Teenage girls make lots of promises to each other, promises that often get lost in the journey to adulthood. But when Katie told her BFF Mandy—who’d
been treated for a rare childhood cancer—that someday she’d have a baby for her, she really meant it.
Katie Pohlman and Amanda (Mandy) Wilson, both 29, were high school buddies. A year apart in school, they became close after Mandy started dating Katie’s older brother. “Then I called to ask her how I should break up with her brother, and something just clicked,” says Mandy. “I think I was 15, and she was 16. We just started hanging out.” The two girls got jobs together, as cooks in a local bar. Since then the two have formed a mutual admiration society.
“Katie is such a great person, I don’t think we’ve ever argued; we pretty much agree on everything,” says Mandy. “And she’s such a happy person, and such a good friend.”
Says Katie: “Mandy was homecoming queen, prom queen, lead cheerleader. She was pretty. But she liked everybody and never judged anyone, never thought she was better than anyone. She has a really neat personality.”
But there was something more about Mandy that wasn’t quite so enviable. When she was just 4 years old, she was diagnosed with Burkitt’s lymphoma, a rare childhood cancer that affected her uterus and left ovary. She went through a round of chemotherapy, and then had surgery to remove the two organs. Her right ovary remained, and as Mandy grew it produced estrogen and ovulated normally, although she could not have periods.
For years Mandy didn’t really know what had happened. During her treatments her parents simply told the little girl that she was sick, and that she would get better. And she did.
Then, around the time she was 12 and would have started menstruating, she learned the consequences of her treatment. “My dad and I were working out in the garden, and he just said, kind of nonchalantly, ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever realized this, but you won’t be able to have children because of everything you went through when you were younger.’ I went back into the house and talked to my mom about it, to make sure I understood,” recalls Mandy.
At the time, she wasn’t particularly upset by the news. “Because my parents didn’t make it a big deal, I never made it a big deal,” she says. “I think if they’d made it a serious conversation I would have taken it differently.” Besides, she adds, “Somehow I knew I was going to have kids anyway, that I would be a mom.”
Katie was aware of her friend’s childhood illness, and it troubled her. She used to babysit, and always knew she wanted children of her own. She couldn’t imagine not having them.
“We were sitting in her parents’ basement, watching movies, the first time it came up,” recalls Mandy. “We started talking, getting into more details of everything that had happened when I was little. Katie said she could see herself as a surrogate mom. And I knew that was possible because my doctors told me that my one ovary was producing eggs.”
But after Katie announced she’d have a baby for her friend someday, the matter dropped. “Mandy never asked me, never held me to it. She just took it as a nice thing for me to say,” says Katie.
Katie went off to college first. “Mandy took me to college with my parents,” says Katie. “She was the one crying as they dropped me off.”
The following year Mandy went to college, two hours away from Katie’s school. “There were times we didn’t talk for three months, but then we’d call and talk like we’d never skipped a beat,” says Katie.
After graduation, Katie married first. Mandy was in the wedding. She brought her future husband, Rob, as her date, even though they had only been together a few weeks. “When Mandy was dating people, it was always the hardest thing for her to tell them she couldn’t have kids,” says Katie. “But Rob is just great. Everyone liked Rob right away.”
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