During Marisa Merliss’s first pregnancy, everything seemed to be within the realm of normalcy, even mundane. Until that stopped being the case. Merliss, a professional dancer, claims that she and her husband had to endure both mental and physical storms in order to get at the destination, despite the fact that there was a rainbow waiting for them at the finish.
Beginning their path toward becoming parents, Merliss and Michael Minarik, who is both a theater performer and a teacher, waited for a total of eight years before beginning their trip.
In an interview with PEOPLE, she says, “We were busy with our careers, I had some injuries from dance, and I was experiencing chronic pain, but I waited until I was healthy and out of pain.” “Then, at forty weeks [in the year 2020], we experienced a stillbirth after a healthy pregnancy that lasted until full term.”
Minarik was seeing the nurses who were monitoring their child as they glanced at the physicians and shook their heads. And he turned his gaze to his wife, who was grinning while being oblivious of the situation.
According to what Minarik is saying to PEOPLE at this moment, “I thought — I have about nine seconds of life left before my wife finds out that our daughter has passed away.” The moment the physician informed her, she looked at me, and as a caretaker and a parent, I was at a loss for how to shield both my wife and myself from the discomfort that we were experiencing.
They were hoping that their friends would be able to alleviate their pain by sending them on a beach vacation in New Jersey. This would allow them to avoid being at home, where they would be surrounded by reminders of how they ought to have been disciplining their daughter.
On the other hand, even that vacation had a twist: Merliss detected something on her upper inner thigh when the pair was out one day. To have a peek, she requested that her husband do so.
There was a large lump in her leg that was the size of a croquet ball, and it was enormous. Then she asks, “What exactly is this?” To which Minarik responds, “And I thought, oh my God.” The day after we had lost our baby, which was exactly two weeks ago, we were admitted to the hospital again overnight.
It was June in the year 2020, when the COVID-19 epidemic was at its peak. They made a hasty trip to the local hospital, where tests were performed, and according to Minarik, the physician informed them that the peculiar tumor seemed to be “insidious.”
According to Merliss, “It sounded outlandish that I could possibly have a cancerous tumor after what we had just gone through,” she adds. “I believe that the tumor filled up with fluid as a result of the traumatic birth itself, as well as the increased inflammation that resulted from all of the trauma, both emotionally and physically.”
After reaching out to friends who are employed at the cancer center at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City, Merliss, who is also a nurse, was able to get access to the facility within a span of two days. It was determined that she had a rare kind of synovial sarcoma, and she required chemotherapy treatment right away.
It wasn’t too much longer after Merliss’ stillbirth that all of this transpired.
It had been exactly four weeks after we had lost our baby, Minarik recounts. “It was four weeks to the day.” “We hadn’t even had the opportunity to mourn the loss of our child, yet.”
When Merliss found out that she had the opportunity to have additional children, she instantly became anxious about preserving her eggs. At first, however, the physicians did not provide much encouragement.
This is what Merliss had to say about the situation: “Basically, they said it was too soon after giving birth, and then I woke up the next day and got my period.” Because of this, we were given the opportunity to collect eggs.
When it came to receiving treatment for her disease, time was of the importance. Less than two weeks were allotted to her by the medical professionals in order to collect the eggs before she began four rounds of intensive chemotherapy.
We are fortunate that Merliss’s cousin Amanda Schulte volunteered to be a surrogate on the same day that she received the news that she had cancer. Even though she was already a married mother of three children, Schulte claims that she was considering having a fourth child at the time that all of this occurred.
In an interview with PEOPLE, Schulte, who resides in Kansas City, Missouri, says, “I wanted her to know that if she was unable to carry because of the cancer and this horrifying treatment, then I wanted to be the one to do it for them.”
According to Merliss, she was “hanging on by a thread” after the double whammy of her daughter’s loss and the cancer diagnosis, and the idea of not being able to have children hung over her.
“The physical pain, the emotional grief, and the toll that took was way too much,” she adds. “I cried my eyes out.” “But we just had a large number of people show up and show their support for us.”
The notion of Schulte’s offer and the hope that she would be able to take up her life after treatment were what kept her going while she was undergoing treatment for cancer.
It turned out to be OK. It was in November of 2022 that Schulte discovered that she was pregnant, and their extended family celebrated the impending birth of a “rainbow baby” during a large Thanksgiving party.
Due to the fact that Schulte was induced the following summer, Merliss and Minarik were put in a number of stressful situations.
“Hearing the heartbeat after the induction was the big moment because that had been the moment before we lost everything, and it was the biggest exhale,” recalls Merliss. “It really was the moment that changed everything.”
It was on July 13, 2023 that a baby girl named Maya was born.
At the conclusion of her three-year cancer checkup, Merliss reported that her health is all right. She and her husband are now contemplating the best way to commemorate Maya’s first birthday, which will take place later this summer.
Minarik made a comical remark about the possibility of a Broadway performance taking place in the park.
The change from “survival mode” to “thriving mode” is something that Merliss is relishing. “I was in survival mode for a long time,” she declares. “There are times when I have to remind myself that we are now living the life that we hoped and dreamed of, and that we are embracing that while still honoring the past,” she said. “Sometimes it is day to day, or week to week.”
