She was pregnant and had a brain tumor. How would doctors handle care?

TAMPA, Fla. - When her phone rang an hour after the MRI scan, Mallory McLean knew the news wouldn't be good.

A tumor had formed at the base of her skull, deep within the brain, the size of a golf ball.

The mass, the doctor said, was a "vestibular schwannoma," a growth on the nerve that affects hearing and balance. Benign - that was a relief. McLean, 36, had lost her mother to cancer a year prior.

But it pressed up against critical arteries in her brain. The blurry vision and dizziness that had landed her at Tampa General Hospital would only get worse without surgery.

And there was a bigger complication. She was about 20 weeks pregnant with her second child, and she wanted to carry to term.

McLean and her doctors embarked on a treacherous waiting game.

What would develop faster, the tumor or her baby?

The pregnancy problem

As a teenager in Lakeland in the early 2000s, McLean traveled to Tampa once a year to compete as a thespian. High school students from across the state performed monologues and dance routines - but the highlight was always outside conference walls, when she and her friends broke free to a downtown donut stand.

The donuts were warm, fresh and delicious. A few years later, when she learned that the son of the donut stand operator was a fellow student at the University of South Florida, she insisted they meet.

The two fell in love, married in 2017, and had their daughter in 2021.

McLean's first pregnancy was easy, the kind that women envy. She worked until her daughter was born, walking 15,000 steps while hosting a fundraiser the day before. She gave birth without an epidural, not by choice but because she was admitted too late in her labor to get one.

"Honestly, not that bad," she said of the natural birth. "I was like, ‘Maybe I should be a surrogate,' because it all went so smoothly."

When she learned she was having a son in the fall of 2024, McLean hoped for anothereasy pregnancy. But this time, symptoms hit her like a train. Overwhelming nausea made it difficult to keep food down. Spells of dizziness set in. Flipping her hairupside down to dry it after a shower left her so disoriented she'd collapse. She survived on a diet of watermelon and strawberries. McLean went on leave from her job in development at a children's hospital.

The issue when you're pregnant, McLean later reflected, is that it's blamed for everything: increased urination, sudden fatigue, constipation, nasal congestion. That makes it difficult to tell when something else is amiss.

By early 2025, McLean's vision had faded, and she beganstumbling. Her obstetrician recommended she see a neurologist, but the earliest opening was past her due date. She made an appointment with the Tampa Bay Hearing and Balance Center instead.

It didn't take long for the doctor to order a brain scan and refer her to the neurosurgery department at Tampa General.

The puzzle master

By the time Dr. Siviero Agazzi got hold of McLean's imaging, he'd already spent thousands of hours removing tumors like hers, but rarely had he managed the care of a pregnant woman.

Tall and thin, with a graying goatee, the Italian-born doctor had wanted to be a surgeon since childhood. During medical school, he became enchanted with the brain. Neurosurgery was delicate - and exceedingly difficult. He liked that he could shepherd people through frightening times.

McLean's tumor was large. The mass was pressing on her brain stem, the most delicate part of the body's operating system, andcausing a buildup of fluid. The pressure was blurring her vision.

"Oh my goodness," Agazzi thought as he looked over her medical records. "We are going to be in trouble here."

At the time of their first appointment, McLean was halfway to full term. The goal was to wait until she gave birth to operate.

But soon McLean's symptoms progressed, and it became clear that waiting was no longer an option. She trusted Agazzi, feeling he saw her as a person, not just a problem to solve.

She'd undergo three surgeries, he explained. First, they'd need to drill into the top of her skull and insert a tube to redirect the fluid. Typically, those tubes, or shunts, drain into the abdomen, but that wasn't feasible given her pregnancy. McLean's would drain into her heart - a common backup.

Once the fluid subsided, her vision would be restored, and that would buy them time. At 37 weeks, she'd have an emergency cesarean section. Days later, she'd undergo a multihour surgery, in which Agazzi would venture deep into her brain to peel back layers of her tumor.

After her diagnosis, McLean's obstetrician had transferred her care to Tampa General and USF Health so that her doctors could work together.As the neurosurgery team prepared to install the shunt, a second team of specialists hovered on standby, strapping wires to her belly to monitor her baby's heart rate.

When McLean saw the neonatal incubator, she felt a flash of panic. If something went wrong, the thought dawned on her, it was there to save her baby.

The shunt placement went well. A few weeks of bed restlater, so did the C-section.

Her baby was healthy, born with a smidge of red hair.

She named him Teddy.

But quickly, mom and baby were separated. Teddy went home with McLean's husband while she stayed for what she hoped would be a final surgery.

The big one, to bid the tumor goodbye.

A winding road ahead

The night before her final surgery, McLean took out her phone and wroteletters to her children. To her 3-year-old daughter, Margot, she saidshe was sorry for all that their family had gone through. The fierylittle girl with a sharp sense of humor had developed anxiety over the months that her mommy was sick.Hospitals now seemed scary.

McLean was proud of her, she wrote, for being so brave.

To Teddy, she wrote about how hard she had worked to bring him into the world - how wanted he was. If something went wrong in the operating room, she needed both her children to know how much they were loved.

Behind the ear, a wedge of bone shaped like a pyramid offers a gateway through the skull. Removing the bone allows surgeons to get deep into the head without disturbing tissue. In the operating room that day, a colleague cleared the path. Then Agazzi stepped in.

The challenge with a tumor like McLean's is that all of the arteries that feed the brain, all of the nerves that make the face move, that help the eyes to track, that allow a person to swallow - all of them wrap around the tumor like twine. McLean's mass posed a particular challenge because it wasn't just enveloped in nerves, but sticking to them.

Agazzi had to peel them away one by one over several hours. One mistake, and her face could be paralyzed.

Though the surgery was high-risk, Agazzi had a specialized tool in his kit to make the procedure safer: the development of a targeted radiation treatment.

After the bulk of a mass is removed, remnants of tumors like McLean's can be expunged through a non-invasive procedure using a system called CyberKnife. With the help of artificial intelligence, doctors use computers to create a map of the brain and a machine to zap the remaining growth away. That means surgeons can leave the tricky edges behind to be cleared up post-operation.

McLean's surgery went about as well as it could have, even with the anticipated side effects. She awoke with temporary vocal paralysis. She lost hearing in her right ear for good. After three weeks in the hospital, doctors sent her home.

There were physical therapists and speech therapists and occupational therapists who treated her at her bedside. She watched baseball game after baseball game - becoming a Rays fan - to retrain her eyes to track motion.

Her husband took paternity leave. Friends and family brought meals on rotation. They ordered DoorDash. They shared videos and memes.

As Teddy learned to be in the world, McLean had to relearn, too.

1 year later

On a recent Saturday morning, friends and family gathered for a barbecue to celebrate Teddy's first birthday.

McLean's husband, Dylan Frechette, placed a party hat on the baby's head. McLean carried over a white cake with blue icing, topped with a little bear, and set it on hishigh chair. Margot, a true big sister, did the honors of blowing out the candles for her brother.

Standing before the crowd at their Tampa home, McLean's husband gave a toast to his wife and the people whohad held the family up.

For McLean, the last year has brought to light a sort of dichotomy. Life is so fragile - and yet, with the marvel of medical advancement, the body can endure what on paper feels insurmountable.

She remembers a nurse making eye contact in the operating room, recognizing her fear, and coming over to hold her hand. The lactation team who helped her pump while she was under anesthesia, so that she would be able to breastfeed. The reassurance of Agazzi, who didn't sugarcoat her reality but made it feel possible to overcome. The momentshe got home from the hospital after weeks away and was finally able to hold her baby, and snuggle her daughter, and sleep.

Though her tumor is gone, and regular life has resumed, McLean will check in with the team at Tampa General for years to come.

There's a sweet irony to her story, McLean said. It was a black diamond pregnancy, sure, but Teddy is an incredibly relaxed baby. He always smiles and rarely cries. A month into his life, he was sleeping through the night.

"My friends and I joke that he came out and read the room," McLean said. "He was like ‘Well, this lady's on her last leg, I need to be good.'"

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This story was originally published June 8, 2026 at 3:34 AM.