A pregnant mother has said her unborn baby “saved her life” after an ultrasound scan of her womb revealed early-stage bladder cancer.
Megan McQuade from Teesside had been trying for a baby for over two years. Everything was progressing as it should until Megan found some light bleeding when she was about six weeks pregnant.
“As a first-time mum I panicked”, she told BBC Radio Tees.
When she went to the hospital, the sonographer discovered a shadow on her bladder and urged her to have it investigated.
However, Megan was so “overjoyed” at seeing her baby for the first time, she completely forgot about the shadow and the medical advice. When she returned for another scan though, things were suddenly a lot more serious.
“The lady’s tone completely changed. She said ‘I really think you need to get it looked into so please, make an appointment with your GP’.”
“It suddenly hit me then – I felt a turn in my stomach almost that something wasn’t right.”
It could be cancer
In December, when Megan returned for a consultation, she was warned that it could be cancer. Describing how she felt afterwards, Megan said “the second I walked out of the room my partner just put his arm around me and said, ‘Are you alright? and I just broke down.”
“All possibilities were flooding through my mind – am I going to survive it? What’s going to happen with baby? It was awful.”
Megan was able to have a biopsy and surgery in January, which went well. “The next steps were to determine whether I needed chemotherapy or not and if I did it was explained to me that we would have to basically choose between whether we would take it out, we treat it with chemo or keep baby”, she said.
“It was the worst decision that anyone could ever have to face”, she added.
At a follow-up appointment two weeks later, Megan and her partner “sat down, [and] the consultant said, ‘Everything has gone really well, we managed to get it all out, we took out some extra cells around it just to make sure there’s no chance of it growing back. We believe at this point there’s no further treatment needed’.”
“I still get a bit tearful – it was the best possible news I could have had.”
The couple are expecting their baby in July.
Right To Life UK spokesperson Catherine Robinson said “It’s wonderful not only that Megan didn’t have an abortion that she clearly did not want, but also that her own unborn baby was the reason that her cancer was found and treated in the first place.”
