19-Year-Old With Brain Tumour Managed to Stay Alive to Give Birth: ‘Death Happens in the Blink of an Eye’

Dana Scatton and her daughter Aries. (www.gofundme.com/prayfordana)

A 19-year-old woman with a malignant brain tumor who managed to stay alive long enough to give birth died on April 21, her family said in a Facebook post.

“This morning shortly before 4 a.m., Dana left us to be with the lord,” Dana Scatton’s family said on the Facebook page, Pray for Dana.

“She inspired us all to be better than who we are and to keep God in our focus at every moment. She faced the greatest fear of all, death, and smiled back with a grin only God can instill. She fought harder than the toughest warriors known to man and did it with grace and valor,” the family wrote.

Scatton, from Pennsylvania, was 17 years old when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor after she was struggling to swallow or speak and even walk.

“I was really overtired,” she said, according to The Advertiser.

“But things kept getting worse. I was forgetting to swallow, and my speech got weird. Then my legs started not responding to things—when I would walk, my legs would drag. That’s when I really got concerned,” she said.

Scatton was diagnosed with DIPG (diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma), in 2017, a type of disease that has no cure and almost no survival rate, reported the Advertiser. DIPG tumors start at the brain stem just above the back of the neck. She was seven and a half months pregnant at the time.

Dr. Jean Belasco, a pediatric oncologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Scatton that there was no hope of survival.

Her condition only worsened and the next day after Christmas, doctors decided to give her radiation without delivering the baby.

“I feel like God just directed the doctors to help decide what I should do,” Scatton said. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to start radiation without having the baby because I didn’t want it to hurt her. But I couldn’t decide what to do—it was too hard.”

Doctors reassured Scatton that the radiation wouldn’t harm the baby and on Jan. 4, after several rounds of radiation on Jan. 3, she gave birth to her daughter, Aries Marie, through C-section.

The baby was born in good health at 4 pounds and 6 ounces.

“She was crying and once they put her on Dana’s chest, she stopped,” Scatton brother,  Josiah Gundry said. “The baby is doing really well … I told my boss about the birth, and he said, ‘One miracle down … one to go.’ ”

“When Dana was going in for the C-section, we were all anxious and stressing,” he said. “And she was just calm. She told us, ‘Listen, it’s gonna be fine.’ I said to her, ‘I don’t know how you’re doing this.’ And she said to me, ‘I just try to trust in God.’”

Scatton’s Death

Her funeral service was held overnight on Friday and was live streamed to the 49,000 fans of the Pray for Dana community on Facebook.

“Thank you to everyone who joined us tonight in person and online to celebrate Dana. We feel very blessed that Dana was loved and supported by so many, from all over the world,” her family said in a recent post.

The family thanked everyone for the cards, letters, and prayers, writing, “Thank you for the support you’ve given Dana over the last 16 months. Thank you for never giving up on her and her fight.”

In her interview with the Advertiser, Scatton had said that death made her realize that this world is temporary.

“It was such a wake-up call,” she said.

“Getting death thrown in your face … it’s so real. It really shows you what’s true. This world doesn’t matter, it’s temporary, you know? When I found out, I immediately let the world go. It’s like, that doesn’t matter anymore. We have to look at the eternal life. We all think we have so much time … honestly, I feel thankful that I have this time to wake up and realize what’s right. And I want everybody to see that. Even though others didn’t get the news that I did, I want them to wake up. I feel blessed that I have this time to make things right–others don’t get that time–death happens in the blink of an eye.”