Yahoo Lifestyle Love Is Blind's Shaina diagnosed with cancer while 3 months pregnant
Shaina Hurley, who appeared on the second season of Love Is Blind, has opened up about receiving a heartbreaking cervical cancer diagnosis while three months pregnant with her "miracle" baby.
Her son, Yiorgos, who she shares with husband, Christos Lardakis, was born back in February, and as of June this year, Shaina has thankfully been living cancer-free. "I am on the other side now," she has shared.
Speaking to People about the health issues she faced during her pregnancy, Shaina said the diagnosis came as a real shock and that she wasn't willing to risk her pregnancy to undergo some tests and treatment options.
Discussing how her diagnosis came to be, Shaina, who is 34, also said she had "no symptoms" of cervical cancer and that the disease was picked up during a routine smear test.
Following her smear test, Shaina was called by her doctor who explained the results had come back as abnormal and that she required a colposcopy (a test to take a closer look at your cervix which may involve a biopsy – the removal of some tissue) as part of a further investigation.
It's important to note that around 1 in 20 cervical smear tests will come back with abnormal results, but that does not automatically mean a cancer diagnosis. At that stage, it simply means cell changes (which may or may not later develop into cancer) have been detected.
"Nearly all abnormal results show no more than small changes in cells. These act as an early warning sign that, over time, cervical cancer may develop," the NHS explains.
However, sadly in Shaina's case the cells had already developed into cervical cancer. After having her colposcopy, the reality star says her doctor told her quickly that things were "not looking good" and that days later, she was given a stage 2 diagnosis.
"I felt the fear creeping in but I knew then and there, I can't let the enemy take over my mind. I can't go down that dark hole," she says. "I had to go into survival mode and tell God, 'I trust you.' I just prayed for the best, at the end of the day."
Shaina says that due to her pregnancy, some treatment options, such as a cold-knife conization (in which abnormal tissue is removed and examined), came with risks to the baby that she personally was not willing to take.
Instead, she chose to wait until she was 22-weeks pregnant and undergo surgery to check the cancer had not spread to any lymph nodes.
"It hadn't spread to the lymph nodes but they were still wanting to do chemotherapy," she shares. "I still had no symptoms, so I did deny chemotherapy. It was hard for the doctors because I was their patient first. And I was a tough patient."
Shaina also chose not to deliver her baby early at 32 weeks, which she said her doctors encouraged her to do, and waited until she was 37 weeks along.
"I took the risk and pushed it to 37-and-a-half weeks and delivered a healthy baby boy [...] We had a miscarriage before Yiorgos and so when I finally got a healthy pregnancy, nothing was going to stop me. But it did put a cloud over it."
Sadly Shaina's road to recovery did not play out smoothly; she had a C-section birth, during which doctors took biopsies of the cancer, but two weeks later sadly suffered a mini stroke. Thankfully, she has recovered well from that, and four weeks later she underwent the cold-knife conization her doctors had been urging her to have throughout her pregnancy, but unfortunately it wasn't successful.
"They did the surgery, waited two weeks, and it didn't work," Shaina explains. "The cancer was still in there."
Six weeks later, the procedure was repeated – and thankfully, had a much better outcome.
"As of June, I'm finally cancer-free," the new mother has happily shared, adding that she and her husband, Christos, are still hoping to expand their family in the future. "We have to wait a year officially from the last surgery, just to make sure my body is okay but we do want more babies."
Now, Shaina says she is "focusing on being a mom and taking it day by day."
Learn more about commonly overlooked symptoms of the five gynaecological cancers here.
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