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"PinterestFacebook(l.) Getting blood drawn for my cancer test; waiting for the results is always kind of nerve-racking. (r.) With Lindsay, my best source of baby inspiration.\nI&amp;#39;ve never been a risk taker. As a kid, when all of my friends flew down the hills on their bikes, I&amp;#39;d squeeze my brakes as hard as I could. As an adult, I make mental pros-and-cons lists before ordering at restaurants. Yet here I am, seriously considering risking my life to have another kid.\nNick and I have always wanted a big family; cancer may make you reevaluate your life plan, but it doesn&amp;#39;t change who you are. Deciding whether to get pregnant, though, is even more torturous than it was the last time around. Unlike when I was pregnant with Alex, my leukemia may not be stabilized this time around. In May a routine blood test came back showing a &amp;quot;weak positive,&amp;quot; the first time in almost five years that my disease had made a peep. If something happened to me, I wouldn&amp;#39;t just be leaving Nick without a wife--I&amp;#39;d be leaving Alex without a mom, a scenario I can hardly bear to think about.\nDr. Mauro, my oncologist in Portland, Oregon, assures me he isn&amp;#39;t worried. He says trace amounts of CML can harmlessly ebb and flow, and that we&amp;#39;ll retest the blood in a few months. Still, it&amp;#39;s a huge reality check: I have cancer. Maybe I should just be thankful to enjoy my life with Alex for as long as that life may be.\nNeedless to say, I&amp;#39;ve been losing a little bit of sleep lately. But then I had a heart-to-heart with Lindsay Beck, 32, a good friend who lives in New York City. After battling tongue cancer in her early twenties, Lindsay started Fertile Hope, a nonprofit organization that urges doctors to discuss fertility preservation before treatment (chemotherapy can wreck your ovaries), and counsels women about their options. She was a pioneer when she had her eggs frozen pre-chemo, although she stayed fertile and never had to use them.\nNow in remission, Lindsay just gave birth to a son, Walker; she&amp;#39;s also mom to Paisley, who&amp;#39;s two. If anyone knows about the internal war that wages when you&amp;#39;re both a cancer patient and a mother, it&amp;#39;s Lindsay. So I invited myself to her apartment (I brought snacks!), and we talked about everything. These are the best parts of our conversation:\nME: Whenever Alex smiles at me or reaches for me--or even when he rips my earrings out, drawing blood--I feel like the luckiest person alive. Do you have those moments?\nLINDSAY: Every day. I constantly want to pinch myself to make sure I&amp;#39;m not dreaming. I remember how right after I graduated college, I had dinner with two of my girlfriends, and we talked about where we&amp;#39;d like to be in 10 years. I never would have dreamed that I&amp;#39;d get cancer--twice--but I did dream that I&amp;#39;d fall in love, marry a great guy, have a successful career and be a mom. Today, even despite cancer, it&amp;#39;s all true. Pinch, pinch.\nME: How did having cancer play into your decision to have a baby?\nLINDSAY: I always wanted to be a mom, but cancer stopped me in my tracks and made me think, Do I really want this? Is this how I want my life to unfold? Yes, I did. And I wanted to do it fast. Many cancer patients don&amp;#39;t realize this, but chemo can make you go into early menopause. When Jordan and I got engaged, I said, &amp;quot;OK, let&amp;#39;s get pregnant. I want to be a pregnant bride.&amp;quot; He was like, &amp;quot;Uh, no, that&amp;#39;s not what I had in mind.&amp;quot; We agreed we&amp;#39;d wait to start trying until the honeymoon...which I had booked and which just happened to fall when I&amp;#39;d be ovulating!\nME: When Nick and I were first thinking of having Alex, a lot of people said, &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#39;t you just adopt?&amp;quot; For us, it didn&amp;#39;t feel right at the time. Did you hear a lot of that?\nLINDSAY: Yes, no one could understand why I&amp;#39;d even consider egg freezing. The hidden message was all over their faces: You&amp;#39;ll be lucky to survive--why are you thinking about children at a time like this?! But I wanted to preserve all of my choices. If you&amp;#39;re a woman--say, Angelina Jolie--and you want a baby, you can choose to adopt. When you&amp;#39;re a woman with a deadly disease, cancer is forcing that option, and that is very different. That is when the fighter in me came out and was like, No way, you are not going to win. I&amp;#39;m doing this whatever way I want.\nME: I&amp;#39;ve heard that it can be harder for cancer patients and survivors to adopt. Is that true?\nLINDSAY: It&amp;#39;s definitely not easy. There are some foreign countries that you can&amp;#39;t adopt from if you&amp;#39;ve had cancer. You&amp;#39;re medically red-flagged. You are out. It can be an issue in the U.S., too. Understandably, people are looking out for the best interests of the child. The good news is that it isn&amp;#39;t impossible to adopt as a cancer survivor--look at Sheryl Crow!--but you need to find a place that is open to it.\nME: Sometimes I worry about being perceived as &amp;quot;greedy,&amp;quot; like I should feel damn lucky I was able to have one kid postcancer and just stop there. Did you ever think like that?\nLINDSAY: I still feel guilty in the face of other cancer survivors who don&amp;#39;t have a family yet, or who didn&amp;#39;t know they could preserve their fertility and now can&amp;#39;t have children. It&amp;#39;s similar to the way I feel about surviving when someone dies of cancer. Why did I live and they didn&amp;#39;t? Why do I get to be a mom and they don&amp;#39;t? I deal with it in therapy!\nME: I remember a comment on my blog from a woman whose mother died of cancer shortly after having her. I think about her all the time. Are there any stories that have rattled you like that?\nLINDSAY: I definitely hear tragic stories, but I try to focus on the positive ones. The best moment was when I met a pregnant woman, a complete stranger, at a restaurant in New York and she told me her story about getting pregnant. She said she was a cancer survivor and her oncologist had referred her to this organization called Fertile Hope. She had no idea that I founded it.\nShe was able to freeze embryos and is now pregnant with her first &amp;quot;miracle&amp;quot; baby. I had the chills!\nME: Wow, that must have made you feel so good. I&amp;#39;m all about focusing on the positive too. But tell me, do you and your husband ever have those awful what-if conversations? Nick definitely wants another kid, but he also tells me he doesn&amp;#39;t think he&amp;#39;d survive if anything happened to me. I assure him that he would.\nLINDSAY: We don&amp;#39;t sit around thinking about it every day, but I have told Jordan, &amp;quot;If I die, I would want you to fall in love again and get remarried.&amp;quot;\nME: Right, didn&amp;#39;t you pick out one of your girlfriends for him? I could never do that!\nLINDSAY: Yeah, I went through all my single friends, and I said, &amp;quot;Do you like her? What about her? You can marry this one, but don&amp;#39;t marry that one.&amp;quot;\nME: I remember when you were pregnant with Paisley, you said that even if you were going to die in five years, you would still have a baby because you would want those five years to be happy and for you that meant being a mom. At the time I thought you were a little nuts, but now I completely get it. Still, I think about leaving Alex without a mommy and it kills me. How do you cope with that fear?\nLINDSAY: I keep a journal for my kids and memorialize moments like when Paisley swiped a little boy&amp;#39;s boogie board at the beach and went running down the sand, squealing, and tried to stand on it. Then there&amp;#39;s Walker--his smell, his first bath, first smile, first time rolling over. I jot down these things so that I&amp;#39;ll never forget them and they can enjoy looking back on them, whether or not I am alive. The truth is, dying without having had kids would be much harder for me to face than leaving my children motherless.\nME: Have you thought about what you&amp;#39;ll tell your children about your cancer? When I was growing up, if my mom had a runny nose, I was distraught.\nLINDSAY: Paisley has asked me about the red radiation scar on my neck. She asked, &amp;quot;Mommy, boo-boo?&amp;quot; I told her, &amp;quot;Mommy was sick and the doctor fixed me.&amp;quot; That&amp;#39;s at her level. But I&amp;#39;ll never hide my disease from them. It&amp;#39;s part of who I am. And I want my children to know how much I wanted them and almost couldn&amp;#39;t have them.\nME: Other than the obvious explanation--your two adorable children--why do you feel so passionately about having kids when you have cancer?\nLINDSAY: Not too long ago cancer was a death sentence. Now I&amp;#39;m told that if you are diagnosed under the age of 45, the average survival rate is 75 percent. The majority of us are surviving. And guess what? We want everything in life that anyone else wants. Why shouldn&amp;#39;t you live your life to the fullest because you happen to have been dealt the cancer card? Cancer says I can&amp;#39;t have kids? I&amp;#39;m having 10!\nME: Talk about greedy! You can have a reality show, Lindsay and Jordan Plus Nine. Seriously, this talk has been so helpful. I think--and I&amp;#39;m guessing you&amp;#39;ve picked up on this--I&amp;#39;ve kind of made the decision in my heart even as I&amp;#39;ve been struggling in my head. I want to do this. Are you with me?\nLINDSAY: If you were a woman who came into my office and told me she had to go off her lifesaving drug to have a baby and asked me what to do, I&amp;#39;d probably tell her she might want to consider surrogacy or other options.\nME: Uh-oh.\nLINDSAY: But wait, we&amp;#39;re talking about you. You&amp;#39;re fully informed and aware of the risks, you&amp;#39;ve been through this already and you&amp;#39;ve had success--a very adorable success. If your doctors are on board, then I am too. I can&amp;#39;t wait to meet the newest Ruddy whenever he or she gets here.\nME: Thanks, Lindsay, you&amp;#39;re the best. If everything looks good on the next blood test, I&amp;#39;m pretty sure Nick and I will go for it. And you&amp;#39;ll be the first to know when I&amp;#39;m pregnant--after Nick, that is."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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