There’s no love like sister love. For one pair of sisters, Randi Fishman and Erin Silverman, their bond is unbreakable: the two are joined by a baby!
When Maryland resident Fishman was 28 in 2011, she received horrific news: She had breast cancer. Her diagnosis happened right after she got married and was about to start a family, crushing her pregnancy dreams.
At the time, Fishman was able to her freeze her eggs and started the expensive, time-consuming process to find a surrogate. They found one and she gave birth in 2014 to their first child, daughter Parker. But she couldn’t carry a second child because of health conditions.
Fishman was devastated, considering she always wanted a big family, telling The Daily Mail, “I wanted to give [Parker] a sibling. Coming from a family of three, I knew that I wanted a bigger family.”
But then, Fishman’s older sister — Silverman, a mom of two — offered to be her surrogate. She gave birth to Fishman’s daughter, Austyn, in 2017.
Fishman, 34, and Silverman, 35, recently revealed to The Daily Mail how harrowing the journey was for both of them. Silverman explained how it was a “long process,” saying, “I always told her that when I was done having kids, I would have a kid for her.”
Fishman had never had symptoms for breast cancer. But tests confirmed her diagnoses — and that she is a carrier of the BRCA1 gene, a gene that increases the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers.
“I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. I never heard of someone that young having breast cancer,” she said.
Two weeks after the devastating news, she had a double mastectomy. In 2012, her cancer came back, so she underwent a lumpectomy and received radiation treatments — and later, decided to undergo a hysterectomy to remove her Fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, and ovaries to prevent ovarian cancer. She has been in remission ever since.
Silverman’s previous pregnancies had been free of complications, but her third as her sister’s surrogate proved to be different. She suffered from bleeding in her placenta and developed high blood pressure. She had to be on bed rest for the last five weeks, and was induced three weeks early.
But despite all the bumps in the road for both sisters, they are extremely happy with how everything worked out (and how could they not be?). Fishman still can’t believe her luck, saying, “can’t believe I have two daughters. I didn’t think that this was possible.”
Sometimes, dreams really do come true.
