29-year-old Kalya Gayton is already the mother of two and is now in the midst of battling cancer for the second time around. She found out about her third pregnancy shortly after finishing five rounds of chemotherapy.
Gayton said to local News 2 that, “It was exciting. It was nerve-wracking. But to see them when they all came out and to hear them crying, that was really exciting.”
This new mother of four was thrilled at the possibility of getting pregnant without the use of fertility drugs as well as being able to carry them, a task she wasn’t sure she could handle.
Saying, “My original goal to make was 34 weeks because I figured if I could beat cancer, surely I could make it to 34 weeks with quads.”
“I just kept trying to tell myself that I could do it.”
Gayton was diagnosed last year for the first time with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a disease that the American Cancer Society categorizes as a cancer that starts in a person’s white blood cells.
According to Breastcancer.org,the ability to get pregnant after chemotherapy treatment depends on a person’s age as well as the type and dosage of a chemotherapy drug received.
However Gayton noticed symptoms of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma which include fevers, weight loss and night sweats while she was pregnant and a biopsy confirmed that her cancer had returned. An unexpected setback and life altering experience.
“You think you’ve beat it the first time. When it comes back, you’re just wondering why get pregnant with these four babies and then, you know, something like this happens,” she said.
“She’d worked really hard to [fight] it the first time, and to come back and have to go through it all again, it breaks my heart,” her husband Charles said.
The four babies born at 30 weeks are currently in NICU and are expected to be there for the next six weeks.
However the new mother of six will be dealing with her own test by undergoing 16 months of chemotherapy treatment which will start in two weeks.
As of now Gayton has a 50 percent chance of survival over the next five years. But she stresses that “We know that He’s gotta have a different plan up there for us, and surely everything’s gonna work out in the end.”
