Meg Farris / Eyewitness News
NEW ORLEANS -- For a New Orleans woman, one of the happiest times in her life quickly became one of the toughest. But she is only focusing on what she's been given in life, not what's been taken away, by a serious diagnosis.
At 33, Melissa Daigle's life dream was fulfilled. One was the man she met at the University of Louisiana homecoming game after babysitting for his brother's child.
"We met and six months later, we got engaged. And a year later, we got married," she remembers with a big smile.
And then the ultimate: starting the big family she always wanted. But after her second daughter was born, everything changed.
"I would have liked to have four or five kids, but I can't have anymore. Now two, is the, two is what, but I'm blessed to have two of them," said Daigle.
It all started during Melissa's second pregnancy with Libby Kate.
"Five months into it, I noticed a lump and I asked my gynecologist about it, and he said, 'You know, things come. Lumps and bumps happen when you're pregnant,'" Daigle remembers.
But months after the birth, while breast feeding, the lump in her breast was still there. Around the same time, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Soon after that, Melissa got neck pain.
At first, she thought nothing of it since years earlier, she had gone to physical therapy to fix neck pain. But this time was different.
"I was having so much pain in my neck, that I was holding, I was nursing Libby and she tapped me in the face with her foot and thank God my husband was in front of me because I tossed her. It hurt. It was so incredibly painful it felt like nothing I had had before," Daigle recalls.
The doctor took a neck X-ray. By the time she got home, her phone was already ringing.
"She said, 'You need to go to the emergency room right now. Something looks very concerning on your X-ray,'" Daigle said about the conversation she had with her doctor.
After weeks of tests came the diagnosis.
"'You have metastatic breast cancer, which is stage IV (4) and it's probably going to be something that you deal with off and on for the rest of your life,'" she was told.
"It's hard to cure them forever, but we can get a lot of women in to remission. So I'm hoping that's going to happen with her," said Dr. Elly Zakris, the director of Radiation Oncology at Touro.
The breast cancer has spread to several places in Melissa's bones. Radiation treatments helped and that pain is now gone. She is being treated by doctors at Touro in New Orleans and MD Anderson in Houston.
Doctors in Texas have her on medication to suppress her hormones in hopes of controlling both cancers. There's also a bone strengthening drug since her bones are at risk of thinning from the hormone suppression.
Doctors say the flood of hormones during pregnancy don't cause breast cancer, they just caused one that was already there to be found.
"The extra hormones that are in your body during pregnancy may make a cancer that was in your body become more obvious. It is potentially a good thing when it's found during pregnancy," said Dr. Zakris.
There is not a lot of science that shows another pregnancy, with it's increase in hormones, would cause cancer recurrence. And some women decide to have more children.
But that concerns doctors. So Melissa was told she should not get pregnant again.
"If I wouldn't have had her (Libby), that, if I wouldn't have had them close together, I might not have had another baby, you know. So we're thankful for what we have. I would always like more (children) but there's always in the future, you never know, you know, you never know, we could adopt or have a foster child or something," said Daigle.
Doctors say it's hard to do breast exams during pregnancy because of the normal lumpy changes. But the good news is this cancer would be worse if it had spread to her organs.
Melissa and her mother, who is doing fine now, do not have the genetic mutations that increase the risk for breast cancers. It is possible Melissa could go into remission for a long time.
But breast surgery should not be ruled out.
"There is (scientific) literature showing that if you remove the primary cancer with women with breast cancer, your survival's better. That might be in her future," Dr. Zakris recommends.
Melissa says friends and family, and even people she knew in the past, help out at home and support her family. But she wants to be there full time while her children are so dependent.
Because she looks so healthy, she now realizes that you can never look at another person and truly know what burdens they carry in life.
"The biggest thing that I want people to know is, you never know when you look at somebody, what they're going through. There's something in every illness, every bad thing that happens in your life, that good comes out of and that God wants us all to be happy in this life and just to do the best with what we have. This is just part of my journey. It's just part of what I'm supposed to do in my life," said Daigle as she choked up.
Melissa and her mother have a very similar type of breast cancer. It is the most common type of breast cancer that is seen in 70 to 80 percent of women with breast cancer.
Melissa has decided, with the doctor's recommendation, that next month she'll go off of her medication and have her ovaries removed at Touro to lower her cancer risk.
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