Hey Baby, Hey Baby, HEY!

It’s not every woman’s dream or ambition to have a child or children. I’ve always known that I would like to have children of my own someday.

At a young age, I remember crying in my father’s arms after being told that I’d probably never be able to have children. That was when they told me that they wanted to put me on a drug called cyclophosphamide, which is pretty much, in my opinion, similar to a chemotherapy drug.

I went on that drug only a couple of times and each time it never agreed with me. It gave me seizures when I received it intravenously. It made my bladder bleed when I took it orally. Since I was never on it for a long period of time, I’m assuming that I don’t have to worry about that too much.

So, putting that aside, what about all of my other risk factors? I have Lupus AND kidney failure.

First, the kidney part. I remember a point in time where doctors said you should NEVER get pregnant while on dialysis. Well, there’s a lady in my dialysis unit who has had several children while on dialysis. When I say several…i mean like 4 or 5! I have to ask her if she every miscarried since I’m not too sure about that.

When you couple that with Lupus, I know it’s important that you cannot be in the middle of a “flare”, and you also have to be in remission for at least 6 months before attempting pregnancy. I’ve heard some conflicting stories about the probability of your child getting Lupus if you have it. Some people say there’s a high chance, others say there isn’t. The opinion I’m going to stick with is one that I saw on http://www.lupus.org/ which said that there is less than a 5% chance of passing Lupus down to your children.

I’m not really on a mission to go out and get pregnant right NOW, as my preference is to be happily married before having a child. If there is anyone with Lupus who has had a child or children, I invite them to comment on my journal or email me and tell me how it went! 🙂