Updated October 21, 2026, 6:27 a.m. ET
After a week of suffering, Nicole Léon went to the emergency room.
She was sure it was food poisoning. The 32-year-old said everything in her stomach had been “coming out both ends” for several days. Doctors suggested that if it wasn’t food poisoning, it might have been an ectopic pregnancy. Leon knew she wasn’t pregnant, but her doctors insisted she have a CT scan of her abdomen.
The results showed no ectopic pregnancy. But it wasn’t food poisoning that made Léon sick either. It was a 17 centimeter tumor in the liver.
After a series of doctor appointments, scans and tests, doctors told Leon she had liver cancer, although she was otherwise in very good health, with no liver disease or other underlying liver problems. They gave him six months to live.
“When she said that, it was almost like an out-of-body experience where I felt like I was floating,” Leon said, adding that her mother was with her when she learned of her prognosis. “I almost felt like my world had collapsed in front of me.”
Leon went from being perfectly healthy, exercising six days a week, to managing her own funeral arrangements. “I was in complete shock,” she said. But she never fully accepted “six months to live” as her destiny.
“Immediately afterward, I asked myself, ‘How could this be true?’ I need another opinion,” she said.
Leon’s story is rare, his doctor told USA TODAY. Dr. Talia Baker, a liver transplant and hepatobiliary surgeon, doesn’t think a healthy 30-something should worry about liver cancer if she doesn’t already have a diseased or scarred liver. “In the case of someone like Nicole, I don’t think there was anything she did, didn’t do, could have done to catch this sooner,” Baker said, adding that liver cancer can go unnoticed for years. But something everyone can learn from Leon, Baker said, is how to advocate for your health. A positive attitude won’t cure cancer, Leon said, but patients should know their options and “shouldn’t be afraid to speak up.”
“I think everyone should have the opportunity to get a second opinion,” Baker said, adding that multidisciplinary medical teams are essential. “A team made up of people with different superpowers that they can bring to the table will often have a much more positive and optimistic outcome than if you just stuck with one discipline.”
“This surgeon saved my life”
Leon took his initial diagnosis and prognosis across the country to three different medical centers, seeking different opinions. “Every place told me something different,” she said, but most agreed that the mass on her liver was too big to remove with surgery.
Leon wasn’t afraid of riskier treatment options, she said, because she was so young. “What else did I have to lose?” She had already been told that she would not celebrate her 33rd birthday.
“I was going to keep looking for answers until I got the one that I thought was best for me,” she said. “I had to stand up for myself. I had to ask questions. I had to understand the facts behind the tumor, the science behind my tumor, my specific treatment options and really weigh those options and determine what was best for me.”
Ultimately, Leon underwent TheraSphere Y-90 radiation therapy at Northwestern University to shrink his tumor to a workable size. Then, four months after Leon’s visit to the emergency room, Baker came in and removed the mass.
“It was extremely risky because she didn’t know if she would be able to remove it,” Léon explained. But when she woke up the next day, she was told the entire tumor had been removed. “This surgeon saved my life. And now I’ve been cancer-free for almost 10 years.”
A journey to motherhood after cancer treatment
Once she was cured of cancer, Léon began to focus on what mattered most: her family.
Her parents and sister were tremendously supportive throughout her cancer journey, she said, and her boyfriend at the time accompanied her to every doctor’s appointment.
Leon said she sat down with her then-boyfriend shortly after the diagnosis and told him she would understand if it was too much to bear. “I didn’t know if I would be able to get married one day, have kids one day and really give him a family, that’s what we talked about,” she said. “I told him it would be nice if he left.”
He told her he didn’t care if they spent six months together, six years or 60 years, she said. “He wanted to be with me forever.”
“He never left my side after that,” she said. “And a few months after my surgery, when I was cancer-free, he proposed and we got married. And we also have two beautiful boys now.”
These babies were also miracles. “My doctors didn’t know if I would be able to have children,” she said. “They didn’t know if it would be smart to have kids.” Her medical team monitored her closely during her pregnancies because her tumor tested positive for estrogen and pregnancy hormones were at risk of causing the tumor to return.
When she gave birth to her first child, who is now 7 years old, Léon and her husband wanted to honor the surgeon who had saved her life. They named their son Baker. Dr. Baker said she remembers when Leon and his family brought baby Baker to the clinic to meet her, around three weeks old.
“I have three kids of my own,” Baker said. “And I have a ton of nieces and nephews, but it was, I mean, when you think about what a privilege it is to be a part of people’s journeys like this, it was pretty humbling and pretty wonderful.”
Madeline Mitchell’s role covering women and the care economy at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Contact Madeline at memitchell@usatoday.com and @maddiemitch_ on X.
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