Ex-TV reporter stunned by pregnancy after cancer
Jessica Sanchez thought her nausea, fatigue and headaches were signs that she hadn’t fully recovered from chemotherapy. An annual visit to the obstetriciangynecologist in late May revealed otherwise: The former traffic reporter at WKMGChannel 6 learned she was more than five months pregnant.
She recalls that her jaw dropped when a Doppler test revealed a baby’s strong, steady heartbeat.
“I was one of those women
who didn’t realize that ‘a little weight gain and some gas’ was actually a 22-week-old baby boy moving around in my stomach,” said Sanchez, 36. “I burst into tears right there on the table, mostly out of shock and fear.”
Sanchez considers her pregnancy a miracle. She was diagnosed with nonHodgkin’s lymphoma in March 2013. The following January, she revealed she was cancer-free.
Her due date is Oct. 11, although she could deliver any day.
Greg Rinaldi, her boyfriend of six years, said they were both stunned and emotional at the beginning. “Can this be real? Then we just started getting excited,” he said.
“After going through chemo, I was told I may never be able to have kids,” said Sanchez, who started at CBS affiliate WKMG in April 2004.
“My chemo treatment was called R-CHOP, and it has been known to affect fertility. In fact, I went into a ‘chemo-induced menopause’ for more than a year after treatment. Even when my periods started to come back, they were sporadic.”
At WKMG, she was off the air for 11 months after her diagnosis. She returned in February 2014, then left in October that year to focus on her health.
Former colleagues are still in touch. “I couldn’t be happier for her,” said WKMG meteorologist Troy Bridges. “Several of us went to her baby shower and had fun talking about her future role as a mommy. She will be great at it.”
Nurse midwife Sandra Williamson, who told Sanchez she was pregnant, said the journalist is doing well. “We got her in with physicians familiar with women who’ve had any type of cancer,” she said. “They reassured her the baby was great.”
Sanchez said it was terrifying at first to consider that she hadn’t been living the first five months knowing she was pregnant.
“Fortunately, I don’t smoke or drink, and everything so far points to a healthy, typically developing baby,” she said.
The pregnancy took some getting used to. “It seemed unreal for the longest time,” she said. “Even when I would walk by a mirror and see myself, it would really catch me off guard.”
These days, Sanchez says she feels hopeful.
“This unexpected pregnancy shows me more than anything that my health is back on track and there is so much more in store for the future,” she said. “It didn’t always feel that way. I went through a long period of depression after chemo as I struggled to remember what it felt like to be normal. I had a hard time accepting the new ‘normal,’ one where my career was on hold, my looks were different, my energy was exhausted and my mind was dulled by chemo brain.”
But she has spent the past year working for Ivanhoe Broadcast News in Winter Park and producing medical stories. Rinaldi works for a technology startup in Fort Lauderdale and had just taken the job when she learned she was pregnant.
She has avoided South Florida because of concerns about the Zika virus in the area.
“When you’re told you may never be able to have kids, you to come to terms with that,” she said. “Now the shock has given way to excitement for my boyfriend and me. We had come to accept the strong possibility that our future would be childless, so we didn’t entertain any thoughts of how thrilling it would be to have kids.”