TRANSPLANT POSTPONED

Postponed but not cancelled.  This thing is still happening, but not on Tuesday.  This isn’t catastrophic news, but difficult news.

Erin and I always say that if things went according to our plan, it simply wouldn’t be us.  We have dealt with obstacles our entire marriage.  Don’t get me wrong.  We are absolutely blessed, but we know that we should always expect the unexpected.  Seven years of infertility treatments teach you that.  For that reason, the news we received today that Piper’s transplant would have to be postponed, while difficult, wasn’t earth shattering.

I will admit that I had put the possibility of this thing being postponed out of my mind.  We are less than a week away and everything looked positive.  I was finally, after all this time, beginning to get ready for this surgery and all that it involves.  I truly believed that we had reached the point of no return and was psychologically ready.  However, as He often does, God threw us a curveball.  I may never know why, but I trust He has His reasons.  That doesn’t mean that today’s news was easy to take.  It wasn’t and it was a tough day.

So why has it been delayed?  Back in August they conducted an initial tissue test to determine my compatibility with Piper.  Everything looked good except they got a borderline positive test on one of the antigens.  They didn’t believe it was positive so they stripped the tissue down (don’t ask, just believe what I’m telling you) and ran the test again.  It came back negative.  That’s what they wanted to see.

On Monday, they took new blood and ran another tissue test.  As expected, that same antigen came back 100% negative.  It was exactly what they wanted to see.  However, they ran the new test against the old blood…the August blood…and the test came back positive.  So, the old test came back slightly positive but the new test came back 100% negative.  On its face, that seems ideal.  There could be a number of reasons that the old blood sample came back positive.  She could have been fighting a virus or some other infection at that time.  When you’re sick, your body produces antibodies.  Those antibodies could have attacked my tissue sample thus causing the positive match.  That didn’t happen in the latest test, BUT, they want to make sure that the latest test wasn’t a “false negative”.  The chances of that are microscopically small, but they have to make sure.  Therefore, they are following the protocol and running another tissue test in two weeks, which means our surgery scheduled for 5 days is postponed.

There’s a chance we can still get this done in December.  That’s what we would prefer.  To be honest, I don’t know how much longer we can wait.  We were soooo ready for this surgery, yet, we both acknowledge that we are NOT in control.  We’ll wait as long as He wants us to wait.  In the meantime, we’ll do everything we can do to keep Piper and me healthy.  We’ll also stay as positive as we can, but in all honesty, today was a tough day.

Keep the prayers coming.  We really need and appreciate them.

Love – Chris and Erin

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