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‘We Have A Fighting Chance’
Groton woman, unborn baby on uncertain journey
By Bethe Dufresne - TheDay.com - 5/14/2002
Cancer patient Charnette Messé of Groton is relieved to hear that her first ultrasound being performed by Dr. Edward J. Watson of Coastal Women's Care in New London revealed no abnormalities.
Photo Credit: Tim Martin / The Day
Friday morning in the dance studio Charnette Messé is watching her daughter, watching her step and watching the clock.
The 10 a.m. class at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum is called "Mommy and Me," and Messé and 3-year-old Gabrielle are faithful attendees. As a dancer herself, Messé would normally be leading the pack. But she's stepping gingerly today, with her second child due in six months.
Normally, too, Messé would be among the last to leave, savoring every moment of the dance, the laughter, the hugs and the bouncy camaraderie of mostly young mothers.
Charnette and her husband Tom, listen to Judy Grasso, nurse manager at the Lawrence & Memorial Hospital Community Cancer Center prior to Charnette's first chemotherapy treatment. The chemo drug packets, foreground, will be administered to Charnette via an IV.
Photo Credit: Tim Martin / The Day
But by 11 a.m. she's due at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, where she'll receive her first dose of chemotherapy since losing her left breast to advanced-stage breast cancer.
Like her mother, Gabrielle loves to dance and loves to dress up. Today "Gabby" is wearing a sparkling pink ballerina outfit, and her blonde curls are drawn up into a bun. "She's not usually quite this dressed up," says Messé. But this is an unusual day.
Little as she is, Gabby seems already in step with her mother's philosophy of putting your best face forward. "Dare to Dream" is what Messé named her own dance company.
After struggling with infertility and agonizing over an abortion - pre-dating her relationship with her husband - that she deeply regrets, Messé, 31, learned on March 8 that she was pregnant again. The day before, her cancer diagnosis was confirmed.
As the hour for her first chemotherapy session nears, Messé edges toward the back of the dance studio, where husband Tom, a Navy doctor stationed at the Naval Submarine Base, is waiting to drive her to the hospital. Their home is near the sub base in Groton.
Tom Messé is talking about the merits of various chemotherapies with Lucinda Rothschild, a mother of three who, like Messé, was diagnosed with breast cancer in her early 30s. Rothschild urges Messé to spend a few more minutes with Gabby on the dance floor.
"Let them wait!" Rothschild says defiantly. The wounded veteran knows what her friend is in for.
Messé, who has smiled throughout the dance session, gamely skipping along beside Gabby in a pretend car train, hugs Rothschild tightly before she leaves.
With her face toward the door, so no one else can see, Messé sheds some tears.
* * *
Two weeks earlier, in her obstetrician's office in New London, Messé makes a cheerful pretense of setting the stage. "He can't give me any bad news today," she tells a nurse's aide, "because I don't want to have my picture taken when I'm crying."
Messé has been nauseated for weeks, just as she was when she was pregnant with Gabby. This day she's feeling better, but the strain on her supple dancer's body and her finely sculpted face is obvious.
She moves stiffly, even rather sadly, in her white socks and Mary Jane shoes. Her shirt, sporting a sticker from Gabby's favorite Blues Clue, hangs a little looser on the left side.
Inside the examining room, lying on her back with her abdomen exposed and her head tilted toward the ultrasound monitor, Messé looks more like her old self as she gazes happily at a tiny ball of movement. "Can you see that?" asks Dr. Edward J. Watson. "That's an arm dangling there."
Prenatal tests have come out well, and Watson likes what he sees on the screen today, a figure still too small to call boy or girl. "From my point of view," he says, "everything's been going really great."
The view from Yale-New Haven Hospital, where Messé had a mastectomy on March 19, is more cautious.
"She has a fast-growing type of cancer that we worry about and we want to treat very aggressively," says Dr. Karen Johnson, who performed the surgery.
"Presumably the cancer is out of her body now," says Johnson. "We don't see evidence that it's gone to her bones or her liver or her organs.
"But the tumor had gone from her breast into the lymph nodes
and it was on its way out, so there could be tiny cancer cells floating
around in her body, looking for a place to set up housekeeping."
These micro-metastases may be too small for any test to pick up,
says Johnson. So there's no debating the need for an aggressive
course of chemotherapy.
But what about the baby?
"The danger of the chemotherapy actually causing a birth defect is fairly low," says Johnson. But despite advances in treatment, chemotherapy is still a form of poison. As it kills cancer cells, it also kills white blood cells that protect against infection.
The main risk of chemotherapy during pregnancy, says Johnson, is that it can make the mother sick, and her infection can be passed on to the fetus.
"With this pregnancy," Johnson says, "Charnette potentially
could do just fine. My concern is her long-term survival. She could
have a new baby a year from now, but if the cancer metastasized
to her liver she might not see this child grow up."
Johnson says she never downplayed the risks or inflated the odds
of success.
"I wouldn't have operated on her if I didn't think there was
a chance of being cured," the surgeon says. "What I told
her is that we'd operate and see if we had a fighting chance.
"We have a fighting chance."
* * *
As a dance teacher, doctor's wife, aspiring actress and doting mother, Messé seemed destined to live the beautiful life symbolized by the award-winning, confidence-inspiring greeting cards she designs and adorns with tiny handmade bouquets.
The three-dimensional cards are sold in gift shops around the Northeast, including New York's City's Plaza Hotel and L&M Hospital in New London, where they have a special spot in the display cases. Messé concedes that the cards may be on back order for awhile.
But while she fights for her life and that of her baby, this ambitious woman who seems almost preternaturally disposed toward optimism is also looking to make a mark and a difference.
Women in her age group aren't advised to have routine mammograms. The perception among them, and often their doctors, is that they're probably too young to have breast cancer. But relying on probability where cancer is concerned can be deadly.
When Messé found a lump under her left arm in January, a family practitioner advised waiting a couple of months, suspecting that it might be drainage from a rash on her breast.
Rare though it is, says Johnson, it's not unheard of for a teen-ager to get breast cancer. Messé plans a campaign to urge young women who show any warning signs of cancer to get checked without delay.
To that end, she's willing to open her life to public view, to be followed into the obstetrician's examining room and into the chemotherapy treatment room at L&M's Cancer Center, where she settles into one of a long line of thick armchairs separated by curtains. Her husband sits by her.
Talking with Watson a few weeks earlier about her crusade for early detection, she tosses off the remark, fully expecting to be taken seriously, "I want to save the world."
Today, with the poison making its way into her body, she is still the dreamer but wide awake to the reality that she must start by saving herself.
Editor's Note: One in about every 3,000 pregnant women is fighting breast cancer while trying to deliver a healthy baby. Charnette Messé of Groton, 31, is among them. The Day is following her progress in an occasional series of stories that began on March 19.
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