How Kate Fitzgerald had bowel cancer surgery while five months pregnant and survived

Melbourne mum Kate Fitzgerald had bowel cancer surgery while five months pregnant. This is how she and her baby survived.

Exclusive: Kate Fitzgerald had bowel cancer surgery while five months pregnant — and both she and her baby survived.

In something of a medical miracle, Melbourne doctors took her womb from her body to operate, then put it back inside.

And it can be revealed the 38-year-old chief executive of Emergency Management Victoria was working 15-hour-days, managing Victoria’s Covid lockdown last year, when she was dealt the harrowing personal health news.

“We had to consider the risk of miscarriage, we had to consider my future fertility and there was my own health because the tumour was the size of a quite large cricket ball,” she said.

It had taken Ms Fitzgerald months to get doctors to take her symptoms — diarrhoea and constipation, lack of weight gain, fatigue, rectal bleeding and dehydration — seriously.

She thought she might have Crohn’s disease or other digestive issues but when she was finally diagnosed with bowel cancer in October 2020 “it was incredibly shocking”.

Within a week she was at Melbourne’s Peter McCallum hospital having incredibly high risk surgery to remove the tumour while at the same time keeping her baby alive.

“I’ve got about a 35 centimetre incision from under my breasts to the top of my pubic bone and they removed the tumour, and they also did a bowel resection and they also gave me a stoma (a bag to collect human waste),” she said.

Kate Fitzgerald is the beneficiary of a double medical miracle after undergoing bowel cancer surgery while pregnant. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Preserving the life of her precious baby was the most tricky part of the six-hour surgery, carried out by Dr Jacob McCormick.

“The baby was essentially moved aside and placed outside, out of the way essentially, but still connected to my body through the umbilical cord so that they could get in and remove the tumour,” she said.

Dr McCormick said it was the first time he had ever done bowel cancer surgery on a pregnant woman.

To carry out the surgery, his registrar put his hands behind the uterus and pulled it forward so he could operate behind it.

“So basically we got a hand behind it and pulled the whole thing forward and pulled it up out of the way, because all the bowel that we needed to operate on was running behind it,” he said.

Kate Fitzgerald was 5 months pregnant at the time. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Ms Fitzgerald was just five months pregnant at the time of the surgery and there was no way baby Ava would have survived if she was born that early.

“We had to get to seven months for her to be to be viable, they weren’t able to induce labour because she just would not have survived that,” she said.

In the months following the surgery — and until Ava was delivered by caesarean section — Ms Fitzgerald was anxious something would go wrong, with her biological clock ticking.

She managed to avoid chemotherapy and radiotherapy because the cancer had not spread and had ovarian tissue removed, in case she wanted to conceive another child.

Ava is now three months old and bringing her parents delight.

“I think we feel so incredibly blessed to have her with us, it was the worst possible news to be diagnosed with cancer when you’re pregnant but we really did have probably the best possible outcome in terms of her being born full term and healthy and with no impacts from the cancer or the surgery at all,” she said.

Kate Fitzgerald with her 3 month old daughter Ava. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Ms Fitzgerald says she hopes recounting her experience will put cancer on the radar of people aged under 50 because the earlier they are diagnosed the better their prognosis.

Bowel Cancer Australia CEO Julien Wiggins said bowel cancer rates were rising in young people — and it was the deadliest cancer for those aged 25-34.

“It’s becoming all too common that younger people were presenting multiple times to GP’s and specialists with obvious classic symptoms of bowel cancer, either being ignored, told to eat more fibre,” he said.

He is asking the government to follow the United States’ lead and extend bowel cancer screening to those aged over 45 (currently it’s the over 50s).

And he’s warning of a rise in bowel cancer deaths due to a 15 per cent drop in the number of colonoscopies undertaken during the Covid lockdown.

A four-week delay in diagnosis of the cancer increases a persons risk of dying by 10 per cent, he said.