Prayers for Ashleigh Range

Friends,
I have an immediate emergency post and need you to pray for my friend Ashleigh Range to recover from Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC).  She was diagnosed a few weeks ago with this rare and very aggressive cancer.  She is posting to her blog each week with specific prayer requests so please follow and pray for her as she and her family go through this very tough time. 

Ashleigh is a friend of mine and running buddy from Dallas.  She is also a GT grad and then went to MIT to get her masters, smart cookie to say the least!  She has a baby, Noah, and is 36 weeks pregnant with her second son, David.  She is strong and determined and can beat this.  Please lift Ashleigh up and pray for God to work a miracle and heal her completely.

Here are her prayer requests for this week:

Prayers

+ My white blood cell counts (WBC) are continuing to drop. Because I'm pregnant I wasn't able to get the standard steroid shot that allows chemo patients to only wait 2 weeks between treatments (it helps boost the WBCs and makes the recovery faster). The WBCs will continue to drop until it bottoms out and then starts to recover. The doctors have to wait to deliver or do the next round of chemo until after my WBCs hit a certain threshold. Currently that is looking like late next week maybe or early the following week, delaying chemo for an extra week and a half. My doctor told me not to freak if the tumors start growing again (how am I not supposed to freak out over that??). 

Please pray for two things: 1) That my WBCs rebound at heroic rates next week so we can deliver sooner rather than later, and 2) that the baby is delivered safely with no c-section or any other complication that would require me to take antibiotics and delay chemo even more. Right now chemo #2 is scheduled for the 24th but I'm really praying that gets moved up so there isn't 3.5+ weeks between treatments.

+ Continued prayers that the cancer continues to recede, break apart, and make its way to a "complete response" with chemo. Please pray that when we do the scans after delivery that the cancer has not metastasized to any other organs and I can "just" be Stage 3B or 3C.

+ This one is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things but I'm told I should lose my hair in the next few days (no thinning or anything yet though, maybe it is going to come out in one big chunk?). Pray that I see it as it really is - just proof that there are drugs inside me killing cells that replicate quickly, which is a very good thing. I hear that losing your hair is pretty traumatic, especially for a woman, and especially for someone that gets a lot of joy out of doing hair. I logically see that it isn't and shouldn't be a big deal, but I hear I might feel differently when it actually happens. Pray I'm cool about it. 

 http://www.myjourneywithibc.blogspot.com/