Victory: Cheyenne Toddler Born With Cancer Spent First 18 Months Fighting for Life

Dorothy Pontillo of Cheyenne was a snuggly baby with big smiles and loud giggles—even while fighting cancer, undergoing chemotherapy, and enduring medical hardships in her first 18 months. She took her first steps in the hospital, pushing a little walker from the toy room while her parents carried her IV poles and lines.

Now 3½, Dorothy is cancer-free, pain-free, and thriving. “She just kept going and now she is just a bright and fun personality,” said her mom, Payton Pontillo. If you ask her name, Payton said, she’ll tell you it’s “Dorothy Ray of Sunshine.”

But the road here was long and uncertain. Dorothy was likely born with a tumor growing on her tailbone, though no one knew until she was a year old. Doctors had flagged enlarged kidneys during Payton’s 20-week pregnancy scan, and after birth, Dorothy was diagnosed with reflux into her kidneys—urine backing up from her bladder. Specialists in Denver prescribed antibiotics, hoping she’d outgrow it.

She seemed fine until just before her first birthday. Dorothy became restless, fussy, unable to sleep. Payton took her to the emergency room, where doctors found she couldn’t empty her bowels. They placed a catheter and sent her home—Payton is a hospice nurse and could manage it. But when the catheter came out, the problems returned. Again and again.

After multiple trips and a life flight to Denver, Payton had enough. “I had hit my limit because it was clear that something was wrong,” she said. “As a hospice nurse, my whole career is to make people comfortable, so to watch my own child in that level of pain and suffering was especially difficult.”

She refused to take Dorothy home without answers. An MRI revealed a grapefruit-sized tumor blocking both bowels and urethra. Doctors confirmed Dorothy had likely been born with it. The diagnosis: mixed germ cell sacrococcygeal teratoma with liver metastasis—originally benign but cancerous by the time it was found.

Within a week, treatment began.

The family’s financial burden was eased by Jason’s Friends Foundation, a Wyoming organization that helps families with children undergoing cancer treatment. There is no pediatric cancer center in Wyoming, so families face travel, lodging, and lost work. Jason’s Friends covers household bills—mortgage, utilities, car payments—so parents can stay with their child.

“We were never not with her,” Payton said. “That she was never alone was such a blessing because it broke my heart to walk by hospital rooms and see children alone because their parents didn’t have an option.”

Dorothy underwent four cycles of chemotherapy and a nearly 13-hour surgery to remove the tumor, which had adhered to her internal organs. By September, she was released.

Now she chases her big sisters and loves dress-up. The family is expecting another baby in May, and Dorothy is excited to be a big sister.

Looking back, Payton’s message is simple: “You will never regret advocating for your child. You might regret if you don’t, but you will never regret if you do, because if you’re wrong, then that’s okay. You just need to know what the whole story is.”