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KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KMBC) — It’s a story as much about loss as it is about life.
Alison Anstaett is a breast cancer survivor, and she needs some help.
She’s due around Christmas.
She and her husband are planning to name their baby boy, Logan. But she needs some help finding breast milk to feed him. So, she posted her request online. She never expected the overwhelming response she received.
Anstaett had aggressive triple negative breast cancer.
“They were like, something’s there,” she said.
That something was a tumor.
“My family has the BRCA gene,” she said.
Anstaett was just 29 years old.
And there was another blow to come.
Doctors told Anstaett, a young mother, that after 16 rounds of chemo, her daughter would most likely be an only child.
“It’s actually really hard to talk about because they told me with the type of chemo that I went through, that it would probably kill all my eggs,” she said. “And they actually gave me less than a 10 percent chance.”
Her current pregnancy is a miracle.
“Even my oncologist calls it a miracle,” she said.
But Anstaett is a survivor.
Against all odds, her family is growing.
She’s finished treatment, but a double mastectomy means she can’t nurse her baby boy.
“I just kind of put it out there and was like, ‘Hey, can anybody help me?’ And you wouldn’t believe how many people reached out to me,” she said.
She turned to online moms’ groups, and women from all over answered her call.
“This came from women who had lost their baby in the NICU,” Anstaett said while going through the donations.
Often these gifts are a labor of love.
Sara Devoto is donating milk for a third time.
“We’ve had an interesting road through our parenting journey,” Devoto said.
Her newborn Joanna is her fourth child.
Sara has lost two children, one as a miscarriage, and the other as a newborn. His name was Logan. After the loss of Logan, she kept pumping to help her grieve. She donated that milk.
“I just felt like it was meant to be for some other baby,” she said.
Devoto and Anstaett are now moms with a special bond.
“I was in shock. Their stories is really what touched me,” Anstaett said.
Together they share heartache and hope for the future.
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