didn’t want to say anything yet.” His parents were staying with us so he said, “I was waiting to tell you.”
I called my doctor and she said,, “You’re young and young women have lumpy breasts (and I had very big breasts). It’s probably nothing but I take this seriously and I’m going to send you to the breast center at St. Luke’s.” So I went to the breast center and they did the biopsy and they said, “Look, I’m sure it’s nothing.” I remember it was Friday the 13th when I went in and got the biopsy. They called me on Monday in my office and said, “I’m so sorry but it’s cancer.”
I remember the world stopping and walking through midtown to Niall’s office all the way on the West Side to meet him on the way to go to my doctor. There’s nothing like being a well dressed, bawling woman in Manhattan for people to leave you the hell alone! I remember I was in this Chanel lookalike jacket and heels and I was just sobbing. Nobody came near me. It was as if I was parting the seas.
I got to Niall’s office, picked him up, and went to the doctor.
It was one of those things where we didn’t know anything. I mean we were wondering, should go do a round the world trip right now? Am I going to die? And they’re like, “No! Your cancer is super treatable.” We thought, “Phew!” Then they asked, “Because you are of child-bearing age do you think you want children?” Luckily at that point we’d already decided we wanted children. So, it wasn’t tough to make that kind of quick decision. We thought, “Absolutely, we know we want children. We’ve been trying to have a child. So yes, let’s go for fertility preservation.” Then the doctor told us about this fertility doctor who specializes in women with cancer.
At the time, it was still so early we didn’t yet know a lot about the cancer I had, whether hormones triggered it. It turns out I have the BRCA1 gene. It’s a genetic marker and it is the reason I had cancer. But a lot of young women when they have cancer, it is hormone triggered. This is the reason this doctor specialized in fertility treatments for women with cancer and why he did it on a very low dose hormone.
Since I had cancer, I knew I couldn’t just go see any fertility doctor. I had to go see this expert cancer fertility doctor. Looking back, I think going through the lower dose regimen was part of the reason it didn’t work for me. We joked that I was like the very hungry caterpillar; I had a very hungry egg. We did it twice and both times I grew just one enormous egg instead of growing multiple eggs. You needed 5 viable eggs in order to make it worthwhile to harvest them. We didn’t know if that first egg was viable. It was big but “Meh, it doesn’t look so good.” So I tried it a second time.
While I was going through these fertility treatments, I was also learning about my cancer and figuring out my treatment. During this process, I did my gene tests and found out that I was what is called triple negative in the breast cancer world, which is a very aggressive cancer. It typically is genetic and it can be very deadly. But it’s also very treatable, if you catch it early enough.
With triple negative, there is a very clear course of treatment. With a lot of other breast cancers, there are a lot of questions with how you’re going to treat it. But the cancer I had there is only one way; you’re doing chemo. There’s no question about it. You also know what chemo you’re doing. When we realized we were going to be on this course for chemo, it reinforced the idea of “It’s good to do the fertility treatment” because chemo attacks dividing cells such as cancer and hair cells, as well as eggs.
I remember a flurry of doctor appointments. I was seeing all of these plastic surgeons. After seeing this one doctor, my body was absolutely covered in marker: “We can take this one breast and then we’ll balance…" It was like a Picasso painting. It took so much effort to get the marker to come off. This guy had drawn all over where my nipples would go. But that was another easier thing that came up through the course of these appointments. Knowing I had the BRCA1 gene made it very clear that it made a lot of sense to do a bilateral mastectomy. If the cancer hadn’t been genetic, they would’ve just recommended a single mastectomy. And then the plastic surgeons would have had to balance me out on both sides.
Since I had a couple months to figure all this cancer stuff out, I did a fertility treatment right away. I probably started at the end of October, did another one in November and then by December when it didn’t work they said, “It’s time for you to start chemo.” I had a very narrow window in which fertility preservation could have worked because once the chemo started it was pointless.
At my second and final fertility appointment, we knew the time was running out so it was probably early December, the doctor said to us, “There’s still only one viable egg like last time. But we have this thing we can do where we can take your ovary out ahead of chemo, preserve it and implant it back into your arm.” When I think back on it, there had been zero successful cases using this method. Nobody had actually even done it before! I remember thinking, “Wait … you’re going to experiment on me with this?” It was a sign of how much we wanted a child and how much we’d gotten our heads around this is the next phase of our life that we even considered doing it.
It was probably the 7th medical decision I had made that day. There were so many medical decisions to make throughout that time. I was constantly seeing different experts and getting second opinions. But I never got a second opinion on fertility because there was this one guy who was known as THE expert in the field. Maybe I should’ve done some things differently. But I got great advice from my fabulous oncologist after I had finally made the difficult decision not to do the ovary experiment.
I went into his office and said, “I’m ready. Let’s get the chemo scheduled.” So, he asked what’s happening with fertility. I told him, “I tried to do fertility preservation with the expert doctor but the low hormone way didn’t work and I decided not to do the ovary arm implant experiment.” I’ll always remember what he said next because it was so valuable and I was so grateful for his clear advice: “If you were my sister or my daughter I would advise you to go on Lupron, which is a shot that will shut down your ovarian function, before we start chemo. It’ll hide your eggs from the chemicals. Because you’re young and healthy the chances of your periods coming back after chemo are really, really strong. You will likely have normal functioning periods again once we take you off the Lupron and those eggs should be fine.” So that’s what we did.
Early in my chemo, we spent a lot of time looking into adoption. I got on this message board about adopting after cancer and tried to figure out what our options would be. It was hard because it’s not easy to adopt after cancer. A lot of places will not adopt to you. But I’d gotten my head around one of two ways to have a child. The first was we have a friend who is a major donorto an orphanage in India. So we thought, “Well, that may be one way!” Or we could do open adoption. I thought, “Look, I’m pretty good at writing essays. I think we could find a family that would adopt to us even with me having had cancer.” I didn’t do a ton of research in that space. But I did just enough to give me a cushion of comfort to know that there are ways after cancer to have a child. Then, I started my cancer treatment.
I started chemo in early December. It was every two weeks. It was probably the second week of December because after the second treatment my hair had started falling out. It was right around Christmas because I remember we went to Tavern on the Green with my family for a big Christmas thing and then afterward my brother and I walked to the wig store where I’d already been fitted. The guy there had seen my hair before it fell out and reassured me, “I STUDY blondes on the subway.”. He had made my wig and told me, “
My brother went bald when he was young,o I let him shave my head and I walked out in my fancy new wig. The wig was so convincing that when I returned to the office right after Christmas, a work friend saw me and said, “Did you get a haircut?” and I said, “Umm, yeah sort of … It’s a wig. Remember?” LOL.
I did chemo from December through the middle of March. It was unusual because sometimes you do surgery first and then chemo afterwards but I did something called neo-adjuvant chemotherapy. Because I had a big tumor, the goal was to shrink the tumor ahead of a lumpectomy so they could take less tissue. In the end, I didn’t do a lumpectomy and they needed to take both breasts because of the BRCA. But by doing chemo before surgery, they were able to dissect the tissue and saw that the chemo had worked and the tumor had disappeared. It was very reassuring to know it was gone.
Surgery was in mid-April. I’d stopped Lupron when I finished chemo in March. My periods came back in September and I got pregnant on New Year’s Eve. Were we trying to get pregnant that fall? Probably. I was conscious that I was fertile because I had been measuring every month before all of this happened. But, I wasn’t making notes.
When I was able to see my oncologist and tell him that I was pregnant — this was the same guy who gave me the advice that my periods would come back — I told him I remembered when he advised me to go on Lupron. It was so strange to me because we had been trying to get pregnant for six months before discovering the cancer and then when they tried the fertility preservation, it didn’t work. I had thought there might be something wrong with me hormonally. So I said to him, “Do you think because my period stopped and came back that it helped?” He said, “Yeah. It probably did. It’s like a computer reboot. There’s a rush of hormones when it comes back online.”
When I went to my OB-GYN. I said, “I’m a high risk pregnancy. Right?” She’s like “Nope. You’re not considered high risk. You’ll be considered advanced maternal age.” I turned 35 in June and had our son in September.” There was nothing special. Nothing crazy that we had to do when I was pregnant with him. I had a really easy pregnancy. I got sick once when I took a vitamin before breakfast. My shoe size didn’t change. Nothing.
Although, I guess I was really paranoid and careful during my pregnancy. I got pregnant December 31st. Early February we went to Guatamala, It was a planned trip to stay with good friends who lived there along with another couple who I knew were trying to get pregnant. I hadn’t even told my parents yet because I was waiting to tell them in person. For breakfast the very first morning, our hostess says, “You’ve got to try this yogurt. It comes from the local farm just down the road.” I asked her if it was pasteurized and she says, ”What do you care?” So then I had to tell her and then my friend who was trying to get pregnant burst into tears right at the table. Later she said, “Here you are, my friend who just had cancer. You’re sitting here with a crew cut and I am mad that you are pregnant? Am I a terrible person??” which she isn’t. It just shows how painful it can be to try to get pregnant.
There were countless nice things people did for me while I was being treated for cancer. My friends were so amazing. I never went to chemo alone. I always had so many friends in chemo with me that we had to have our own room. We were so obnoxious and laughing the whole time, playing music. The nurses would be like, “Oh here she comes. We need to find some extra space for her.” And when I got pregnant, this outpouring continued. I don’t think I bought baby clothes until our son was two. I got so much from so many people.
One sweet thing came from the blog I wrote throughout this whole thing. There was a girl at work I knew and liked. She wasn’t my best friend or anything but her mom became a big devotee of my blog. When I got pregnant, this girl came to my office and said, “I need to tell you that my mom bought this Teddy Bear for your babyto-be. She read everything you wrote through your cancer journey and she’s just so happy for you.” It was so touching to know that people who had been following my story were happy for us that had made it through and I was pregnant. Of course my friends and family were amazing. But I was blown away by the fact that there were strangers rooting for me. I mean I didn’t even know that lady’s name!
I will say one other thing. We found out our son’s gender when I was pregnant with him and it was a huge relief to find out he was boy. He only has a 50 percent chance of being the gene carrier because we don’t believe Niall has the BRCA-1 gene. It’s so much less of a risk than a girl would have had because even if he does carry the gene, it is unlikely to have a direct impact on my son’s own health. They say BRCA1 can show up in men as a slightly elevated chance (maybe 5%) of having, I believe, stomach cancer. It’s nothing like if I’d had a girl. Again she’d only have a 50% chance of having the gene. But if you’re a woman with BRCA1, you have a 70% chance of having breast cancer. BRCA2 can show up as male breast cancer but I don’t have BRCA2. So it was a huge relief to know I was having a boy.
Advice:
My husband, Niall, got me through it all. The fact that he was so open helped. His stance was, “We’ll do whatever we have to do. We’ll have a baby one way or another and right now focus on getting through chemotherapy and then we’ll address the next thing.” It was so amazing when we didn’t have to!
Looking back though, what also got me through it all was having plans. I would say do a lot of homework and a lot of research. It gives you at least the illusion of control. I did a LOT of homework. If you’re a control freak like me, it helps you feel like you have some influence in terms of the doctors you’re going to use, the course you’re going to take. Just to have those options and plans is helpful. I don’t know how much of a difference all of that homework and research made. But it sure made me feel better.
I also had all of these Plan Bs and I didn’t know if I was even going to need them. I was starting to track countries that I could adopt from. I was like “Well, Russia won’t. But Guatamala might. And India is an option.” As I said, I am a planner so just having those plans was comforting because I knew I wasn’t going to initially need them. I was going to try for a year once my period came back. Then if it didn’t work, I would go into this whole adoption exploration. Even the fact that I thought about my friend who supports an orphanage in India shows how comforting those Plan Bs were to me.
I think a lot of people struggle with the question of “Am I willing to adopt?” But because I was blindsided by having cancer, living through one of the worst things that could happen to somebody, the question of “Will I or won’t I consider adoption?” wasn’t something I had to think very hard about. It sounds a little maudlin. But try to think of it as, “Things could be worse.” Imagine something even worse happening to you. I think having to actually live through all of these other bad things helped me make much more rational decisions. It helped me not see certain options as negatives.
The best advice I got was from my oncologist. He said, “I know you’re probably really devastated that the fertility preservation didn’t work and I’m sorry that it didn’t work for you. But you need to go into chemo emotionally and physically strong. You need to know that there are things we can do for you that should mean you’ll be able to come out of this and have a baby. Don’t go into this wringing your hands, you’re going to need a lot to get through this.” It helped to know that. That Lupron shot was a painful shot though.! It felt like someone had beat me with a bag of oranges, like I should be bruised all over, even thoughI wasn’t. LOL.
Read Corinne’s Blogs about fertility preservation and getting pregnant after cancer below.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 04, 2006
Babymaking
New York is quiet at 7:00 on a Saturday morning. I notice a few people bundled in hats and scarves walking their dogs, a guy in a baseball hat and sweatpants out buying coffee, the cleanup crews in their John Doe Fund overalls as the taxi takes me from the west to the east side.
The buzz of activity at the Cornell Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility comes as a shock after the calm of the still-sleeping city streets. The door opens into a room full of chairs and sofas, the 50 or 60 seats mostly occupied by couples and women in their 30s and 40s, well-groomed despite the early hour. With a coffee machine in the corner, magazines in wall-mounted racks, and people reading the newspaper, it feels like a business class airline lounge with fewer suits and more women carrying a different kind of baggage.
There is a protocol. Arrive between 7 and 8:30 in the morning. Sign the pink sheet if it is your first visit. The green sheet if you are here for hormones. The white sheet is for the regulars going through IVF. You sign your name, you sit and wait. They call you in and draw your blood. You go back and wait some more.
But the rules don’t apply to me. “I was told to ask for Kathy,” I say quietly, trying not to draw attention to myself. I feel the eyes of several women nearby on me as I ask to jump the line. I wonder if they are asking “who the hell is she?” as I am processed swiftly – I barely have time to take off my coat before the nurse who works closely with the doctor who focuses on preserving fertility in cancer patients calls me back for my bloodwork. “Don’t envy me” flashes through my mind as I pick my way through the sea of crossed legs wearing saddle-colored driving loafers or tall boots with jeans tucked in.
The special treatment continues after my blood is drawn. My chart goes to the front of the queue. I do have to sit and wait for a room to open up before I am called back again. Eventually I am guided back to the warren of examination rooms and told to get undressed from the waist down. I am relieved that Katherine and Emily arranged for us to have a pedicure at Jinsoon last Monday before dinner at Snack in the Village. Once again, I have neglected to wear socks.
They don’t bother with hospital gowns – with all the women they process during the ninety minute period every morning, 365 days a year, they have probably studied the time required to change in and out of gowns and determined they could increase efficiency by 25% by eliminating sleeves and ties. Instead, you sit on the paper cover of the exam table, a sheet protecting your modesty.
Of which there is very little left. I counted – in the past few weeks, 14 strangers have had their hands on my breasts or have been eye-to-eye with my ovaries, and there are more to come. If this were high school, my name would be in three-foot-high letters on the bathroom wall.
When the doctor finally enters, the exam is swift. Feet in the stirrups, ultrasound wand, follicles observed and measured. Later that night, after my blood count and photos are reviewed, I get my marching orders. Take two of these pills, inject yourself with this much of that shot, inject yourself again the next morning to make sure it doesn’t kick off too soon. This will go on until sometime in the middle of this week, when we are ready to harvest, fertilize and freeze.
As I walk back through the waiting room, the sea of faces makes me slightly relieved that I am in the special treatment category. For Niall and me, this is still just an insurance policy – only 30% of women under 40 who go through chemotherapy go into early menopause permanently. Although it may take as long as 18 months for my cycle to return to normal, there is still a fighting chance I will be able to get pregnant naturally. And if not, I will come back to these offices, surrounded by a new group of young and not-so-young women, all of us hoping that the wonders of science will step in where nature has faltered.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 05, 2006
Almost Famous
Being told that the famous fertility doctor himself was going to conduct my vaginal ultrasound last Tuesday was like learning that one of your friends is bringing a Michelin-starred chef along to the dinner party you are throwing – there’s enough pressure when it’s just the usual crowd, but this heightens the performance anxiety.
“Only one, again,” he says, removing the wand and taking off his gloves. Statistically, five eggs are needed to result in one successful pregnancy later. Silently, I start to question what I have done wrong, why this has failed for the second time in a row. I feel like a 22-year-old who can’t pass her driving test– how can I be so bad at something that comes so easily to others?
The plaques and trophies that adorn the doctor’s office are not as reassuring this time as they were last time. Even one of New York’s 100 Best Doctors can’t give us the frozen embryo insurance policy we were hoping to have so that we could feel better about our chances to have children one, two, or five years from now, after the chemotherapy has done the damage that it inevitably does at the same time it does good.
Normally, women in my situation, who must undergo chemo but who want to get pregnant in the future, just cross their fingers and hope for the best. More recently, some doctors will give Lupron shots to artificially “shut down” the ovaries during chemotherapy, the idea being that it “hides” the egg reserve from the chemicals that are designed to attack fast-growing cells like cancer, hair…and eggs. Once chemo is done and you are off the shots, chances of returning to normal functionality again are greater.
Other women go through a round or two of “normal” IVF, the kind that can result in some women producing as many as 30 eggs at a time. However, there is some fear that the increase in hormones this process triggers may exacerbate a woman’s cancer.
So if you have access to joining a cutting-edge research study, cancer-specific “fertility preservation” is an option. I took a pill to suppress estrogen production at the same time that I injected myself with follicle stimulating hormones. Although this tends to result in fewer eggs (more like 4-8 in one cycle), it is considered much safer for women with cancer, although it is still being studied.
In my case, it only produced one each time, and judging from my estrogen tests, neither one would have been viable if retrieved. The doctor explained that this could be the result of a low egg reserve to begin with, which is unlikely at my age, or it could be due to a mechanical malfunction in the ovary that essentially triggers early production of an egg.
He offers a ray of hope: “If it is the second, then you are a good candidate for ovary harvesting.” Sitting in his office 20 minutes after getting the news of my dominant egg, this seems like a reasonable option. It’s a simple laproscopic surgery. It is expensive, but insurance would probably cover it on the grounds that I have an increased risk of ovarian cancer given my BRCA status, and it is advisable that I remove my ovaries to cut my risk before I turn 40 anyway.
I call Niall and he comes right over from work. I start completing the paperwork before he arrives. If I am going to do this, it has to be 48 hours from now, so I fill out the forms that have suddenly become all too familiar – anaesthesia permissions, acknowledgements that all surgeries carry risk of infection, agreements not to sue if something goes wrong.
Niall arrives at the office and we head downstairs for much-needed caffeine and an attempt at clear thinking under pressure. We review the papers and talk about the risks. We are both nervous about the lack of data – it is an incredibly new technology. We joke that in addition to the benefit of being able to have children, we would also be making a major contribution to science. After agreeing that the risks of the initial operation seem low, and that the bigger decisions would come in a year or two when the time arrives to try to get pregnant, we schedule the surgery for Thursday morning.
I wrestle with the decision all day at work. I go through the motions of ordering the medicine I need to take that night from the pharmacy, but I also do more Internet research, both scientific and anecdotal, on women who have children after cancer treatments. It’s impossible to get solid numbers without a clear denominator, but I do read enough to start worrying about what I am doing to my chances of getting pregnant “naturally” after treatment if I remove an ovary.
The procedure itself is enough to freak out the squeamish. The doctor would remove one ovary, cut it into many small strips of tissue, test some and cryopreserve the rest. When the time came, we would implant several of the strips under the skin of my forearm and hope the eggs living inside the tissue would mature there, with the help of stimulating injections. Once mature, the eggs would be harvested from my arm, injected with Niall’s sperm and further matured in a test tube, and then the embryo would be implanted in my body. We would then hope I could carry to term successfully.
That night, both of us are uneasy. “We’ve made the right decision,” I say a few times, out loud, testing to see how it sounds.
It sounds wrong. We look at each other and know. We’ve had six weeks to grow accustomed to the idea that childbearing is likely to be a challenge for us after this, and we have discussed many options. We have accepted that there is more than one way to become parents, not all of which involve passing on what I already know could be a fatally flawed gene.
I have endless respect for my doctor’s work in this area – he is on the cutting edge of the little-examined consequence of premature infertility in young cancer patients. He provides hope for the future to people at a time when they most need it.
But Niall and I realize that hope is something we already have. Ignoring the siren call of being the cover girl for Reproductive Endocrinologist monthly, I cancel the surgery. I schedule my first Lupron shot for four days later, followed by my first round of chemo coming up this Thursday, December 8.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 05, 2008
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 Niall 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. Our son, William, 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(orinne) 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.