Lisa Fasone thought her path to motherhood might be closing. After her first daughter was born in 2022, something went wrong—not obviously, but subtly. Her menstrual cycle never returned. She continued lactating long after weaning. Headaches, night sweats, fatigue settled into her days. Bloodwork revealed the culprit: elevated prolactin levels, a hormone produced deep in the brain by the pituitary gland.
For many women, elevated prolactin makes pregnancy nearly impossible. It's a quiet kind of heartbreak, especially when you desperately want another child. Fasone initially tried medication to manage the condition, but her symptoms kept creeping back. An MRI finally showed the source—a prolactinoma, a benign tumor on her pituitary gland, sitting at the base of her brain and churning out too much prolactin.
The diagnosis brought clarity but also a wrenching dilemma. More medication might work, but higher doses meant higher risks—and Fasone didn't want to risk an unborn baby on treatments not proven safe in pregnancy. She found herself at a crossroads: keep increasing medication that wasn't really helping, or face the problem head-on through surgery.
That's when she met Dr. Stephen Magill, a neurosurgeon at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. Magill understood what mattered most to Fasone. He walked her through the surgery—the benefits, the risks, what to expect. She decided to go ahead.
The outcome exceeded her hopes. Magill removed the entire tumor, and Fasone's prolactin levels returned to normal almost immediately. "Even within a month of surgery, she was able to have a baby," Magill said. That baby was born healthy. No hormone replacement therapy needed. No ongoing medication. Just a healthy pituitary gland and a growing family.
For Magill, watching a patient's life unfold this way is profound medicine. "To get someone through that and then see full circle, living a normal life, healthy pituitary gland, not on any hormone replacement. Holding a healthy baby is just, it's incredible," he said.
Infertility, Fasone knows, carries an invisible weight. It isolates. It makes you question yourself. But her story carries a quiet message for others wrestling with their own diagnoses: don't stop advocating for yourself. "If you feel like something's wrong, make sure that your voice is heard [by] your providers," she said. Sometimes the answer isn't more medication or accepting what seems inevitable. Sometimes it's finding the specialist who will listen, explain the full picture, and help you reclaim the future you want.
In the months after surgery, Fasone got to experience something she wasn't sure would happen: she became a mother again. It's a reminder that even rare tumors have solutions, and that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is insist on being heard.