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38-year-old mother-to-be, Laurel Cohen had been a little surprised by how uneventful her pregnancy was. She had reached trimester three without any trouble, and was letting herself gradually become more excited for the arrival of her child when it all turned around.
In week 35, Cohen began to experience stomach pain, constipation, and shortness of breath. She and her doctors believed these conditions to be symptoms caused by pregnancy and didn’t investigate further because Cohen’s child was appearing healthy in all the scans.
It wasn’t until the pain left Cohen bedridden and unable to work that doctors began to get worried.
After more scans were completed, doctors discovered a suspicious lump on Cohen’s liver but couldn’t proceed until Cohen’s child was delivered. The doctors scheduled Cohen for a C-section four days later and immediately wheeled her off to complete biopsies on her tumor.
That was when the doctors discovered that Cohen had terminal bowel cancer. The disease had already spread to her liver and she didn’t have long to live.
Cohen was able to spend another ten weeks with her newborn daughter, Ruby, before she passed away.
Her widowed husband, Dave, is still in shock. The two had met when they were just children at summer camp, and he had taken many years to convince her to go out with him, get married, and start a family together. He had never imagined that he would ever do any of these things without her.
“There are no words to describe how difficult losing her has been and it all happened so fast,” he recalled.
“After her death, I so wanted someone to blame but the doctors did everything they could. Every symptom she had was so easily explained by her pregnancy.”
Although Dave is still grieving his wife’s death, he has already found the strength to use the support he has received from friends, family, nurses, doctors, and charities to continue paying it forward. In the last five months, Dave has run several 10k races, all while pushing Ruby in her stroller, to raise money for charities that “raise awareness of cancer in pregnancy.”
If you’d like to donate to Dave and his cause, visit his page here.
