After more than a year of trying to conceive, Kathleen Lombardo was over the moon to find out that she was finally pregnant.
While she experienced nausea, spotting, and gestational diabetes during her pregnancy, Lombardo’s doctor insisted that she was perfectly healthy.
Once she gave birth to her son, Jack, however, a nurse told Lombardo that there had been something odd about her placenta—she had two amniotic sacs.
“I promptly forgot all about it, wrapped up in my love affair with my beautiful, perfect baby boy,” she wrote in Women’s Health. “Something still felt off, but I chalked these feelings up to first mom jitters and tried to silence my instincts.”
About a month after Jack arrived, Lombardo couldn’t shake the awful ache in her stomach; then she started bleeding.
At her six-week appointment, Lombardo’s fears only worsened when the midwife checking her cervix noticed something so strange that she sent the new mom in for an ultrasound.
Though her doctor initially thought Lombrado simply had some leftover tissue that needed to be expelled, tests soon proved her worst fear: cancer.
Lombardo was quickly diagnosed with choriocarcinoma, and extremely rare form of cancer that she developed during her pregnancy.
The rare cancer was aggressive, soon spreading to her lungs—making it stage 3.
After 13 rounds of chemotherapy over the course of six brutal months, Lombardo fought the deadly cancer.
Now she hopes that her story will warn other new moms about the rare cancer.
“Talk to your sisters and mothers and friends,” she said. “And if you have any of my symptoms, or feel what I felt—that instinct, that feeling that you couldn’t put your finger on—please, tell your doctors that you need to be seen immediately.”
