Violet Lee is a two-year-old little girl from Brooklyn that is suffering from a serious immune disease. Her chemotherapy begins on July 21, to help her body prepare for a bone-marrow transplant she will be having soon. Her mother was devastated to hear that not only would her baby girl have to undergo such serious treatments, but that those treatments would likely leave her daughter sterile.
Thanks to a new miracle surgery, her mother hopes that she will have the choice of having children of her own like any other woman. With the help of fertility specialist Dr. Kutluk Oktay, it just may be possible.
Dr. Oktay will remove Violet’s tiny ovary and preserve it on ice, in hopes that when she is a healthy adult it can be transplanted to allow her to have children. Ovary transplants have been successful in adults, but there are no guarantees that the ovaries will be on the ice for over twenty years.
Violet’s mother thinks it is worth the chance. She stated “It was hard enough to find out your baby needs to go through chemotherapy, but to hear your daughter will be sterile after the treatment — that one thing gets healed, but another destroyed — I felt someone punched me in the stomach”
Violet will be the youngest child to undergo this experimental procedure. Before her, the youngest patient was three years old. Dr. Oktay has performed the same surgery on some 40 girls ages 18 and younger. He also is attempting to help boys with serious illnesses by preserving a small part of their testicles.
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