A routine scan for a pregnant UK woman went from exciting to horrifying, after she and her partner were told their 'baby' was actually a cancerous tumour.
Twenty-three-year-old Grace Baker-Padden and her 28-year-old partner Joe Cowling told the Mirror they were initially surprised when she appeared to be pregnant, as she was on birth control.
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But it was confirmed by four pregnancy tests and a GP visit, and the couple decided to have the baby. Baker-Padden says she credited daily vomiting and mild swelling in her belly to her pregnancy.
"We were so happy and excited. Our parents couldn't wait to be first-time grandparents," Baker-Padden told the Mirror.
But during a routine scan at the 12-week mark, the couple says that things "didn't look right".
"There was no baby shape - it looked like a bunch of grapes. The midwife said it looked like a 'molar pregnancy', and went to find a doctor," Cowling says.
Doctors confirmed it was a molar pregnancy, known as gestational trophoblastic disease - when an unfertilised egg implants in the uterus. While most are benign, Baker-Padden's was a malignant mass.
"We'd gone from expecting a baby to having the C-word thrown about," Baker-Padden recalled. "From planning this exciting new future as a family, to suddenly no baby and my health at risk was awful."
"I just wanted the horrible mass out of me immediately."
Baker-Padden went through six months of chemotherapy as a result, and has since been cleared by doctors. The pair now have to wait at least a year for her hormones to settle, and they have a 15 percent chance of the same thing occurring again.
A similar molar pregnancy hit headlines in 2017, when a British woman was first to 'give birth' to her tumour.
Newshub.
