Marcha’s twins had eye cancer
Marscha (33) and Haiko (35) were overjoyed with their son Jayson (now 9) and the twins Zoë and Dex. When the twins were ten months old, it turned out that they both had eye cancer.
For Zoë (now 7), the tumor was confined to her eye, but Dex developed a metastasis and passed away. “Every night, I relive the moment Dex died in our arms.”
Marscha: “When I was ten months old, my right eye was removed. It turned out there was a tumor in my eye. I didn’t have to undergo chemotherapy or radiation therapy because the tumor was removed along with my eyeball. Since then, I’ve had a prosthesis in my eye—commonly known as a glass eye. I’ve never known anything other than seeing with just one eye. When I was fourteen, I started dating Haiko, who was sixteen at the time. We knew early on that we wanted to have children someday. But I might have been a carrier of a genetic condition. So, when I was eighteen, I underwent genetic testing, which showed that I wasn’t a carrier. That was the best possible outcome. We were happy. There was an almost negligible 0.5 percent chance that my children would inherit the predisposition to retinoblastoma—an eye tumor.
