For the first time since delivering twins, a local mother recently diagnosed with eye cancer is speaking out, and only to Channel 9.
Just weeks before she was due to give birth to a baby boy and girl, Jessica Boesmiller received a stunning diagnosis: ocular melanoma.
"I had blurry vision coming home from a staff meeting one night," Boesmiller said.
What she thought was an unusual pregnancy symptom was actually a large tumor in her right eye.
"All I could think about was, 'I can't leave my children,'" Boesmiller said. “I was terrified for what this meant for our life and if I would be able to see them grow old."
The Boesmillers have two older sons who are 7 and 9. They said telling their sons that Jessica had cancer was difficult but the couple tried to do it in a way that the boys could understand.
"Mark has kept a garden for me for a long time and the boys understood pulling weeds and they understood that. So we compared it to a weed in a garden and I had a weed in my eye," Boesmiller said.
Twenty days after her diagnosis, doctors removed Jessica's eye. Right now, she is wearing an eyepatch but hopes to get a prosthetic eye.
Three weeks later, on Dec. 22, Piper and Mason were born.
"How are they doing?" anchor Allison Latos asked.
"They're great. Their placenta pathology after the C-section, it went to pathology and came back negative. So the doctors say that they're good and if that was clear we didn't have to worry about them," Boesmiller said.
The family is focusing on the future, including the search for answers to why a rare eye cancer has affected so many families in the Charlotte area.
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