The Mom Who Got Ovarian Cancer After Having Her Ovaries Removed

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Because no two paths to parenthood look the same, “How I Got This Baby” is a series that invites parents to share their stories.

Christina was a law student in her early 30s when she first underwent laparoscopic surgery to get to the root of the debilitating menstrual periods that had plagued her since she was a teenager. The pain was so intense that it often left her bedridden, and she had once bled so much that she became anemic and required a transfusion. The procedure revealed that she had not one problem but many: a fibroid, a benign uterine tumor; adenomyosis, a condition in which the endometrium, or lining of the uterus, grows into the uterine wall; and endometriosis, which occurs when those same endometrial cells grow outside of the uterus. Each issue on its own could cause extreme pain and excessive bleeding.

When she woke from the procedure, the doctor informed her of her diagnoses and then delivered an even more painful blow: She was going to have trouble conceiving. “It was a shock,” remembers Christina. “I was angry and upset. I had just gone through a bad breakup with my boyfriend from law school and was already in a bad headspace. So the bad news after surgery felt like more than I could handle.” But Christina also felt somewhat relieved; at long last, physicians knew what was going on with her and would be able to help. She finished law school and sat for the bar with a medical accommodation, because she had her period during the exam. Shortly after learning she passed the bar, she met Mark — the man she would marry. The pair got engaged and immediately went to see a fertility specialist. They decided to move ahead with IVF; Christina was 35 and didn’t want to wait. She had no inkling of the complicated and heartbreaking fertility and health journey that lay ahead. Christina, now 43, shares her story:

On attempting IVF

Soon after Mark and I got engaged, I went through a round of hormone treatment, but we didn’t get any embryos. Our wedding was set for about a year later, and Mark’s brother was getting married too, the summer before our wedding. So we decided to just hold off on further IVF. It was like, let’s not stress. Let’s get married, go on our honeymoon, come back, and try again. So that’s what we did — but again, it didn’t work. We weren’t able to retrieve any good-quality eggs, let alone make viable embryos. At that point my doctor said, “Look, I think you need more help. I’m humble enough to tell you I don’t think I’m going to get you pregnant. You need another surgery to remove some of your endo.”

I met a new surgeon. I’ll never forget our first appointment. She looked at me and said, “Girl, I’m going to take care of you. We’ll get you pregnant,” and I started crying. It felt like the first time a doctor had really acknowledged my pain.

She went in and cleaned up a lot of the endometriosis. She also removed my fallopian tubes. “I think this is going to help,” she said.

On getting pregnant

After that surgery I went through two more rounds of IVF; yet again, we weren’t able to make viable embryos. It was emotionally exhausting, but I felt like I was on a mission and was determined to keep going. I figured out that if we switched our health insurance, I could have more rounds of IVF covered, so that’s what we did. We also switched to a new fertility clinic. And finally we got three embryos: two of them good, one less so. We transferred all three, and I got pregnant with two. We were so happy.

And then, I’ll never forget it. I was six weeks pregnant and watching Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding, and I started bleeding. I had a feeling I was miscarrying and started sobbing. My doctor told me to come in for an ultrasound, and that’s when they saw that there were two fetuses, one of which didn’t have a heartbeat. I also had a subchorionic hemorrhage-bleeding between the uterine wall and one of the membranes that makes up the amniotic sac. For the next several weeks, I had weekly ultrasounds to check on the hemorrhage.

The doctors told me I’d pass my miscarriage naturally, but every time I bled, I’d freak out. The day I finally passed the tissue, I was in the middle of a real-estate closing, representing a guy selling his condo. All of a sudden I felt something running down my leg. I excused myself, went to the bathroom and saw heavy, heavy bleeding. I shoved paper towels into my underwear and went back out to my client and said, “I’m sorry, I have to go, there’s an emergency with my accountant.” Then I drove myself to the hospital.

My husband met me there. We were waiting, and I was writing checks for the closing, when I realized I had to go to the bathroom. I went, and I passed this massive clot. I thought I was miscarrying the other baby and had a panic attack.

Thankfully, it wasn’t another miscarriage; it was just tissue from the first miscarriage. When I heard the surviving’s baby’s heartbeat, I cried. Throughout the pregnancy, the only comfort I took was in hearing the heartbeat. That was everything to me. I’d listen and feel like everything was okay.

At 14 weeks, we found out we were having a girl. I began to relax a little and enjoy the pregnancy more. We did a pregnancy photo shoot in a park, and a couple weeks later, we told our friends and family.

On her water breaking dangerously early

A few weeks later, when I was 20 weeks along, we went in for the anatomy scan. The baby looked fine, but my cervix looked like it was shortening prematurely. My doctor wanted to keep an eye on it; she told me to come back in a couple of days to be checked again. I knew the cervix wasn’t supposed to shorten until the end of pregnancy, but I don’t know if I fully understood what it could mean — that it could be a sign I’d go into preterm labor. One of my best friends had it happen, and I knew she’d had her babies early, but I don’t think I really got what was going on.

But at my next scan a couple weeks later, my physician was blunt. “Your cervix is shortening to such a degree, this pregnancy might not continue,” she said. I was by myself at the time, sitting on the table in a paper gown. I started crying.  “What do you mean?” I asked. She told me to go back to the waiting room, call my husband, and tell him to get there right away.

The same day, my doctor got me in to see a maternal fetal-medicine specialist. He kept saying, “You’re going to blame yourself for this, but there’s nothing you could’ve done.” I was like, “What are you talking about? I’m still pregnant.” I wasn’t mentally ready to give up on the baby and I didn’t know how to press him or what to ask for. The specialist told me to go home and live life normally. “Try to avoid stairs,” he said. He didn’t recommend bed rest or anything else.

About a week later I was at my office, picking up some files with my mom, when I suddenly felt wet. I knew I hadn’t peed, so I was a little confused.

And then, as soon as I sat down in the car, my water broke everywhere. I freaked out. I called my husband and told him to meet me, my sister, and my mother at the hospital. When I got there, a doctor confirmed my water had broken but that the baby’s heartbeat was strong. “It’s going to start fading out,” he said. I broke down. I was 20 weeks and five days pregnant.

On delivering her daughter

I checked into the hospital. All these people came to see me — chaplains, doctors, nurses. They’re telling me all this awful stuff. “When the baby is born, it’s not going to look like a baby,” someone said. “It’s your choice, but if you want to, you can terminate now.”

My husband and I were in total disbelief. We’d worked so hard to get pregnant, and the baby still had a heartbeat. There was no way we were going to terminate. We wanted to take whatever chance we could.

I was there for about a week and then got transferred to a hospital with a more advanced NICU that had the capacity to resuscitate babies born around 22 weeks. At that point I was 21 weeks and some change. I was put on an intravenous drip with magnesium sulfate, which can help with the baby’s brain development, and received steroid shots to help with the baby’s lungs. A doctor from the NICU came to see me to talk about the game plan.

They’d let me stay pregnant until I reached 34 weeks, if I could hold that long without developing signs of an infection. But if I did — if I got a fever or my white blood-cell count started to elevate — they’d have to deliver. “You’re our patient,” they told me, “not the baby.”

I was about 22 weeks and four days along when I started feeling feverish. Things started happening really fast after that. “Our first challenge is making sure the baby is born alive,” the doctors and nurses said. “The second will be resuscitating her, and the third will be keeping her alive.”

Sophie was born September 12, weighing just over a pound. We named her after our grandmothers. She was tiny. It took the doctors more than seven minutes to intubate her.

They whisked her up to the NICU and took me into recovery. Once they had her in the incubator, they wheeled me up to see her. I was delirious, sweating and feverish with the infection. We were only allowed to be there for a little while before they had us go back downstairs. My parents and Mark’s parents were with us, and everyone was kind of sullen. We didn’t know what to do.

Ten minutes later, they called us all up again. Sophie was struggling. Her lungs just weren’t developed enough.

They told us it didn’t look like Sophie was going to make it, and asked us if we wanted to move her off the machines. I was crazed at that point. “Do you swear to me there’s nothing you can do?” I asked one of the doctors. “I swear,” he said. The nurse took Sophie off the machine and Mark and I held her, waiting. We told her we were so proud of her, that her life had meant something and that we’d spend the rest of our lives honoring her memory and doing it with purpose. Everyone was crying — my husband and me, the doctors and nurses, our parents.

Sophie survived for two hours after she was born; after we took her off the machine, she lived for about ten minutes. We all said good-bye.

On grieving Sophie

After Sophie died, they gave me a box of her things — the cap they put on her, the blanket they wrapped her in. Before Sophie had been born, we’d put a swing up on our closed porch. We’d imagined sitting there with her after she came home. When we got home from the hospital, Mark and I just sat there and cried. Mark was wrecked. My sister arrived, and at some point the two of us left him out there so that he could have some time alone.

It took a really, really long time to feel normal after that. Everything reminded us of Sophie. I’d ordered a music box for her, and when it came in the mail, I sat on the kitchen floor and bawled my eyes out.

I felt a ton of guilt. Like, as a woman, you have one job, to carry your baby and keep her safe, and I couldn’t do it. The logical part of me knew nothing was my fault. But the emotional part was like, You did this.

A few months later, we transferred our final embryo. When it didn’t work, I decided I wanted a hysterectomy. As my 39th birthday approached, I had the operation; my uterus, cervix, and ovaries were removed.

On pursuing pregnancy via a surrogate

Soon after my surgery, Mark and I decided that we were still determined to have a family and wanted to hire a surrogate. We’d spent a lot on IVF, so we knew we’d need to figure out a way to finance it. We asked our parents if we could leverage their credit to get a loan. In the end, they loaned us money for us to pay back.

I joined a group on Facebook for surrogates and people who were looking for them. It was through that group that I found out about a women-run agency in Idaho. I reached out to them and got a good feeling. We decided to sign with them, and a few months later, we were matched with a surrogate in Dallas. Her name was Marissa, she was a mother of two boys, and she’d been a surrogate before. She seemed solid. We liked her and signed a contract.

Because we didn’t have any more embryos, we needed an egg donor. We found an anonymous egg donor, bought a batch of her eggs, and created embryos with my husband’s sperm and her eggs. That was an interesting process; we picked someone who was my height, with my hair and eye color. When you choose, you get to see donors’ medical histories, family histories, education.

We ended up doing two transfers with our surrogate — the first one didn’t work, but the second one did. The whole process was bittersweet. Sometimes I would think, I wish I were carrying my child, and then other times I would think, Thank God I don’t have to do this. Sometimes I thought, Huh, this is what a man must feel like during a pregnancy. You’re making a child, but because you’re not feeling all of the things you feel when the baby is inside you, you don’t have that connection. When we found out we were having another girl, that was tough. I was like, Oh. She’s going to die. It was totally irrational. But I was so afraid. I kept some distance from Marissa and the baby throughout the rest of the pregnancy because of that, I think. I felt like, Let’s not get too close. I had a lot of fear.

I did end up meeting Marissa when she was about seven months pregnant. I’d gone to Texas to visit my sister and scheduled a layover in Dallas, so Marissa and I could have lunch. It was brief, but it was nice. I felt comfortable.

On noticing a dull pain in her right abdomen

Much earlier in Marissa’s pregnancy — about 18 months after my hysterectomy — I’d begun to have this dull, consistent pain where my right ovary used to be. That’s weird, I thought. That feels like my ovary. I was used to being in pain, so I just dealt with it. I sat with heating pads at work and at home and sometimes used lidocaine patches.

But eventually I became concerned, so I went to see my primary-care doctor about it. She referred me to a urologist, who thought I had a UTI, even though I’d never had a UTI in my life.

Time went on and I still felt really unwell. We were having a barbecue one day and I started feeling a lot of pain and nausea. I told my husband I needed to go lie down — and then I started projectile vomiting. Mark called an ambulance and I was taken to the ER. The physician who treated me ran some tests and concluded I had gallstones. “That’s what’s causing your pain,” he said. “They’re blocking your bile ducts. You need surgery to remove your gallbladder.” So they opened me up.

But after that procedure I was still in a lot of pain, and really struggling. I couldn’t keep anything down. A week later, I still hadn’t passed a bowel movement and the pain was getting worse, so I  went back to the hospital. They discovered a bowel obstruction and rushed me into emergency surgery.

Six hours passed in that surgery. Then my surgeon emerged and went out to see my husband. Something didn’t look right in the area where my right ovary had been, they said. In surgery, the surgeons had FaceTimed an oncologist, to ask for the oncologist’s opinion. It was the middle of the night, and the on-call oncologist wound up getting dressed, driving to the hospital, and scrubbing in. That’s when they found out I had cancer.

I was in surgery for another ten hours after they told Mark what they had found — that’s how long it took them to remove it all. When I woke up, the surgeon came in to talk to me. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” he asked.

I told him to give me the bad news first. “The bad news is that you had  cancer,” he says. “The good news is that we think we got all of it.”

I could not fucking believe it. I started crying, asked for my mom and my husband, and then I passed out again.

On facing her diagnosis

It was ovarian cancer, stage three. It turned out that when I had my hysterectomy, the surgeons weren’t able to get all of my ovarian tissue, and there was still a portion of my right ovary in my body. I had been on hormone-replacement therapy for over a year while still producing natural estrogen, and that likely contributed to my cancer. The disease was so widespread that it had caused bowel blockages — that’s partly why I had been in so much pain. After the surgery, I was in the ICU for a week, and then on a general surgery floor for another three to four weeks. By the time I was discharged on December 4, Marissa was about one month from her due date.

I remember thinking to myself, Okay, this is what depression feels like. Despite everything I had been through, I’d never registered that thought before. But this was different. I was really miserable.

On moving forward with cancer

I tried to focus on getting well enough to get out of the hospital and be ready for the baby. Surgeons had removed a portion of my small intestine; my cecum, which is the top of the large intestine; part of my bowel and my bladder. I couldn’t eat and got my nutrition through a PICC line, a catheter that goes into a vein in your arm. I also had an ostomy bag, which I’d been told I would need until I healed.

My surgeons believed they’d removed all the cancer, but my oncologist told me I’d need chemotherapy to get rid of any microscopic traces of cancer that weren’t discernible through testing or scans. My care team told me I could start immediately or wait until after the baby arrived. I decided to start right away. I knew it didn’t make sense to go to Dallas. Between the stress of traveling, dealing with the ostomy bag and the dressings on my incisions, the PICC line, I knew I couldn’t. That was a hard pill to swallow. It was hard for Mark, too.

On the birth of her second daughter

Marissa ended up being induced a week ahead of her due date. Mark and my mother-in-law flew to Dallas and FaceTimed me from the delivery room. Watching the birth on the phone was surreal. Our daughter came out super alert, with big, wide eyes. It’s kind of insane how much she looked like me. Three days later, Mark flew home with her. My parents and I went to pick them up from the airport in New York.

I was a little bit nervous to meet her. She wasn’t my biological child. I worried that I wouldn’t have that same connection with her. I think everyone expected me to have an overwhelming reaction to her when I first saw her, but I didn’t. But then we got home and did skin-to-skin — then I felt it. This is it. This is my baby. She’s here.

We named her Lily.

On juggling chemo and a newborn

By the time Lily came home, I’d had two outpatient chemotherapy rounds out of the six I was supposed to have. I wasn’t prepared for how emotional losing my hair would be. I’m one of those girls — hair, face, skin, I’m into all of that stuff. When my doctor told me I was going to lose my hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows, I lost it again. Like, you’ve taken my uterus, my ovaries, my tubes, and now you’re taking my hair and eyelashes? Everything that makes me a woman? What else can you take away?

My friends were amazing and bought me a fancy wig from this place in Beverly Hills, plus bags of groceries and money for Uber Eats. Some of my friends came with me to chemo. They’d rub my feet and read me Us Weekly from cover to cover to help me feel better.

Chemo was rough. Day three after my treatments was always bad. I could feel pain in my bones, my knuckles, my knees. We had this routine: My husband would drop me off at my parents’ house on Day Three. I’d fall asleep in their family room, and my mom would put the baby beside me in her bassinet. My mom also brought her own bed down so she could sleep next to me. And she’d take care of me and the baby. I would get to hold Lily a little, but it was really my mom and my husband who did most of the work.

Mark was amazing. He was the first of us to change her diaper. He did skin-to-skin with her first, held her first, fed her first. They developed a special bond right away.

On bonding with Lily

I was so sick in the first few months of Lily’s life that I could rarely be with her by myself. I remember the first time Mark left me alone with her; he went to the pharmacy. Lily was a little over a week old. We were just sitting there, looking at each other. I turned on a Whitney Houston song and picked her up and danced with her. Every time I hear it, I still think about that moment.

Mark took care of Lily overnight, and I did as much daytime stuff as I could. The first year of her life, I felt super guilty. I couldn’t be a fun mom because I was sick, and I worried she wasn’t happy. Looking back, I know she was happy. In all of her pictures, she’s so happy. But I wasn’t happy. Physically and mentally, I was going through a lot. The ostomy bag was a big hindrance. I couldn’t just throw the baby on my hip; sometimes it would get in the way.

A year after the surgery, I finally got rid of the bag. It was like day and night. By then I was also done with chemo, and started feeling normal again. That really changed things and helped me feel comfortable in my body again.

Lily and I grew closer and closer. The first time she said “Mama,” I was taking her on our first overnight trip together, to see a friend of mine. I was changing her diaper, and she looked up at me and said, “Mama!” I grabbed my phone to record it. That was a big bonding moment.

On her cancer recurring

Ovarian cancer can become like a chronic disease. Often it doesn’t totally go away, so people go through periods of remission and recurrence. Some can live with it for years. I go for scans and blood work every three months.

This past February, I found out my cancer came back. I wasn’t feeling hot, so I kind of knew something was up. Lily, who is 2 now, did, too. She actually said one day, “Mommy is sick.” Literally out of nowhere. That hurt, hearing her say that. Now I’m like, I can’t let on that I’m sick. I’m trying to be as normal as possible, but I just started chemo, and I’m not feeling great. The medication I’m on gives me nausea and makes me really tired. After my first session, I remember lying down on the couch and Lily asking me to color, and I just couldn’t. I felt really bad and started crying.

My doctor and I don’t really talk about prognosis. I’ve pretty much accepted I’m going to have lifelong issues with this. I guess I’ve just accepted it — that women live with it, and that I’m healthy otherwise and should focus on that. I don’t feel like I’m going to die soon. I can’t live that way, you know? There’s too much I want to do; I’ve been setting up my own law practice this year, and there’s so much I want to show Lily. If someone tells me someday, “You have six months to live,” then okay, maybe I’ll do things differently. But for now I’m just trying to go with things as best I can. There was definitely a moment after we found out when I was like, Wow, this sucks. There’s this sadness. We’ve fought so hard; we created our child, you know? What if I die and I leave her without a mom? What does that look like? That freaks me out. I just know that, in order for me to get through this, I have to treat it like a job. I’ve done hard things, and I can do hard things again.

On facing the future

Lily, my little nugget, is awesome. We’re very close. We co-sleep, partly because I love having her close to me — waking up in the middle of the night and having her right there. People have a lot of opinions about co-sleeping, but I’m holding onto this moment as long as I can. She’s really tight with Mark, too. She loves when he brings her to school in his truck.

Marissa offered to carry a baby for us again. When Roe v. Wade got overturned, we thought hard about her offer. What if the government one day decides that refusing to use an embryo amounts to manslaughter? I don’t trust the government. I don’t trust that they’ll respect our rights as women. We decided to destroy the remainder of our embryos.

I think a lot about our egg donor; she has no idea that she made our dreams come true. We’re so grateful for this woman out there. It’s sad to say, but part of me is happy that Lily doesn’t have my genes, so she doesn’t have to deal with endometriosis and everything else I went through. I wish surrogacy was more available to everyone. My family is from India — we’re Punjabi — and in my culture, nobody talks about it. There’s this stigma. I wish it wasn’t such a taboo.

Sometimes I don’t know how Mark and I survived all of this. Things were very, very dark.

I think Lily has helped us heal a lot from the loss of our first child. She’s the light of our lives. And she makes me stay proactive about my own health, because I want to be here for her for as long as I can. We made her happen, and so we owe that to her.

All names in this story have been changed to protect the subjects’ identities.

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Kristen Mascia , 2024-05-02 18:00:42

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