Maggie's fighting spirit
When 4-year-old Maggie was born at Evanston Hospital, doctors discovered she had a mass underneath her tongue about the size of a golf ball. It was a life-threatening condition that also could have led to the loss of part of her tongue and threatened her ability to taste and speak. The news devastated her parents, Helen and Eric.
“There was no indication from the ultrasounds that there was anything unusual,” says Helen. “We went from having a normal pregnancy to having a baby in intensive care.”
The family was referred to Children's Memorial Hospital otolaryngologist John Maddalozzo, MD, who stopped at Evanston Hospital the day she was diagnosed on his way home from work. He told the family Maggie would need surgery to remove the mass and determine its nature, but that the surgery would have to wait until she grew a bit more. Five weeks later Maddalozzo operated on Maggie and discovered the mass was a cancerous Rhabdomyosarcoma, a relatively common form of childhood cancer, but one rare in newborns.
Maddalozzo told Maggie's parents that a second surgery would be necessary to remove the muscles in the floor of her mouth and reconstruct them.
“You can have a lot of problems and complications with this type of procedure,” says Maddalozzo. “We wanted to preserve the nerves to the tongue because we had to remove part of its base. It could have affected the motor to one half of her tongue as well as the feeling and sense of taste in that half of her tongue.”
Eric says he and Helen reacted with shock and disbelief to both the news that Maggie had cancer and the fact that the operation carried a certain amount of risk. “Then we thought, ‘Let's go forward with the operation,'” he says. “Maggie has such a fighting spirit and we were confident we could get it under control with surgery and chemotherapy.”
“We went from having a normal pregnancy to having a baby in intensive care," says Maggie's mother, Helen.
The operation was a complete success with no complications, says Maddalozzo. The family then met with pediatric oncologist David Walterhouse, MD , who told them about the various combinations of drugs that would be used during Maggie's 19-month course of chemotherapy. Walterhouse says the regimen for an older child would typically include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation treatments, but radiation wasn't an option for Maggie because its effects are too toxic for babies.
He also explained that Maggie would need to stay overnight at the hospital on the days she underwent her treatments. Helen says Children's Memorial became the family's “second home,” and that Maggie learned to crawl and walk at the hospital.