Waltham Mom Welcomes Second Baby After World-Class Treatment for Stage 3 Colorectal Cancer
Note: This story mentions infertility and pregnancy loss.
Last March, Stefania Frost stood in her bathroom, staring at the pregnancy test in disbelief.
“I kept being like, is that really two lines?” she recalled, referring to the sign of a positive test result. “I don’t think I cried. I was just in shock.”
After several emotionally and physically taxing years of fertility struggles, her and her husband, Roy, had all but given up on their dream of a second child. Their hopes had already been shaken by a profound experience not long before.
Overcoming adversity
Just a few years earlier, Stefania overcame stage 3 colorectal cancer. The diagnosis came as a shock: she was 36 and a new mom to her daughter, Sofia, who was 18 months old at the time.
A day after attending a family cookout in June 2020, Stefania began experiencing a sharp pain in her right side. Thinking it was indigestion, she tried to treat it at home. But the pain lasted several days. Her husband urged her to go to the doctor. She brushed it off.
“Being a mom, we always put ourselves last. I told him not to worry — it’ll be fine,” Stefania remembered.
When the pain wouldn’t go away, she arranged a telehealth appointment with a nurse practitioner, who advised her to come into the clinic to get a closer look. After a physical exam, her primary care physician ordered a CT scan for the following day. It revealed inflammation in the colon. A few days later, Stefania underwent a colonoscopy. She couldn’t believe what the doctor told her: It was colon cancer.
A family member strongly recommended Mass General Cancer Center, due to its reputation as a world leader in cancer care, and Stefania found herself in the capable hands of oncologist Aparna Parikh, MD, medical director of the Center for Young Adult Colorectal Cancer at Massachusetts General Hospital.
On July 16, 2020, about a month after that fateful family cookout, Stefania underwent surgery at Mass General to have the tumor removed from her colon, along with 49 lymph nodes.
“I met with Dr. Parikh shortly after the surgery, and she recommended we follow up with three months of chemotherapy,” Stefania said. “Right before all this happened, I had been trying to get pregnant again. I told her that I really wanted to have another baby, and I’d heard that chemo can damage your ovaries.”
Dr. Parikh immediately connected her with The Clinic for Reproductive Health and Cancer at Mass General, where Stefania underwent egg retrieval and in vitro fertilization before beginning chemotherapy.
Even after numerous fertility interventions, she was unable to become pregnant again. “We got multiple opinions from different doctors and clinics. Everybody said it just wasn’t going to work for me,” Stefania said.
And so, when she saw the positive pregnancy test, she didn’t dare hope. “I was so scared, especially because I’d had two miscarriages before,” Stefania said. The test result was especially surprising because the couple had discontinued fertility treatments and conceived naturally.
New life brings new hope
Soon, the excitement and joy overtook her anxieties. She called her husband to share the happy news. Later that day, Stefania drove to her parents’ house to pick up Sofia. “We were in the car, and I just blurted out to my daughter that I was having a baby,” she remembered with a laugh.
