The Cancer That Pretends to Be Pregnant

How Choriocarcinoma Sneaks In After Birth—And Why It’s Curable. It is a rare, terrifying tumor that arises from pregnancy itself.

A few months after giving birth, one of my patients came back with what sounded, at first, like the most ordinary postpartum problem in the book: bleeding. Not a little spotting, but gushes. I examined her—her uterus was large. That raised my eyebrow. She also complained of shortness of breath. That raised both eyebrows.

So, we admitted her. The chest X-…