We couldn't wait any longer, this morning Helen got her first chemo-therapy treatment, two drugs called Epotoside and Carboplatin. She will get two more treatments, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and after that we wait for 3 1/2 weeks before the next round.
These drugs are very powerful, they damage all cells that grow fast (like cancer cells, but also some healthy cells), but the healthy cells recover much better than the cancer cells.
So these drugs can travel from the blood to the brain, which means that they also can travel from the blood through the placenta to the womb and this is why normally they are only given to pregnant women when there is no other alternative.
Our oncologist could only find 11 cases globally where pregnant women had been given these drugs, so there is very little experience of this. In most of the cases everything went without problems, but in a few cases the baby fell ill and had to be delivered urgently. So of course we will monitor Helen very closely.
But even if we are nervous, the overall mood is positive, there is after all a good chance that this will end well.
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