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You hear all the time about mothers who put their lives on the line for their children. Women who stand up to danger or search tirelessly for a cure. Women who endure pain or hardship of their own, who won't take no for an answer. All for the children they hold in their arms every night.This is the story of one of those women -- brave, strong and determined. Only the child she fought for was still just a promise. And in a twist many people would call a miracle, the unborn child ended up saving her life. This is the story of Michelle DeSantis and Michael, the son who almost wasn't.
The winter of 2002 was a magical time for Michelle. She and her husband, Jim, a stockbroker, had just purchased their dream house, a five-bedroom Colonial on an acre of land in a quiet town on Long Island. After struggling with developmental delays, their six-year-old, James, had started regular kindergarten. And now Michelle thought she might be expecting again. Out to dinner one Friday with her best girlfriends, toward the end of the evening she confided that she'd missed her period a couple of weeks before. Everyone knew how much Michelle wanted another baby, and none of them could stand the suspense. So she and her friends drove around, looking for a late-night convenience store. They bought a home pregnancy test kit and -- bingo! -- it was positive.
Busy with James and getting ready for the move, Michelle did not immediately visit her ob-gyn. She finally made an appointment through her sister Marie, the administrative secretary to her doctor, Adam Romoff. Routine blood work confirmed Michelle's pregnancy at nine weeks. Dr. Romoff also gave Michelle a breast exam. Feeling something in one of her breasts, he ordered a sonogram, standard procedure for a pregnant woman with a suspect lump. Michelle stuck the prescription Dr. Romoff had written in her purse without looking at it. A week later, as she handed it to the radiology receptionist, she noticed it ordered an ultrasound of her right breast -- yet she thought she remembered Dr. Romoff saying he felt something on her left. She called Marie, who conferred with the doctor. "Have them both checked," he said.
The radiologist thought he saw something in the right breast, in addition to the left. Michelle was thinking, "Okay, I have two cysts. Big deal." More than anything, she was preoccupied with getting home to James. Dr. Romoff, in whom she had total faith, could take care of the rest.
Indeed, breast cancer isn't common in women in their early 30s. Yet within the hour, Dr. Romoff received a phone call from the radiologist. Marie knew her sister had just been for her sonogram. And she knew such a quick response could not mean good news. "I ran into his office when he got off the phone, and he looked up and said, 'Marie, you have to give me a minute.' He was in shock." The radiologist had found a suspicious cluster of cells in the right breast. Dr. Romoff called Michelle, breaking the news as gently as he could. She needed a biopsy within the week.
A doctor did biopsies on both sides -- one a fine-needle aspiration, the other a core biopsy. Tissue from the right breast went immediately to the pathology lab. The needle was big and the emotional tension exhausting, but Jim and Michelle weren't alarmed. "Jim, I am not cooking dinner tonight," Michelle said, joking.
The MD came back into the exam room: They needed another biopsy. He tried to be reassuring, telling them that one to three biopsies are usually performed on suspicious tissue. Jim was starting to get concerned, and began firing questions. The answers were always the same: "We won't know until we get there." Jim left the room for a few minutes. While he was out, the doctor came back. "We have to do another one," he told Michelle.
The third set of results seemed to take an unbearable amount of time. "I couldn't be on that table any longer. I just wanted to get dressed and get out of there," Michelle recalls. The doctor came back once more. "We see malignant cells."
"The first thing I said was, 'I want my mother.' Here I am, 34 years old, pregnant. How does this happen?" With the exception of a cousin on her mother's side, no one in the family had ever been diagnosed with breast cancer. Dr. Romoff immediately got the pathologist's findings, and Michelle went straight to his office. She was finding it hard to get control of herself. She believed -- for the first time -- that she was going to die. But the sensation was surreal, detached. "It was less 'I am going to die' than like hearing someone dear to you was dying."
Dr. Romoff and Marie were waiting, and Jim was there, too, of course, but Michelle felt utterly isolated, frozen in anxiety. She heard Dr. Romoff trying to explain that there were different types of cancers, with different risk factors and treatments. But by then her mind had shut off. She remembers thinking, "I am going to die. I want to be with my son, and I don't know how to tell my parents I have cancer."
When she got home and saw James, Michelle became inconsolable. "What if I'm not here anymore for him?" When James was a toddler, Michelle took charge of his developmental therapy herself, which had only deepened their bond. James wanted a baby brother or sister, and asked for one constantly. After the home pregnancy test, Michelle and Jim had told him to pray every night and ask God if he could put a baby in Mommy's belly. Once the pregnancy had been confirmed, she and Jim told James. "He was so thrilled -- he believed God had directly answered his prayers," she says. And now what would happen?
Two days later, Michelle and Jim went for an appointment with Dr. Leslie Montgomery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. She reviewed Michelle's file before giving her an exam. She knew the lump was at 12 o'clock in the right breast, but she couldn't feel it. Dr. Romoff could not have felt it. No one could have. Only the sonogram -- that was necessitated by the pregnancy -- picked it up. A fluke, or a small miracle.
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