MaKenna Lauterbach from Illinois was 36 weeks pregnant when she received the shocking diagnosis of a large tumor in her chest, revealing the real cause of the persistent cough and breathlessness during her pregnancy. The 26-year-old, who was diagnosed with stage 3 melanoma, is now stable and recovering, along with her healthy baby, thanks to the timely intervention and coordinated efforts of a dedicated team of doctors.
When Lauterbach experienced a bad cough while she was expecting, she knew something was wrong. Simple tasks, like walking to the barn to feed her horses, left her unusually winded, as if she had just run two miles. However, doctors were initially hesitant to perform chest scans due to concerns about radiation exposure.
When Lauterbach was almost due, the cough worsened to the extent that she started throwing up and had to be hospitalized for shortness of breath. The scans then revealed a grapefruit-sized tumor in her chest, blocking the artery to her right lung.
By the time Lauterbach received the diagnosis, she was in respiratory distress, the tumor obstructing her airway, putting both her life and her baby’s at risk.
After being airlifted to the intensive care unit at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, her condition worsened, she went into labor, her blood pressure spiked, and the baby began showing signs of distress during contractions.
“Lauterbach was in real trouble, and we had to act quickly – this wasn’t something that could wait for Monday morning. When you’re pregnant with a baby that’s nearly full-term, your lungs already aren’t functioning at full capacity, and when you add a huge tumor on top of it, you run the risk of having respiratory collapse and cardiac arrest,” said Dr. Lynn Yee, maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Northwestern Medicine in a news release.
Doctors quickly prepared Lauterbach for extracorporeal life support (ECMO) and performed an emergency C-section, successfully delivering a healthy baby boy.
“Because of the tumor, the delivery happened so quickly. I was grieving the birth plan I had spent months preparing for, while also dealing with the news of my unexpected diagnosis,” Lauterbach said.
While her newborn remained in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, doctors performed an advanced bronchoscopy on Lauterbach. The procedure revealed that her tumor was stage 3 melanoma, prompting the medical team to immediately begin developing a treatment plan.
“Lauterbach’s diagnosis was difficult to make because we weren’t sure if the melanoma started in the chest or somewhere else, and there isn’t much literature or published cases on how to best treat tumors like these, so we had to rely on the expertise that we’ve developed here at Northwestern Medicine,” said Dr. Kalvin Lung, a thoracic surgeon with the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute.
The medical team decided on surgery to remove the tumor. Before the procedure, Lauterbach was given three cycles of immunotherapy which helped shrink the tumor from 13 centimeters to nine centimeters.
“We think at some point, Lauterbach had a melanoma on her skin and her own immune system took care of it, but not before a cell or two may have escaped and eventually started growing inside her body,” explained Dr. Sunandana Chandra, medical oncologist with the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
During the surgery, doctors had to remove her right lung parts of the main pulmonary artery, and lymph nodes. “The tumor was sitting on top of Lauterbach’s heart and extended into the right lung, impacting all three lobes and the entire main trunk of the pulmonary artery, which is why we had to remove the right lung,” said Dr. Lung who conducted the surgery along with Dr. Chris Mehta, a cardiac surgeon with the Northwestern Medicine Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute.
“It’s extremely rare to see this type of tumor invading into the major blood vessels of the heart. We may see something like this once every few years,” Dr. Mehta added.
Lauterbach’s latest scans show no evidence of metastatic melanoma, and while her cancer remains stable with no new tumors, she will continue immunotherapy treatments for the next year.
