TV anchor believes her baby girl’s death saved one life — and paved the way for another
If Allison Latos was a little bit nervous in the days and weeks leading up to the moment when she would welcome her third daughter into the world, it’d be hard to blame her.
After all, this was to be the second time in less than two years that the WSOC-TV anchor would be heading to a maternity ward to give birth — and the first time wound up being the single most emotionally devastating night of her and her husband Josh Lucas’s lives.
“The memory of when they put Hannah on my chest, and we heard her cry, was so fresh. It’s probably burned into my head because, you know, it’s one of the few memories of her that we really have,” says Allison, whose daughter Hannah Joy Lucas died May 13, 2020, less than two hours after being born.
“And I thought, I don’t know how I’m gonna react whenever I hold this child,” she continues, recalling some of the anxious thoughts she had over the course of the winter, during this latest pregnancy. “You know, Am I gonna be a mess? Am I gonna be OK?”
As it turns out, Allison had no reason to worry.
What she felt when they put Helena Faith Lucas on her chest, just after 1 p.m. on Feb. 16, “was beautifully independent of her, of Hannah’s birth and death,” she says, smiling, as she sits next to Josh while holding their sweetly-squawking week-old daughter in her arms. “It felt like its own experience. Because it was.”
Yet the sisters will forever share a complicated, bittersweet link.
It’s something Allison and Josh both believe in their hearts: Helena wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Hannah — and Allison might not be, either.
The worst news expectant parents can get
They were high school sweethearts in West Virginia who drifted apart after graduation, then back together after college, before settling and marrying in Charlotte in 2013.
When they tried to start a family a few years later, they ran into challenges, but eventually overcame them with help from a fertility clinic. On March 18, 2018, they welcomed their first daughter, who they named Hope — in part because the word represented something they never gave up despite their many struggles to get pregnant.
The following year, upon deciding to grow their family, they had none of the same fertility issues. Instead, they had a much more tragic one. At 34 weeks, Allison and Josh learned that the baby growing inside her belly had a very rare condition called a dural arteriovenous fistula.
Basically, the baby’s brain wasn’t getting good blood flow, which in turn had a negative impact on its heart.
Basically, they were told their baby — who they would learn was another girl — would not survive.
Allison had to carry her unborn daughter for 13 more days, all the while knowing the baby was going to die.
Hannah died in her mother’s arms the same night she was born, and there’s no way to sufficiently convey how shattered Allison and Josh were left.
But an already-awful 2020 wasn’t done with them yet.
‘What does this mean for our family?’
It actually started four months before Hannah’s birth and death.
After finishing an evening newscast in January 2020, Allison received a voicemail from a viewer who told her she noticed a lump on her throat. Allison took a photo of her throat and sent it to her siblings, who are physicians, and her brother suggested that pregnancy could cause an enlarged thyroid. An evaluation by her obstetrician determined that her thyroid was functioning fine, so Allison stopped worrying about it.
Cut to that summer, not too long after losing Hannah. A planned memorial service had been scrapped due to COVID, but her family gathered the weekend it was supposed to take place anyway — and at some point, the conversation turned to that viewer’s phone call.
“‘I can still see the lump in your throat,’” Allison recalls her brother saying. “At that point I’m a hypochondriac because of what we just went through, so the very next day I called my primary care doctor.” Following a battery of tests, she received — for the second time in just a few months — a crushing medical diagnosis.
She had thyroid cancer.
The next six months were rough. In mid-summer, her thyroid was removed; in September, she had radioactive iodine treatment; in January, another unexpected gut punch, when doctors found spots on her lungs. Allison was consumed with worry: What does this mean for our family? Will we ever have more kids? Am I going to die?
The spots were tiny, though, and another round of scans in April 2021 showed that they remained tiny.
By that point, her doctor was matter-of-fact. “‘People live with spots in their lungs for many, many, many years and never see any change,’” Allison recalls her doctor saying. “‘So I think you need to go live your life. If that means you want to have more kids, don’t let this stop you.’”
Allison and Josh would take that message to heart. “We just sort of decided,” Allison says, “that ... we could not live, fearing what’s gonna come next, or we can live and just face what comes next.”
In May 2021, right after what would have been Hannah’s first birthday, the family finally held a crowded memorial service — on a beautiful, sunny day that fell right in the sweet spot after the first waves of vaccinations and before the delta variant started to spread.
Then in June, Allison and Josh found out they were expecting again.
The next nine months proved to be a more emotionally complicated experience than most people could possibly imagine.
How Hannah has continued to shape them
“There was so much joy and everything through the pregnancy, but it was like, you simultaneously grieved all that didn’t pan out with Hannah,” Allison says. “Because of what we went through with her, we were watched a lot closer. The doctors were really keeping an eye on us, and we had really frequent ultrasounds, and so all of those checks were reassuring. But the first few times we went and they told us, ‘The brain looks normal,’ I would pretty much melt down every time —”
Her voice shakes as she finishes that sentence, and her eyes begin to well up.
“— because ... you’re relieved, but you’re so sad because —” she pauses briefly and swallows hard “— it just didn’t work out with her that way. But then when I think about ... the role she played in possibly saving my life — I mean, it’s pretty incredible.”
Here’s what she means by that:
First, the surgeon who removed her thyroid told Allison that probably being pregnant with Hannah is what made the lump on her throat pronounced enough for the concerned viewer to notice and report it. Second, her family probably wouldn’t have been gathered together that weekend in the summer of 2020 if not for that planned-but-canceled memorial service, and so the conversation about the viewer and the lump, Allison and Josh say, might never have happened.
Also, Allison says, “I feel like if she was with us — she had been born, was healthy — we would have been consumed with ... parenting and newborns and having a toddler and everything. ... I wouldn’t have been thinking about my own health. I would have been totally preoccupied.
“So that’s where I really think it was her life and her death that has changed us in ways that we just didn’t see coming. ... That’s where I say the gratitude for her, and all she continues to bring to our family, is so much deeper than I could have even imagined in those initial days and weeks after we lost her.
“She’s shaping us every day because, really ... Helena wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Hannah. I think we probably would have said, ‘OK, our family’s complete with two.’”
‘The happiest I’ve been in a really long time’
There are still tears in the Latos-Lucas household, but there are also more smiles and laughter than there have been in a long time.
Allison and Josh can be seen beaming broadly and beautifully in the photos from the hospital that they used to announce Helena’s Feb. 16 arrival on social media.
A week later, in the living room of their home in Belmont, their mouths curve into softer smiles when they talk about why they named their third daughter Helena. “The meaning there is ‘a bright light,’ or ‘shining light,’” Josh explains, “and we felt like that was just so fitting for coming through and being on the other side of everything that the last two years has offered.”
Then they laugh when they recall how Hope, who turns 4 next month, began bawling and wailing when her parents called her from the hospital, because she had her heart set on a little brother and was devastated by the news of a little sister instead.
Then they laugh again (and shake their heads, and turn a little red, too) when Allison — as she shares thoughts on the “gratitude and perspective that came from experiencing all that 2020 brought us” — is interrupted by the very distinctive sounds of baby Helena filling up her fresh diaper.
They both laugh some more while talking about Hope, both smile some more while talking about Helena, both cry some more while talking about Hannah.
And as the conversation comes to an end, Allison apologizes.
“Sorry, I hope we weren’t so, like, heavy and weepy,” she says, and she and Josh both laugh. “I hope we seem happy.”
“Yeah,” Josh chimes. “We are happy.” They both laugh again.
“Despite all our crying,” Allison says, still laughing.
“I’m just the happiest I’ve been in a really long time,” she says, smiling, as Helena continues squawking in her lap, and between bits of running commentary from Hope, who’s wearing headphones and watching a video on an iPad in a living chair near the couch.
“It’s just nice to have good news to share, and to just really be in this moment. As crazy as it is. I mean, it is a chaotic cluster —” she stresses, as she and Josh burst into laughter again “— most days. But I just love it.”
Allison looks down in her lap at Helena and smiles again.
“She’s just perfect.”
This story was originally published March 1, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
