Baldwin woman has rare benign tumor removed from spine

Ruth Gutierrez of Baldwin is looking forward to Thanksgiving.

"I can actually cook now," said the 32-year-old single mother.

That wasn't true seven weeks ago. On Sept. 27 Gutierrez underwent a more than five-hour operation at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow to remove a rare, benign tumor on her spine. The tumor, a thoracic meningioma - a condition that afflicts only 1-3 per million people nationwide a year - had left her numb from the chest down, weak, barely able to walk and painfully dependent on her 8-year-old daughter, Kayla Canales.

"It's a miracle," she said recently at NUMC. "I can't tell you how bad I felt and how good I feel now."

Gutierrez said she first started feeling some numbness in her left leg last January when she walked Kayla to school. But by April she had little feeling in her legs and feet and her knees would buckle. On their daily walk to school, the child had to hold her mother up. The two-block walk home without Kayla frightened her, she said.

In the meantime, Gutierrez had lost her job in sales and was feeling too weak to look for another. She couldn't afford COBRA, which allows former employees to continue their job-based insurance, and she made too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Without health insurance she put off seeing a doctor.

Embarrassed, she let no one in her family except Kayla know how bad she was feeling. Her daughter spent less and less time playing with her friends, Gutierrez said. As her mother recounted this period in their lives this week, Kayla clutched her mother and began to weep.

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Desperate, Gutierrez in the spring went to NUMC for a series of tests she paid for on a sliding scale based on her income. All the tests came up negative and her doctor suggested she get two MRIs, one for the lower body and one for her upper body. She put them off, she said, because they cost $400 each and she didn't have the money.

But in late September she had the second MRI of her upper body and it showed the meningioma. It was about 2 centimeters across and draped around the spine, said Dr. Ricky Madhok, a neurosurgeon at both NUMC and the Harvey Cushing Institutes of Neuroscience at North Shore University Hospital.

Gutierrez was immediately scheduled for surgery and Madhok along with a team of five others successfully removed all of the tumor, which he said was "completely compressing the spine like a pancake."

As soon as she woke up, Gutierrez said could feel her legs again and seven weeks later she feels reborn.

She owes about $40,000 for the operation but has applied again for Medicaid. In the meantime she has decided to pursue a new career. "I want to be a nurse," she said.

And Kayla has gone back to being a normal 8-year-old. "She's not afraid. She doesn't have to hold my hand," she said.

Together, mother and daughter can now look ahead.

"This is a new life for me," Gutierrez said. "This is a new beginning. This is a new me."