Four years ago, Stephanie Thigpen, then 22, seemed to have it all: a husband she loved, a baby on the way, and decades of life ahead of her to enjoy with them both.
What she didn’t know was that inside her body was a ticking time bomb that would threaten to go off before her baby was born, forcing her to choose between her child and her life.
Stephanie was young and healthy, so when she began having headaches and nausea halfway through her pregnancy, both she and her doctors chalked it up to the changes happening to her body as a new life grew within her. When things got worse, and she developed numbness and weakness in her arms and legs, her doctors assumed it was just the baby sitting on a nerve.
But as weakness progressed to partial paralysis, she sought help at the ER. There, an MRI revealed the ugly cause of her symptoms – she had a brain tumor the size of a grapefruit, and it was growing fast. Stephanie needed surgery right away. But there was no way to guarantee that both baby and mother would survive. So Stephanie made the decision to deliver her baby by C-Section first, and told the doctors to prioritize his life over her own.
“The anesthesiologist gave me two choices and I made it without hesitation,” Stephanie told the Valdosta Daily Times. “Of course I told him to take the baby first and if I survived then worry about me.”
Baby Tripp was born weighing just 2 pounds, 11 ounces. He was immediately admitted to the NICU, while his mother was rushed into brain surgery.
Stephanie’s doctors weren’t optimistic about her chances – they warned her that in a worst-case scenario, she might not ever wake up from surgery. Even if she did, she might never walk or speak again.
When she woke up the next day able to speak and move her arms, hands and toes, her doctors proclaimed her swift recovery “a miracle.” But they had bad news – pathology on the tumor revealed it to be a stage IV Glioblastoma Multiforme, an aggressive, deadly form of cancer. According to their projections, she had only one year to live.
Meanwhile, she had yet to meet her baby boy.
Stephanie’s first glimpse of Tripp in the NICU was bittersweet. “I was in a wheelchair so I could not get really close to him due to all the machines,” she said. “He was so tiny and all the tubes were heartbreaking.”
Stephanie decided to fight her cancer. She embarked on an aggressive course of chemotherapy and radiation, receiving treatments 6 days a week.
To the amazement of her doctors, it worked: Stephanie has now been cancer-free and off chemotherapy for two years. She has seizures now as a result of the cancer and surgery, but after some trial and error on the part of her doctors, she is now on medication that works.
Recently, Stephanie and her husband welcomed their second child, a baby girl named Brynlee, whose pregnancy was blissfully uneventful.
Despite his early entrance into the world, Tripp is now a healthy almost-4-year-old.