Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her
doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain
in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and
her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the fluid was drawn off with a
long needle and sent for testing. Instead of an infection, as everyone had
expected, it was lung cancer, and it had already spread to the lining of her
chest. Her pregnancy was thirty-nine weeks along, and the obstetrician who had
ordered the test broke the news to her as she sat with her husband and her
parents. The obstetrician didn’t get into the prognosis—she would bring in an
oncologist for that—but Sara was stunned. Her mother, who had lost her best
friend to lung cancer, began crying.
The doctors wanted to start treatment right away, and that meant
inducing labor to get the baby out. For the moment, though, Sara and her
husband, Rich, sat by themselves on a quiet terrace off the labor floor. It was
a warm Monday in June, 2007. She took Rich’s hands, and they tried to absorb
what they had heard. Monopoli was thirty-four. She had never smoked, or lived
with anyone who had. She exercised. She ate well. The diagnosis was
bewildering. “This is going to be O.K.,” Rich told her. “We’re going to work
through this. It’s going to be hard, yes. But we’ll figure it out. We can find
the right treatment.” For the moment, though, they had a baby to think
about.
“So Sara and I looked at each other,” Rich recalled, “and we
said, ‘We don’t have cancer on Tuesday. It’s a cancer-free day. We’re having a
baby. It’s exciting. And we’re going to enjoy our baby.’ ” On Tuesday, at 8:55
P.M., Vivian Monopoli, seven pounds nine ounces, was born. She had wavy brown
hair, like her mom, and she was perfectly healthy.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande
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