JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas (Feb. 19, 2015) -- When a terminally ill Army wife gave birth to a healthy boy here, doctors called it a modern-day medical miracle.
A year later, Yesenia Ruiz-Rojo is still alive and sharing quality time with her son, Luke, and doctors are hard-pressed to come up with another description.
"To me, it is nothing short of a miracle," said Lt. Col. (Dr.) Raul Palacios, chief of interventional radiology at Brooke Army Medical Center, or BAMC. "I sincerely doubt I will ever again witness what we've seen with Yesenia."
Ruiz-Rojo arrived at BAMC in September 2013. She was 21 years old, four months pregnant, and had just discovered she was facing aggressive liver cancer. Doctors gave her four to six months to live.
Ruiz-Rojo gave no thought to herself; she begged her doctors to save her baby. "The only thing I could think about was my baby," she said. "Just have the baby, I told myself, and the rest will figure itself out."
The odds were against her, Palacios recalled. Based on current literature and case reports, a pregnant woman with this type of aggressive cancer had not lived very long, let alone long enough to deliver a healthy child.
"There was nothing out there we found in conventional medicine that would offer her any hope," Palacios said. "We weren't aware of anything in the past that had been tried successfully."
Unwilling to give up, BAMC experts from more than a dozen specialties met to explore every possible treatment option. They decided on a therapy called selective internal radiation therapy with Y-90, which places tiny radioactive particles in the patient's artery that feeds the liver tumors. The tumor consumes the particles and either shrinks or dies, Palacios said.
The team felt Y-90 would offer the least risk to mother and baby, so "we held our breath, acknowledged Mrs. Ruiz-Rojo's desires, and made the best educated decision with what we knew at the time," he said.
After a six-week treatment and early encouraging signs, Ruiz-Rojo gave birth to a premature, but healthy baby at BAMC on Jan. 10, 2014.
Her providers grew attached to this young mom and her baby over the course of her stay. "It was truly an honor and a privilege to care for Yesenia," said Kimberly Hatfield, clinical nurse officer in charge of 5 East, an inpatient ward at BAMC.
Once recovered from the delivery, Ruiz-Rojo moved to California to stay with her family.
She cared for her son for about a month, but her mom and sister soon took over as her health declined. Yearning to spend time with Luke, Ruiz-Rojo despaired at the bouts of sickness that made her too weak and in pain to hold him. "I'd stay to myself because I didn't want him to see me that way," she said. "It hurt me so much to do that."
Last March, she became so violently ill, doctors called her family in to say their goodbyes. Beating the odds again, she survived that and nearly two dozen other hospitalizations.
Unsure if she would make it to a year, she threw Luke a 6-month-old birthday party. "I went all out," she said. "I wanted him to see pictures of me and him and have happy memories."
With illness and weakness taking their toll, Ruiz-Rojo became bed-ridden and depressed. It took a wake-up call from her beloved aunt to shake her out of her sadness. "She told me, 'You have to start living for yourself and your son.'"
That day was a turning point. Ruiz-Rojo slowly began building her strength. She did her makeup and hair, helped out around the house, and, most importantly, began to care for her son. "I do everything now but change his diapers," she said with a laugh. "He's too wiggly for me at this point."
Ruiz-Rojo's voice softens when she speaks of Luke. He loves to bang on pots and pans, she said, and to listen to her sing nursery rhymes to him in Spanish. She swears in the midst of his baby babbling, she has heard him say "I love you."
"It makes me sad that there are moms who take this gift for granted," she said.
On Jan. 10, Ruiz-Rojo celebrated Luke's birthday surrounded by family and friends. And, a month later, she celebrated her 23rd birthday. Her phone is packed with pictures of herself, smiling and hair flowing, holding her curly-haired son, something she was unable to do just a few months before.
While she is on the liver transplant list, Ruiz-Rojo prefers to focus on living a normal life, not one riddled by fear. "I honestly didn't think I'd live to see another birthday," she said. "This past year has been a journey, but it's made me appreciate what I have so much more."
Palacios said there are "no words to describe the joy" he feels when patients do well.
"In my heart, I feel Yesenia was in the right place at the right time with the right people," he said. "BAMC had a chance to help and did, it says a lot for the [Department of Defense]."
Veronica Dominguez, a 5E staff nurse, called her time with Ruiz-Rojo "humbling."
"As a nurse, you always want to touch someone's life," Dominguez said. "To see her baby growing and Yesenia still able to care for him … it makes what we do every day so worthwhile."
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Terminally ill Army wife gives birth to 'miracle' baby at BAMC
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