One Sunday morning between Christmas and New Year, Christine Kalafus was tickling her four-year-old son, Trevor, when he accidentally elbowed her in the chest.
Under any other circumstances, the incident would have passed without note. It certainly wouldn’t be something that the young mother, who was eight months pregnant with twins at the time, would have recalled 25 years later.
But today, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Kalafus remembers that childish fumble as the moment she knew, on a cellular level, that her fears that something was terribly wrong with her were well-founded.
She explained: ‘It was like being stabbed. I nearly hit the ceiling because I was in such pain.’
A few days later she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. The fact that the diagnosis was a vindication of sorts, brought no satisfaction.
Kalafus had been raising concerns over what she felt certain were abnormal symptoms throughout her pregnancy only to have them repeatedly overlooked by her doctor who, she claims, dismissed them as the baseless fears of a ‘hysterical woman.’
Now 56, Kalafus is chronicling her story in her new memoir, ‘Flood,’ published by Woodhall Press. She believes patients who can sense something wrong in their own bodies often know better than medical professionals in whom they place their trust.
Pictured: Christine Kalafus, now 56, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer two days before she was forced to deliver her twins early
Pictured: Kalafus shows off her large baby bump in December 2000 — a few weeks before she her life-threatening diagnosis of triple-negative intra-ductal carcinoma
Kalafus became pregnant in the Spring of 2000, a year after her husband, Greg, confessed he’d had an affair with another woman.
She explained that they were determined to save their marriage and put the infidelity behind them so when she conceived twins she hoped it would be a fresh start.
However, when Kalafus was five-and-a-half months pregnant, she began experiencing an unpleasant sensation like someone was sticking pins or fine needles into her right breast.
She touched the breast and felt a hard, walnut-size lump.
The discovery rang alarm bells in her head. ‘I immediately thought of my paternal grandmother who died of breast cancer at 35 when I was ten,’ she said. ‘Then I reassured myself that I was only 31 so it’s unlikely to be that.’
She decided to mention it during a routine check-up three days later with her OBGYN — for whom she uses the pseudonym Dr Robb in her book — who had delivered her first child in 1996.
She saw Dr Robb every three weeks because she was carrying twins and there was an elevated risk to the pregnancy.
But according to Kalafus, her doctor seemed more interested in measuring the size of her stomach than listening to the concerns she was raising about her breast. He looked at the lump, she said, and touched it lightly before concluding, ‘It’s nothing. It’s just a clogged milk duct.’
Looking back Kalafus, a writer based in Connecticut, recognizes the blind faith she placed in the medic simply because he was the authority figure in the room. She doubted herself, not him.
‘I saw his framed diplomas on the wall and didn’t question him,’ she said.
She didn’t remember lactating until she had given birth to her first child but she reasoned that perhaps she was ‘starting early’ because this time she was having twins.
The doctor sent her away without giving any advice on how to deal with the clogged duct.
But, three weeks later, and still troubled by the persistent symptom, she asked about the lump once more. Again, the doctor dismissed her concerns.
According to Kalafus she raised the matter at her three subsequent consultations, to no avail.
She said she started to produce colostrum (the earliest nutrient-dense version of breast milk) which, she thought, backed up his diagnosis.
In mid-November, Dr. Robb agreed to measure the lump. He noted that it was bigger, but still insisted it was a clogged milk duct that they should ‘just keep an eye on.’
‘He was like a stuck record,’ she said, adding that she felt belittled and patronized. Kalafus said, ‘I felt like a little child.’
Pictured: Kalafus’ identical twins Parker and Spencer at 18 months old. They were born by C-section on January 4, 2001 — the same day that their mom underwent a lumpectomy
Pictured: Kalafus and her twins when they were ten months. She was still recovering from her intensive seven-month chemotherapy and radiation treatment
Yet, it bothered her that this pregnancy felt so different from her first, and she wasn’t convinced that the difference could be put down to the fact that she was expecting twins.
She didn’t share her worries with her husband, Greg, who was also 56. She said, ‘I’m not someone who likes to make people worry unnecessarily and so I muscled through myself.
‘Besides, we were both busy at work, running a household with a young child and managing the bills.’
But the agony that she experienced when her young son accidentally elbowed her that day was something she just couldn’t brush off.
She booked the first available appointment with Dr. Robb, and by January 2, 2001 she was sitting in his consulting room once more.
Unbelievably, her words still fell on deaf ears. While Kalafus told the obstetrician what had happened, he shuffled paperwork and appeared to listen only half-heartedly.
Little wonder that Kalafus felt desperate and unheard. Thankfully, there was a nurse in the room who seemed far more engaged in Kalafus’s story than the doctor.
Kalafus was leaving when the nurse called her back. There was a general surgeon’s office over the road, she explained, and they had managed to squeeze her in for an appointment.
She was seen right away, and the surgeon performed a needle biopsy.
Dr Robb called that night after dinner. He had received the results. ‘He didn’t even say “Hello,”’ Kalafus says. ‘He said the tests were positive for cancer.’
Pictured: Christine, then 33, with her three sons, twins Parker and Spencer, 17 months and their older brother, Trevor, six, in 2002
Barely pausing for breath, the doctor told her that the babies would have to ‘come out,’ adding, ‘We don’t know where else it might be.’
Both Kalafus and her husband, Greg, were left to absorb the shocking news overnight before driving to the hospital the next morning.
There, the nervous mother-to-be underwent a battery of routine tests such as pre-surgery blood work – and learned that the lump that had started all those weeks ago the size of a nut, had grown to the size of a golf ball.
In the absence of an oncologist because everything had happened so quickly, it was left to Dr. Robb to deliver the news.
He said she needed an immediate C-section ahead of a lumpectomy.
Spencer and Parker were born on January 4 – at 37 weeks they were considered full term for twins.
But there was no time for Kalafus to bathe in any post-birth relief or bond with newborn babies. They were taken away to the baby unit before she could even hold them.
Meanwhile their mother, who had undergone the caesarian under an epidural was now administered a general anesthetic for the lumpectomy which followed immediately on.
When she came round after the two-hour surgery Kalafus had a ‘giant crater’ in her chest where the lump had once been.
The tumor was taken for a biopsy in case the cancer had spread. Mercifully, it hadn’t.
She was reunited with her twins and their older brother in her hospital room when, woozy from the anesthetic, she became confused when the babies were wheeled inside in their lucite bassinets.
‘But, when mom put them in my arms, I could smell that new baby smell and realized they were mine.’
Pictured: Kalafus met her newborns just a few hours after having breast cancer surgery. At first she was too woozy to realize they belonged to her
Pictured: Kalafus today. She has undergone annual mammograms since contracting breast cancer at the age of just 31. Thankfully, it had not metastasized
Kalafus was discharged with the newborns — who were a healthy weight — four days later.
Then, around a week after that, out of an abundance of caution, doctors took a number of lymph nodes from under her armpit as a pre-emptive measure to ensure the disease had not metastasized.
Kalafus later found out that she had triple-negative intra-ductal carcinoma – a particularly aggressive cancer that is not responsive to hormone therapies, often diagnosed at a young age and prone to reoccurring.
Meanwhile Spencer and Parker were watched by her mother and aunts. They came to the family’s historic house — nicknamed ‘The Witch House’ as a reference to its sharply pointed center gable resembling a witch’s hat — while she underwent more testing and then chemotherapy.
‘They did a miraculous job, but I felt robbed of bonding time with my twins,’ Kalafus said, adding, ‘it was supposed to be one of the happiest times of our lives, but Greg and I were terrified about the future.’
She recalled her oncologist said he wanted to get her to point that she got to see her children graduate high school.
As difficult as that was to hear, Kalafus said: ‘I actually thought it was one of the most insensitive things I’d ever heard. I wasn’t just a mother, but an individual.
‘Not only that, but I was also only 31 years old.’
A six-month course of chemotherapy began in early February and her hair started to fall out after the first treatment. Next, she had 30 sessions of radiation on consecutive days of the week, with Sunday off.
With the toxic drugs flooding her system there was no question of her breast-feeding the twins as she’d done Trevor. In fact, her illness, and its treatment, impacted every part of those first few precious months with her newborns.
Pictured: Kalafus. Recalling her cancer treatment after her twins were born, she said, ‘it was supposed to be one of the happiest times of our lives, but Greg and I were terrified about the future’
Pictured: The so-called ‘Witch House’ in Connecticut where Kalafus lived with her family at the time she was pregnant with the twins and later had cancer treatment
‘I was often too weak from the treatment to pick them up,’ she said.
She and Greg sat Trevor down to tell him what was happening. ‘We said, “Mommy needs medication to make feel her better,” and he accepted that.’ The little boy even helped her shave her head to neaten things up after most of her hair had gone.
Now aged 24 and 29, her sons are wholly relieved their mother, who still has mammograms every year, has not suffered a recurrence of cancer.
According to Kalafus, Dr Robb — whom she didn’t challenge directly — never once expressed any remorse for his inaction.
She said she didn’t think of taking legal action against him, partly because of the cost. ‘Nor am I a great believer in blaming people who make mistakes,’ she added.
Instead, today Kalafus advocates for women — especially expectant mothers — to stand up for themselves in the face of medical arrogance or indifference.
She said: ‘It’s one thing for the grocery clerk not to believe you when you say the zucchini is bad, but it’s another thing for a doctor to dismiss you. One is just an annoyance. The other is a possible death sentence.’
