母愛的奇跡 The Miracle of Mother's Love
佚名/Anonymous
With all the energy that only a playful three-year-old can have, Caitlin Hedges clambers over her mum Trish and tugs at her arm for attention. As 37-year-old Trish tickles her, Caitlin collapses in fits of giggles.
Just the fact that they are sitting in their living room in Peterborough is a miracle-because four years ago, Trish had to make a terrible choice. She was suffering from cancer and being treated with chemotherapy. If she continued the treatment, Caitlin would have to be aborted. If Trish chose to have Caitlin and stop the chemotherapy, she was told she would probably die.
“It must be every mother's nightmare to make that choice,”says Trish,37，“but there was no contest. I desperately wanted this child to live, even if it meant sacrificing my own life. Isn't that every mother's instinct?”
Trish, a former chemist, was diagnosed non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph glands, in 1995 and by that time the disease had spread throughout her body.
After more than a year of chemotherapy, Trish was in partial remission but the treatment hadn't worked as well as doctors had hoped. She was given a break while experts decided what treatment to try next and she and Paul took a holiday in Turkey. While there, they spotted a pair of gold wedding rings and bought them on the spur of the moment.
“Marriage was something we'd always talked about,”says Trish.“we both knew we'd get married one day, but this was the first step to making it happen.”
However, when they arrived home their wedding plans had to be put on hold. Trish discovered another lump and doctors decided to try a more aggressive course of chemotherapy.
But before it began, Trish was desperate to find out whether she could have children or not. She went for tests but they showed the hormone levels in her blood were so low that it would be impossible to conceive.“Strangely enough, the news didn't bother me,”she says,“Even though the doctors told me I would never have children, I found it impossible to believe.”