Funderburks set to welcome first child after Alicia’s cancer diagnosis during pregnancy
Kody and Alicia Funderburk were excited to find out last September that they were expecting their first child. But when a test result early during pregnancy came back abnormal, that excitement became tinged with fear as the couple spent the following months searching for answers. Eventually, they finally got one: Alicia was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in January, starting chemotherapy right before TwinsFest.
Had Alicia not become pregnant when she did, there’s no telling how long it might have taken to detect the cancer. “Yeah, this sucks, but we do have a lot of positives to be thankful for, and I think that’s really what you lean into when something like this is going on,” Kody said. Alicia quickly began chemotherapy, which was halted as she neared her due date.
The Twins reliever will be placed on the paternity list for the upcoming series against the Mets with Alicia set to be induced on Monday. Weeks after Baby Funderburk is born, Alicia will resume treatment. While there was a worry that the test results could come back as breast cancer, which runs in Alicia’s family, Kody said the doctors were all optimistic from the beginning with this diagnosis.
“We caught it early enough. It was just more about ‘OK, what do we need to do? ’ ” he said.
“Kind of like how baseball is, you kind of get to your process ‘OK, what’s next? ’ ‘OK, go execute that. ’ ‘What’s next?