I was struggling with infertility then brain surgery helped me get pregnant

Lisa Fasone desperately wanted to give her daughter a little brother or sister.But when she and boyfriend, Larry Brastad, started trying, they joined the millions of Americans battling infertility.“I thought I was never going to have another child,” said the 32-year-old woman from McHenry, Ill.

told People.“It was an awful feeling.”More than a year later, doctors found a solution — but they would have to go deep inside Fasone’s brain to pull it off.After giving birth to her first child in 2022, Fasone began experiencing symptoms she assumed were caused by her fluctuating postpartum hormones, like night sweats, headaches, fatigue and no menstrual cycle She also continued to produce milk long after she was done nursing.“I kind of chalked it up to I just had a baby, you know, a year or two ago,” said Fasone, a urology physician assistant in the Chicago area.

“I’m just still not quite right because of that.”But when doctors did bloodwork, they found her prolactin levels were elevated.The hormone is produced by the pituitary gland — nestled at the base of the skull — where it stimulates lactation and influences fertility.“They suspected it was a tumor because I didn’t have any other risk factors for why my prolactin would be so high,” Fasone said. Medication brought her levels down for a time, but eventually she stopped responding to the drugs and her symptoms returned.

She was also afraid of what the treatment might be doing to her body.“The medication isn’t well studied for pregnancy,” she said.“I just didn’t feel comfortable trying to have a baby without good data to suggest it was safe.”It left her staring down a Catch-22: If she got pregnant, she’d have to stop the medication immediately to protect her baby.

But if she went off it, the tumor could grow, potentially leading to other side effects.The benign mass, called a prolactinoma, is the most common type of tumor on the pituitary gland.In the US, about 1 in 10,00...