A New York woman has shared her story about fighting an aggressive form of leukemia during pregnancy, and how both she and her baby were able to survive.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- At 29 weeks pregnant, Yelena Trunzo was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of acute myeloid leukemia.
- Doctors treated her with IV chemotherapy, induction therapy, and a bone marrow transplant while pregnant.
- Being pregnant ultimately saved her life, as routine bloodwork detected problems early. Doctors said otherwise, “it would have gone undetected,” according to Trunzo.
- Women can be successfully treated for cancer while pregnant without aborting their children.
THE DETAILS:
Yelena Trunzo told the Staten Island she was 29 weeks pregnant with her second child when she noticed she had been feeling unusually tired. Her obstetrician referred her for blood testing, but it was difficult to find a provider who would take her. “Nobody wanted a new patient, especially one who’s pregnant,’’ Trunzo, a registered nurse, said. ”Basically, they didn’t think it was that serious.”
Yet once she finally got her results back, they were devastating.
Trunzo had acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a form of blood cancer which starts in the bone marrow, where new blood cells are made. It’s a common form of blood cancer in adults, but it spreads quickly and, according to Cleveland Clinic, can be life-threatening if left untreated. There are different subtypes of AML, and Trunzo does not say which subtype she was diagnosed with, but a GoFundMe page set up for her described it as a “rare and aggressive” form.
Trunzo leaned on her family for help. She was referred to Weill Cornell Medicine/NewYork-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan to begin immediate treatment. Her husband, her mother, and her mother-in-law traveled daily to bring her meals and care for her seven-year-old daughter as Trunzo began IV chemotherapy, induction therapy, and a bone marrow transplant — while pregnant.
Eventually, her doctors made the decision to induce labor early, and her son, Maximo, was born at 34 weeks. He was diagnosed with Fetal Growth Restriction (FGR) as a result of the chemotherapy, and spent some time in the NICU as a result. Though her daughter, Adrianna, was able to visit her, Trunzo said it was difficult keeping the siblings separated, until a child-life specialist intervened.
Less than a month after giving birth, and having undergone her second round of chemotherapy, Trunzo was able to go home. Her son’s middle name, Justin, is for the oncologist who helped save her life — and her son’s.
Trunzo’s pregnancy made her care more of a challenge, with both Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Northwell Staten Island University Hospital referring her to Cornell — but even there, doctors told her they had only treated a small handful of pregnant women with AML. Yet Trunzo said it was being pregnant that ultimately saved her.
“They said it would have gone undetected had I not been pregnant,” she said. ”Because they did such routine bloodwork when I was pregnant, they were able to pick it up as quickly as they did.”
As for Maximo, he’s thriving — which Trunzo said proves that he lives up to his name. “We picked the name before we knew any of this, and it literally translates to the ‘greatest and strongest,'” she noted.
And through it all, she has counted herself lucky to have the support she needed to make it through. “It’s been a crazy five weeks of just unexpectedness and life-changing events, but it definitely showed us how much we‘re loved.”
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Women are frequently encouraged to abort their babies if they are diagnosed with cancer during pregnancy. Yet many forms of cancer, as Trunzo’s own case shows, can be successfully treated during pregnancy, with studies from The Lancet and Lancet Oncology showing that chemotherapy during pregnancy does not have long-term negative effects on the preborn baby.
