“As far as we can find out,” Lavin said, “she’s the only person in the world who has had” two procedures to treat fibroids “and got pregnant — at least the only reported case we have been able to find.”
When Claudette and Danny Hopkins, who live in West Akron, were married two decades ago, they were in their early 20s. Like many young couples, they dreamed of starting a family. They tried and tried to conceive, but suffered one disappointment after another.
Then came the fertility evaluations and treatments. Claudette, a driver for the Akron Public Schools, endured shots, downed pills, went through artificial insemination. She had two surgeries to try to correct blocked fallopian tubes. At age 30, she was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, a condition linked to obesity and infertility.
She reached her 40s, a time when a woman’s chance of miscarriage hits 40 percent. By then, she also had developed severe symptoms from large uterine fibroids — benign tumors that can cause extensive, chronic bleeding and impair fertility.
In November 2004, because of the fibroids, Hopkins underwent endometrial ablation, a surgery that removes most of the lining of the uterus to try to prevent fibroid bleeding.
The ablation didn’t work, Lavin said, so a month later, Claudette underwent fibroid embolization, a procedure in which radioactive dye is injected into uterine blood vessels. That procedure is known to cause a 20 percent to 25 percent pregnancy-loss rate.
Then she gets pregnant….without assisted reprodcutive technology.
In May, Claudette’s care was referred to Lavin, who specializes in high-risk cases. He placed her on bed rest in August.
Claudette had weekly prenatal visits with Lavin and his partner, Dr. Stephen Crane. She had extensive monitoring to check the baby’s heart rate and growth and received weekly progesterone shots to prevent premature labor. Her cervix was stitched closed.
From the moment Claudette awoke in the morning until she fell asleep at night, she felt nauseated and weak — and that lasted throughout her pregnancy. Because she had undergone gastric-bypass surgery several years earlier, she had a hard time eating enough to gain weight. She also had hypertension and a large fibroid, which the doctors watched carefully. And she was 44 years old.
“It was certainly a complicated case,” said Lavin, who is writing a journal article about it.
That might be the understatement of the year. Crossed linked at RedStateMoron.
