In 2024, content creator Bridget Bahl was newly married to her husband, Mike, and hoping to start a family. Sharing that process online—where some 1.7 million people followed along as she dated and then planned her wedding—seemed only natural, especially as she underwent rounds of IVF.
She was on her sixth when she felt the lump. At first, she mistook it for a side effect of her IVF medication. “Your breasts change so much during the cycle, so I thought it had something to do with that,” the 42-year-old says. “In my mind, if you have cancer, it’s going to feel like a marble, something hard and foreign. That’s not how this felt.”
At her next fertility check-in, about two weeks later, she asked the doctor to take a look at the lump. Things moved quickly from there: She underwent a mammogram, an ultrasound, and a biopsy in a single day, all of which revealed that she had a golf-ball-size something in her right breast. (“I’m a B cup on my best days,” Bahl jokes. “How could I be hiding a golf-ball-size anything in there?”) Next came the diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma, HER2+ hormone-receptor-negative breast cancer—stage 2 breast cancer that had spread to a nearby lymph node.
While the American Cancer Society reports that the median age for a breast cancer diagnosis is 62, the last decade has shown a major uptick in women under 50 discovering that they have breast cancer. And Bahl had no history of it in her family: No BRCA, no genetic predisposition, not even a single abnormal mammogram among her nine aunts, mother, and maternal grandmother. “My first thought was that I had done this to myself, maybe with the IVF,” Bahl says.
It’s a fairly common misconception. “I’ve been doing this for nearly 15 years, and I would love to tell you that this is the first time a patient has discovered they have cancer during IVF, but it’s not,” says Brian Levine, MD, Bahl’s Manhattan doctor, who is double board-certified in reproductive endocrinology and infertility and obstetrics and gynecology. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, however, no studies have found a correlation or association between taking fertility drugs and developing breast cancer. Instead, what tends to happen is that as women begin fertility treatment, they suddenly pay especially close attention to their bodies. “We know that breast cancer will affect anywhere between one in six to one in eight women during their lives,” Dr. Levine says. “It just ends up that, when people go to fertility clinics, sometimes it’s the first time that they’re actually going to a doctor regularly. That’s when you’re more likely to discover something.”
Once it was confirmed that she could safely restart the hormone treatment, Bahl was able to try one more round of egg retrieval before beginning to address her cancer—and it was her most successful to date. “Round six got us one more embryo,” she says. That’s also when she decided to share her diagnosis on social media, roughly a month after she had learned the news.
Bahl then went into treatment: a lymph-node biopsy, a lumpectomy, months of chemotherapy, and then 15 days of radiation. When we talk, it’s been a week since her final radiation session and Bahl is wrapped in a cardigan, its vivid pink matching the shade associated with breast cancer awareness. Her hair is pulled back, and she’s makeup-free. “Our entire second year of marriage has been cancer and Mike taking care of me,” Bahl says. “Straight out of the gate, I tested all of our wedding vows. It’s been ‘in sickness and in health,’ for real.”
She’s also continued to capture her experience—and progress—for her followers, despite not always feeling up to it. “I had a really, really hard time with chemotherapy, and so it didn’t feel authentic to act like, Oh, I’m totally fine.”
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Bahl and her husband are still hoping to start their family one day; they’ll have three frozen embryos waiting for them after she completes her cancer treatment. Next up for her is immunotherapy—a treatment meant to train the body to ward off future cancer cells.
“When I met with my oncologist for the first time, she was going through all these things, saying, ‘Your eyebrows are going to fall out, your hair is going to fall out, your eyelashes are going to fall out,’” Bahl says. “‘Also, you can’t have a baby.’ All of these things were taken from me so quickly.” Although she’s no longer ovulating due to her treatment, implanting one of her own embryos and carrying her own child isn’t necessarily off the table (something she s hoped for); she’ll just have to be cancer-free for two years first.
She’s still sharing everything on social media, and every time she does, somebody reaches out and tells her that they finally got a mammogram, started self-checks, or even discovered their own cancer because of her. “Went in for my annual mammogram because of you,” a message she shared on Monday read. “Just had a double mastectomy, and they were able to get all the cancer.”
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