What was meant to be an exciting time for an expecting mother from Elyria turned into an unexpected medical journey.
Leah Busser found out she was pregnant in May of 2024; around her 12-week mark, she began blood work to detect any abnormalities in her baby.
While there was nothing wrong with her baby boy, the tests revealed there was something going on with Busser.
“They started noticing that there were some false positives coming back. And what I mean about false positives is the test coming back saying there's something abnormal about the baby,” Busser said. “Well, it turns out there was nothing abnormal about the baby, there was something going on within the mother.”
Busser said her doctors were stumped until she was sent to participate in the IDENTIFY Study at the National Institute of Health in Maryland, where it was determined she had stage three Hodgkin Lymphoma.
The IDENTIFY Study examines how prenatal blood test results for a baby might also detect malignancy in the mother. The women receive full-body imaging and lab work to determine the cause of the abnormal test results.
“Well, it turns out 60% of the women that were involved in the study, I think it's only been a handful of people, honestly, I think about like 100 to 200 people at this point, since they launched it in 2019, have been coming back, and it's been cancer,” Busser said.
The sudden diagnosis took a toll on Busser both physically and mentally, impacting the excitement surrounding her pregnancy. And on top of it all, she was working full-time.
She said she feels as though she missed out on a lot during her pregnancy, as there were many things she could not do because of the cancer.
“A lot of decisions got taken away from me,” Busser said. “There were certain things that I couldn't and could do during pregnancy … the decisions like breastfeeding and stuff like that kind of got stripped away from me.”
Busser said throughout her pregnancy, she had to roll with the punches, but now, she can process her experience.
“Definitely some PTSD I'm dealing with with,” Busser said. “The biopsies that I went through and just finding this all out during my first pregnancy was just crazy. So, [I’m] just trying to process, work through emotions.”
But throughout the process, Busser said she never felt alone.
“I didn't feel alone in the least bit amount,” Busser said. “Just everyone from the doctors to the nurses, everyone who I encountered through this entire process, had just been so amazing and supportive … they're the ones that really got me through this.”
Busser said she encourages expecting mothers to consider getting the same bloodwork done as she did because she had little to no symptoms of her diagnosis prior to the bloodwork.
“I do think it's super important for a pregnant woman to consider doing this blood test because I personally just did the blood test because I wanted to know the gender of my baby,” Busser said. “And when it came back as abnormal, I didn't get to find out the gender until later. But, It came back as abnormal for the reason that I had cancer.”
Now, Busser said she is getting out of the newborn trenches with her healthy 2.5-month-old baby boy and is now in complete remission with only three more treatments left.
“[I’m] just trying to just finish this up just so I can kinda close this chapter a little bit and just focus on being the best parent to my kid and wife to my husband and getting back to work full time,” Busser said.
