Poor baby, poor mom, poor family. What a horrible thing to have to deal with -- except that at least some astrocytomas have a very high cure rate. I have a former graduate student finishing up his chemo following surgery for a large astrocytoma, and he is doing very very well. This mom will have a new baby in 5 months, right? At that time, she can certainly pump and provide breast milk for the 3 year old. My student's experience with astrocytoma chemotherapy is that it was not nearly as devastating to his gastrointestinal tract as the standard chemo for breast cancer. Each different kind of cancer has its own "cocktail" of chemotherapy drugs, and some are murder (literally) on the GI tract, while others are relatively mild. So this kid may do fine on chemo, but I would certainly encourage the mother to pump while the newborn nurses and give the 'other side milk' to the toddler. Poor baby. :( Kathy Dettwyler _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html