We are back home tonight. Rachel needed a shot of neulasta – to help her white blood cells recover faster – 24 hours after her last chemo treatment, so we had to wait until that was given before going home. After this first one, I’ll be able to give her the shot at home after her chemo treatments so we won’t have to wait around in the hospital an extra day (I’m guessing the first one is done in the hospital to make sure she doesn’t have a bad reaction, though they didn’t mention that.) The anti-nausea meds are helping pretty well; she hasn’t had too much nausea.

Rachel had a phone consultation with the fertility doctor from Boston today. He confirmed that there is a decent chance she will have problems in the future, given the amount of cyclophosphamide she’s scheduled to have. The longer she waits to start trying for a family, the more likely for there to be problems, since women have fewer viable eggs as they get older anyway and she’ll have even fewer due to the chemo. Her options are basically to either do nothing and hope for the best or to try to harvest eggs and freeze them for future use in the event she does have trouble getting pregnant in the future. The process of harvesting eggs would involve a few weeks of hormone injections to stimulate ovaries and help the eggs mature. Then she would have to go to Boston for the procedure to retrieve the eggs. It would be tricky to work around the current chemo schedule, but her oncologist is willing to work around this if she decides that this is something that she wants to do. Rachel was really upset about this today; it’s a lot to take in for any woman, and way more than any 17-year-old should have to worry about or decide on. 😦