Cancer didn’t take fertility from doctor
INNOVATIVE CARE PROVIDES A ‘MIRACLE’
After an innovative treatment, Ana Carla Cepeda was able to give birth to her second son.
Ana Carla Cepeda’s 6-month-old son, Bruno, isn’t a miracle, though he might as well be. Instead, he is the result of some innovative medical care that made the little guy possible. In late 2014, Cepeda, who then lived in Monterrey, Mexico, was diagnosed with earlystage cervical cancer. Cepeda, who now lives in San Antonio, is herself a physician, and she knew the conventional treatment would render her infertile.
Cepeda and her husband, Pablo Arizpe, had a 4-year-old son, but they didn’t think their family was complete.
Her doctor in Monterrey told her to visit Dr. Anuj Suri, at the obstetrics and gynecology department at Houston Methodist Hospital. He might be able to help.
And he was. Christmas week of that year, Suri performed a relatively rare procedure called a trachelectomy, an operation that is safe at removing the tumor but still preserved Cepeda’s uterus.
Fast forward to October 2015, when Suri gave a cancer-free Cepeda, now 36, the green light to try to get pregnant.
The following spring, Cepeda went to see Dr. Barbara Held, an OB/GYN at Houston Methodist. She was 20 weeks pregnant.
“This is the only time I’ve taken on a cancer patient like this,” Held says. “It’s not something you come across every day.”
The pregnancy proceeded normally. “I was quite thrilled when she made it past 32 or 33 weeks,” Held says.
Then, on Aug. 11, Cepeda delivered her baby boy by cesarean section. “She didn’t blink the whole time,” Held says.
Every birth is like every other, and every birth is unique. “It actually felt like with my first son, a new life,” Cepeda says, “It was a miracle.”
Suri says the rare patient in Cepeda’s situation often needs to conceive using in vitro fertilization and pregnancy can take a while, but this pregnancy occurred the oldfashioned way — pretty quickly.
He has performed this surgery several times, but it’s the first time one of his patients wanted a pregnancy right away. He wasn’t directly involved in the pregnancy and birth, he says, “but I was still watching from the periphery, checking to see if she was doing
OK.”
Held says this example offers hope for young women with cervical cancer. “It’s an important point for young women to consider if they want to preserve fertility,” she says. “Women with this diagnosis are often devastated and think they can never have a baby.”
“We had some risks we had to undertake, but at the end of the day, everything went well,” Cepeda says.
She has nothing but great things to say about the Houston Methodist team. “I always felt supported,” she says.
Suri was especially happy that he got to meet the baby on one of Cepeda’s follow-up visits.
“It was kind of cool to see that,” he says.