Hannah Toohill, a 29-year-old woman from Scotland, has just shared an incredibly gut-wrenching story of getting cancer right after having a new baby boy.
Toohill's story begins with a devastating cancer diagnosis, which the mother-of-two received shortly after giving birth to her son Fraser. Toohill was diagnosed with an advanced form of the blood cancer, multiple myeloma, she told the Scottish paper, the Daily Record UK. And because her prognosis led her to believe that she only had months left to live, she made a heart-wrenching decision that she felt was the right thing to do: she chose not to bond with her newborn son.
Read More"I thought the right thing was to spend time with my daughter Catherine, who knew me already and would have memories with me," she said. "So while my husband spent time with Fraser every day, I hardly ever went to the hospital to visit him."
Fraser was in the hospital at the time because he was born extremely premature and had to remain in the neonatal care unit. While Fraser was being cared for, Toohill was undergoing tests to determine the cause of intense backpain that she initially thought to be pregnancy-related. The tests revealed, however, that Toohill's cancer had weakened her bones, resulting in a broken sternum and crushed discs in her back.
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Luckily, Toohill's story has a happy ending. After four rounds of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant that left her in the hospital for five weeks, Toohill's cancer entered remission, and it became clear that she would live longer than several months. That's when she decided to get to know her son after all.
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"My mindset only started to change when I realized the treatment I was receiving was working and I was actually doing OK," she said. "Now I can't get enough of Fraser we have such a wonderful relationship. He's such a mummy's boy."
Figuring Out What's Best For Your Children After a Cancer Diagnosis
Hannah Toohill is far from alone in the difficulty she faced navigating her own cancer treatment while trying to figure out the best way to put her children first. Members of the SurvivorNet community who are parents often say that after a cancer diagnosis, the hardest thing is figuring out how to tell your children, and to prepare them for the possibility they might lose their parent.
Breast cancer survivor Gina de Givenchy, for instance, told SurvivorNet that after her diagnosis, all she wanted was for her 12-year-old daughter to know her mom would be OK.
"I didn't want her to see me weak and sickly," de Givenchy said. "But at the same time, you can't completely hide it. When it comes to your kids, I think you always want to sort of protect them."
RELATED: Telling Your Kids You Have Cancer: "When it Comes to Your Kids, You Want to Protect Them"
Journalist and breast cancer survivor Amy Robach, whose daughters were 7 and 10 years old when she was diagnosed, told SurvivorNet that on the day she told her daughters, she had been crying all day. But then she said, "The moment I saw my daughters, I had this strength come over me, this mom strength, and suddenly when they started to cry, I got strong… it was really strange. And I was able to tell them [that] I was strong, that I was going to fight, that I had the best doctors in the world, and that I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. And it did help them. And feeling their love and feeling their support was amazing."
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