When you’ve been through a traumatic experience like cancer, it can be difficult to picture what the future will hold.
Shelly Battista feels she was meant to be a mother, but after welcoming her first daughter, she found a lump in her breast while breastfeeding. She assumed it was a clogged duct, and the Arlington Heights, Illinois mom was shocked to learn it was actually triple-negative breast cancer.
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Although she has no family history of cancer, Shelly carries the BRCA1 gene mutation, which comes with an increased risk of certain cancers. In February 2020, she started chemotherapy and had a double mastectomy. The treatment was successful, and Shelly was declared cancer-free in December of the same year.
Unfortunately, Shelly’s cancer treatments damaged her ovaries so badly that they needed to be removed. The good news is she was able to preserve embryos for future use with help from Dr. Kara Goldman at Northwestern Medicine Center for Fertility and Reproductive Medicine.
“There’s a tremendous misconception that you have to have ovaries in order to carry a pregnancy, but actually the ovaries and uterus function quite separately from each other,” Dr. Goldman explained.
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A year after receiving her cancer-free diagnosis, Shelly went back to Dr. Goldman to start trying for a baby. The first two embryo transfers failed, but on third try, Shelly got pregnant!
“We didn’t want to get our hopes up too high, right?” Shelly said. “So, when we got the phone call from Dr. Goldman — she called us herself, we were very, very ecstatic.”
The joy didn’t end there! At their first ultrasound, the technician spotted not one, but two babies in there!
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Incredibly, Shelly’s twin daughters arrived on the same day she was declared cancer-free just two years earlier. Seems they were meant to be, doesn’t it?
“I always wanted at least three kids, so this was amazing,” said the overjoyed mom.
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Shelly really came full circle in just two years. We can only imagine the heartache she felt when she received that diagnosis, but look at what beautiful things can happen when you keep persevering!
Share this story to welcome the Battista twins to the family.
Source: inspiremore.com
