Woman Survives Esophageal Cancer and Wins Gift of a Lifetime

Morgan Hartman and her then-fiancé Phillip de Amezola were busy moving into their new home they bought in 2020 when they realized all of the house’s pipes needed to be replaced. It was the first of several unwelcome developments for the Miami couple, who had been planning on getting married once their lives settled down and their busy schedules permitted. A short time later, the licensed mental health counselor received a surprise cancer diagnosis and was told she would need surgery to replace one of her own pipes. She had cancer of the esophagus, the hollow, muscular tube that moves food and liquid from the throat to the stomach.
{TRANSCRIPT}: - I grew up in Illinois. I was there through college and grad school and I left in 2000. Through a series of crazy events, I was able to get licensed here in Florida to become a mental health counselor. And I work from home. I do only telehealth and I am in private practice. I love it. I'm very blessed. So that's what I do professionally. It was this summer, Phil and I, my fiance and I bought a house in July of 2020. And around that time, I started having some difficulty swallowing that I didn't think much of. A friend of mine who is also a nurse who works with a gastro doctor said, "You really should get that checked out." And I hadn't had an endoscopy or a colonoscopy yet. I was 49. So I went to the endoscopy. That was on December 18th and still not really thinking anything of it. I woke up and the doctor was sitting next to me and she said, "We found a mass and it's really large and I've done a lot of these and while we're waiting for biopsy results, I'm pretty sure it's cancer." So that was like a punch in the stomach. I just did not see it coming.

The type of cancer that Morgan had was a sarcomatoid carcinoma, which is a very rare cancer of the esophagus. It only accounts for about 1% of esophageal cancers and there are no known risk factors for this cancer of the esophagus.

I did five rounds of chemo here at the Miami Cancer Institute. I did 28 rounds of radiation consecutively, and then they scheduled the surgery for about, I think it was about 45 days after my last radiation treatment.

And then we went to the operating room with Morgan in April of 2021. She underwent a robotic three-field esophagectomy, which is an approach to remove the esophagus going through the left neck, the right chest, and the abdomen where we take the stomach and we turn it into a tube that then comes all the way up to the base of the neck and we connect the remnants of the esophagus in the neck to the tube of the stomach so that there is a way for the patient to eat after surgery and the gastrointestinal tract is in continuity. The esophagus is taken out with all the surrounding lymph nodes in the top portion of the stomach. And Morgan did very well with surgery.

I'm told it was a 10 to 11-hour surgery and I was in the hospital for another nine days with a feeding tube and all kinds of tubes coming out of me and I was on the road to recovery and they told me they got it all. Dr. DeRosimo always told me, "Whatever it was is in a bucket in pathology." That's what he would say. "Don't worry about it. We got it. It's in a bucket in pathology."

At this point, we consider her cancer free. She is eating a regular diet without any difficulties and she is doing very well.

And then I saw on Facebook through the Miami Cancer Institute that there was this giveaway for a gift of a lifetime. It was a dream wedding provided by all these vendors at the Ritz-Carlton on Key Biscayne. And I thought to myself was this written for me? Was this written for us? So I put our names in without telling Phil I'd done that, not thinking that I would win. I never win anything ever. And we won. So it was a really cool way to celebrate that we're both here, that we can finally get this done, we can finally get married. And it's very exciting. So I can't say enough good things about this place. Miami Cancer Institute saved my life.