Woman fights cancer while pregnant
Melissa Rathgaber was three months pregnant when she was told she had breast cancer.
After finding a lump on her breast, doctors had assured her it didn’t appear cancerous and the surgeon who removed the lump agreed, saying it was likely just fatty tissue.
But a few weeks later — just after Christmas in 2015 — a call from her doctor shattered those assurances.
“She said I had triple-negative breast cancer and so she needed to do additional surgeries ... It was absolutely devastating,” recalled Rathgaber. She also had a threeyear-old son at home.
“With all the reassurances that I was given, I just hadn’t considered that it would be ( breast cancer) at all, and then that call came in and it sort of floored us. My husband and I went in and I didn’t really hear anything that the doctor was saying.”
A lumpectomy and a lymph node biopsy quickly followed. Her tumour was small — only eight millimetres — so the doctors were hopeful it would not have spread. The results again told a different story and a few weeks later, Rathgaber found out the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes.
She was referred to an oncologist who told her they should start chemotherapy immediately. Six months pregnant by this point, Rathgaber was hesitant.
“I asked if we could wait for it, but he said if it was his own family he wouldn’t recommend that because it was such a small tumour that was already aggressively trying to get all over the place,” she said.
She agreed, and underwent two rounds of chemotherapy over the next couple of months. Despite having weekly checkups with a specialist to ensure her baby was doing well, Rathgaber worried how the treatments would affect him.
“He just was helpless on the inside and I didn’t know if it was going to impact him for life,” she said.
Two weeks before her due date and before her third round of chemotherapy, Rathgaber was induced to make sure she had the strength needed for delivery. Her son Hudsen was born on March 26, 2016.
“He was perfectly healthy, which was a huge relief,” said Rathgaber.
Just 12 days later, she was back in the hospital for another round of chemotherapy, with treatments continuing until June. Following that, she underwent 30 radiation treatments throughout July and August.
Even after treatments wrapped up, she still made frequent trips to the hospital for scans to make sure the cancer had not returned. This summer — three and a half years after her initial diagnosis — Rathgaber said she was officially discharged from the Allan Blaire Cancer Centre in Regina.
“We had a big party here and a celebration that I’m done with that,” she said. “I’m feeling really, really, really good.”
But Rathgaber knows that, because of the type of breast cancer she had, she will always be at high risk for the cancer to return. Because of this, and the many other women fighting breast cancer, Rathgaber was thrilled to learn about Run For The Cure from her nieces and seized the opportunity to raise money for breast cancer research. On Sunday, she participated in Run For The Cure in Regina with a team of friends and family behind her.
“I’m super passionate about it now, to raise that money for the research that still needs to be done so that we can figure out how to prevent this completely,” she said.