HOW FAMILY
OF all Suzanne Bell’s Mother’s Days, this one will be extra special – with a baby son that she feared she might never live to see.
Her joy at finding she was expecting her third child last February was shattered when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Doctors told her she would need a mastectomy to remove a tumour the size of a golf ball, as other cancer treatment would risk the life of her unborn child.
The news plunged Suzanne, 40, into torment. “All I could think about was I might wake up without my left boob and my baby,” she said.
But today she reveals how partner Craig, 31, and her two children from a previous relationship rallied round her with love laced with touching humour.
When her mastectomy scar left her “feeling like a monster” she said her daughter Sienna, eight, told her: “Two boobs, one boob, no boob – you’re still our mummy.’
And Grace, four, brushed away her anguish by asking if she could decorate her bandage with Peppa Pig plasters – “and of course I let her,” said Suzanne.
Even when she got her prosthetic breast, it didn’t faze the girls – they just saw it as an ideal replacement for a tennis ball they’d lost.
LUMP
Now they’re both delighted with their baby brother Theo born last October.
Suzanne recalls how she broke the news of her pregnancy to primary teacher Craig, her partner of 16 months, after discovering she was pregnant on February 13, 2019.
She decided to tell him in a Valentine’s Day card. “I just wrote, ‘You’re going to be a daddy’. He was over the moon.”
But their joy turned to despair in April when she was massaging her breasts with oil to prevent stretch marks. She found a lump in the left one.
After seeing her GP she was referred to Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospital’s Breast Clinic, near her home. Craig went with her to an appointment she still saw as just “a precaution.”
But after a physical examination and ultrasound, doctors said they needed a biopsy.
“I felt sick to my stomach with worry,” said Suzanne.“Everybody there, including Craig, told me to stop panicking, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible was going to happen.”
At a follow-up three days later, she was told she had stage one cancer, with a 4.5cm wide tumour in her left breast.
“The nurse asked if I had anybody with me – but I’d insisted Craig go to work,” said Suzanne. “My world came crashing down. All I could think was, ‘I can’t have cancer – I’m pregnant’.”
It was that night when she broke the news to Craig that reality hit home.
“He was so excited about becoming a dad. Now I feared I could be denying him that chance,” she said. “But he told me he’d support me no matter what.”
Doctors decided on a mastectomy as chemotherapy and radiotherapy could harm her baby. Suzanne was also told there could be no reconstructive surgery at the same time as being under anaesthetic too long would be a risk too.
“I wasn’t bothered about any of that,” she said. “I just wanted the cancer gone and for my baby to survive.”
She said the hardest job was telling her little girls what was happening.
“I wanted to be as honest as possible with them, so I said doctors had found