Local woman, son survive cancer during pregnancy

Franklin County resident Amy Hanley found out she had colorectal cancer while pregnant with her fourth child.

Hanley and 14-month-old Joshua are happy and healthy these days, but Hanley has started talking about going through chemotherapy treatments while pregnant to give hope to women who might find themselves in a similar situation.

She’s also written a book called “Surrender: Pregnant with Cancer.”

“There is hope. Being pregnant and having cancer at the same time isn’t hopeless,” Hanley said.

In fall 2009, Hanley found out she was pregnant, and she started bleeding from her rectum, she said.

Pregnant women sometimes develop hemorrhoids, and Hanley thought the bleeding may have come from that condition, she said.

“I lost the baby in November, but the bleeding continued,” she said. “It was because of the pregnancy that I became symptomatic, but it was only after I lost the baby that I went to the doctor.”

She couldn’t immediately see a doctor, and by the time the appointment came around, Hanley was pregnant again, she said. Doctors found a mass inside Hanley’s colon that — once biopsied — they diagnosed as cancer.

Surgeons cut the cancerous tumor away, but later found the disease had moved to a lymph node, and she would need to go through chemotherapy, Hanley said.

Cancer during pregnancy is rare, with about one in 1,000 pregnant women getting the disease, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Breast cancer is the most common cancer during pregnancy.

Several doctors warned her that trying to keep the pregnancy going would put her life in danger and urged her to have an abortion, she said.

“I knew that God had the power to save me and the baby. I didn’t know that he would, but I knew that he could,” she said.

Hanley found a doctor who had seen pregnant women with breast cancer — and their unborn babies — survive chemotherapy, and he agreed to treat her, she said.

“He did say, ‘I will not make you any promises about the baby,’ ” she said.

Although cancer treatments are dangerous to developing fetuses in the first trimester, the placenta acts like a shield during the second and third trimesters — blocking much of the harmful chemotherapy drugs, said Bobby Hanley, Amy Hanley’s husband.

Pregnancy and chemotherapy took their toll, and Amy Hanley spent weeks curled up on the couch, trying to recover and worrying about her family.

“Everybody believed I was going to die,” Amy Hanley said.

But as the chemotherapy continued, and her pre-natal checkups showed a steadily-growing baby, Amy Hanley started becoming more active and playing with her children.

It was a matter of reorganizing her priorities, she said.

“The things that were really important, I had the energy to do it,” she said. “I just didn’t worry about the clutter.”

Amy Hanley had a C-section and gave birth to a healthy baby, Joshua, on Aug. 28.

She still had painful radiation treatments to endure, but she decided she could do anything for her children, she said.

“One of the biggest things I learned was to live without fear,” she said. “I learned how to find something good every single day.”

The family’s story has garnered a lot of attention, said Bobby Hanley.

“I’m just glad to have my wife alive, glad to have my baby boy healthy,” he said.

Bobby Hanley recently read an account of a pregnant woman with cancer who died three days after her child was born.

“That brought a lot of those feelings back that I had hidden away for sometime,” he said.

If the woman had access to the same information or doctors his wife knew, maybe she would have lived, he said.

“There’s a lot of information in the medical field that’s not as up-to-date as it should be,” he said.

The Hanley family is set on giving back and makes care packages for chemotherapy patients, Amy Hanley said.