Hot enough to flee the city and go to the beach. A long and leisurely drive along US Highway 30, the Old St. Helens Road,  gives you enough time to listen to a Radiolab podcast that reveals the most amazing story.

(I, by the way, usually do not listen to podcasts or books on tape. Part of that has to do with the fact that I associate taped narrative with all the times I was hospitalized as a child or teenager and could not even hold a book. So they would set me up with tape recordings, TVs were not present in pediatric wards. These days I also find that I am just impatient – I read fast, and admit to skipping, and listening slows me down to a degree that makes me twitchy.)

In any case, I make exceptions if I am told by a trustworthy source, now paddling his canoe, that I HAVE to listen to this or that recording. And so I stumbled onto this modern medical miracle, a feel-good-story if there ever was one.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/fronads

Here is the short version: Women who undergo chemotherapy or radiation usually lose their fertility, the ovaries get poisoned, fried or otherwise shut down. Freezing eggs beforehand is not an option – they contain so much liquid that gets crystallized by freezing that it bursts the ovum.

Several years back a doctor in NYC experimented with the removal of one of the ovaries of a young woman about to undergo serious chemo for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Her survival chances were slim, but she clung to the promise that if she was cancer free 2 years after treatment, they would re-implant the ovary. Which she was and they did – putting it for easy access right under her belly button, assuming that they would harvest eggs for IVF from there, should it kick back into action. In other instances they implant the tissue into your arm. Go figure.

Imagine everyone’s surprise when she got pregnant the old-fashioned way.  Not once but three times across the next several years. And she is not the only one; by now there are over 100 children born with this type of implantation, all without IVF.

So what’s happening here? They still don’t know, but two major theories are offered, one stranger than the other. Either the implanted ovary starts ovulating and somehow the egg migrates into the bloodstream and finds its way to the niche where it belongs, locating the fallopian tubes and moving into the uterus. Or the hormonal set-up from the implanted ovarian tissue triggers something in the system, bringing the seemingly destroyed ovary that is still down in the original  place back to life and pumping. In either case, it is miraculous.

Once you are at the beach you can photograph crabs (the German name Krebs denotes both the crustacean and cancer), cool off, and think about the mysteries of science……

….or about the fact that if all these miracle children learn not to giggle, they can partake in Haydn’s Kindersynfonie  ….