Lisa Spindler
Of course, these women are painfully aware that they are different from other cancer patients. "Let me tell you, you get some funny looks when you go in for chemotherapy with a big, round belly," says Sandi Bender. Bender was a 32-year-old mom in Macomb, Illinois, just seven weeks pregnant with her fourth child, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. For three years, she’d been feeling an uncomfortable pressure in her throat. She’d gone from doctor to doctor; finally, an endocrinologist she consulted ordered an MRI, which showed a tumor spreading across her neck and chest. "When I heard the news, I was in shock," Bender says. "My first thought was, Am I going to lose the baby?"
Her oncologist told her she could go forward with both the pregnancy and cancer treatment; another oncologist she consulted for a second opinion advised her to end her pregnancy, because of the potential risks to the fetus. "The tumor was wrapped around my veins, and the doctors told me they couldn’t operate," she says. "We had to go straight to chemo." Her cancer was so advanced that her doctors recommended taking the unusual step of beginning her chemotherapy during her first trimester. Even so, "Ending the pregnancy was out of the question for me," Bender says. "I just tried to have faith that everything would work out."
Experts say that these days it’s rare for a woman with cancer to be counseled to end a pregnancy. However, "the decision to terminate can often expand the options for treatment, since some drugs can be used only if the patient is not pregnant," says Paniti Sukumvanich, MD, a gynecologic oncologist at Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh. He adds, "It’s a very personal decision, and there is no right or wrong answer."
Fear for the future
Bender began chemotherapy when she was around 10 weeks pregnant. The drugs made her tired and nauseated, on top of the exhaustion she felt from pregnancy. "The fatigue knocked me out," she remembers. "I spent a lot of time in bed, and my husband would bring my kids into the bedroom to visit with me."
But by far the worst part, these women say, is the harrowing anxiety. Heidi Floyd was two months pregnant with her fourth child when she felt a lump in her breast. "My arm brushed against it when I was changing a sheet on a bed," says Floyd, who lives in Warsaw, Indiana. "Right away, I knew there was something wrong." A lumpectomy later confirmed that the mass was malignant, and within two weeks Floyd was receiving chemo. Her own mother had died of breast cancer at age 42; Floyd was just 38. "Having lost my mom so young, I was afraid I wouldn’t be around to take care of my children," she says. "One evening after I put my kids to bed, I took a shower and just slumped down in the stall, saying over and over, ‘Please, please, please …’ "
Floyd was also thinking ("every minute")about how her baby was faring. "There’s one particular chemo medication, Adriamycin, that people call ‘the red devil,’ because it’s red,and its side effects can be very harsh," she says. "Whenever it went into my body, the baby went crazy, kicking and moving. I’d think, Oh, God, I hope he’s OK." On April 2, 2005, Floyd gave birth to a baby boy, Noah, now 6 years old and thriving. "At first I was praying he would be born healthy," she says. "Then I upped that to: Please, just let him make it to kindergarten. Well, he’ll be starting first grade this fall, so now I’m rooting for college!"
