Michelle Jahnke with daughter Elana
A woman who was diagnosed with cancer while pregnant says she owes her life to her unborn child because she might not have fought so hard if not the presence of her baby girl.
The Daily Mail is reporting on the story of Michelle Jahnke, 35, from Lemont, which is near Chicago, who was diagnosed with stage three rectal cancer four years ago. She had been working as a television news producer at the time, was a regular jogger and considered herself to be very healthy.
“The day that I found out I had cancer, I say it was like a death sentence. I knew that if the disease wasn’t going to kill me, the choice that they were telling me to make would,” Jahnke told CBS News.
She had a tumor on her colon, the doctors informed, and it had to go. “So you’re gonna have to terminate your child.”
It was an option she couldn’t accept. “I knew that if I was to do that, I would have died from a broken heart.”
Instead, she began a desperate search for some way to save her baby while getting the treatment she needed.
She found what she was looking for in Dr. Blase Polite, an oncologist at the University of Chicago, who designed a special treatment plan which would involve some chemotherapy during the pregnancy.
But there were risks and she and her husband Mark spent many sleepless nights considering them before agreeing to begin the treatment.
“Going to chemo emotionally was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It took a lot of faith to know that you’re putting so much poison into your body, but yet believe that everything’s gonna be OK.”
It was.
Several months later, she gave birth to a six pound baby girl named Elana. The child was perfect and suffered from no ill-effects from the chemotherapy.
Within two months of Elana’s birth, she began more intense chemotherapy followed by surgery. Everything went smoothly and she has been cancer-free for two years now.
“People say ‘You’ve saved her life. You were the brave one.’ (But) she saved my life. Had I not been pregnant, I don’t know if I would’ve fought so hard. But knowing that I had to fight for her, for her life so that she could be born, and I can see her grow into a woman, I mean, that’s every reason to live.”
She added: “Elana is the light of my life. I love being a mom!”
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