Pregnant with Her First When Diagnosed with Breast Cancer, She Thought She Couldn't Have a Second — Until She Got Good News

Jackie Shaw was five months pregnant with her first child when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2018. She was 29.

“I found a massive lump on my right breast near my armpit,” says Shaw, now a 36-year-old social worker in Mogador, Ohio.

When she was driving her car, she felt it rubbing against her arm. “It was very hard,” she recalls.

At her next obstetrician appointment, she showed it to her doctor, who initially suggested it could be a clogged milk duct. But when it didn’t get better, her doctor sent her for an ultrasound, a mammogram and a biopsy.

When she was told she had breast cancer, the mother-to-be says the first question she asked was, “Can I breastfeed my baby?”

After learning her diagnosis, she called her husband Nate Shaw, a 34-year-old auto body painter, who rushed home from work.

“There were lots of tears and hugging and ‘God, what happens next?’” she says. “You try not to Google, but you can't help yourself.”

She did three rounds of chemo — a type that "makes you pee red" — while she was pregnant, "which was utterly nerve-racking and terrifying,” she says.

“I think one of the hardest conversations I had with my husband throughout all of this was, right before they dosed me with my first chemo, telling him, ‘God forbid if something were to happen, take the baby, not me,' " she recalls.

Though he protested, she says, “I tried to reassure him, ‘You would be fine. You will be a great solo dad if, God forbid, that happened.' "

Her son was due January 23, but on Christmas Eve, her water broke early, and she delivered Grayson, a 5-lb., 7-oz. baby boy that evening.

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After he was born, she had one more round of chemo.

“I don't know what was worse, being pregnant and doing it, or leaving your newborn to go get chemo,” she says. “I was fully convinced I would die while going through chemo and abandon my child.”

But her son is what motivated her to fight.

“It kept me going just knowing that I have this little tiny life to be responsible for, and to be here for, that I want to watch grow,” she says.

After he was born, she had to choose between a lumpectomy or mastectomy.

“With a lumpectomy, it'd be a couple days of not holding my baby and with a mastectomy it'd be months of not holding my baby. So I went with lumpectomy,” she says, knowing she might have to have more surgery later. “I’d rather hold my baby.”

Removing the lump revealed a full response to the chemo, but she still to have radiation twice a week, which was difficult to juggle with a newborn.

“It was so chaotic because you go to all these appointments and you can't take him with you. That was a huge stressor because everybody works. So who do you call?" she says. "And you have so many appointments that you can only ask people so many times to do you a favor. That was rough."

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Her son, she says, was her constant companion on her cancer journey.

“That baby is my battle buddy,” she says. “That is my dude, my homie. We call him our Original G —because he's the OG gangster that survived all the things with mom.”

Shaw, who had triple positive breast cancer, had a Herceptin infusion after the baby was born, then was treated with Tamoxifen ("I call it Satan's pill") for the next five years. The estrogen-blocking pill made her have menopausal symptoms like hot flashes and achy bones.

She had told herself that she wouldn’t consider trying for a second baby until she had completed five years of Tomoxifen — but at her five-year mark, her oncologist told her new studies showed that 10 years on the medication was a better idea.

“I walked out of that appointment and had an absolute meltdown,” she says. “While I had told myself, ‘No more children,’ I think I was just waiting for that five year mark to truly reassess. And then when they kind of took that off the table, I was not okay.”

Her maternal fetal medicine doctor at the Cleveland Clinic told her about the POSITIVE clinical trial where women paused their treatment, had a baby, then went back onto medication without cancer recurring.

“For women with estrogen-sensitive breast cancer, it’s tricky, because they tend to benefit from long-term anti-estrogen treatments and you shouldn't get pregnant while on them; they’re dangerous during pregnancy,” says Shaw's physician, Dr. Halle Moore, director of breast oncology at the Cleveland Clinic and a professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, Lerner College of Medicine.

But after seeing the results of the POSITIVE trial, Dr. Moore advised Shaw to try pausing her treatment to have a baby, then returning to it.

“It is okay to become pregnant after a breast cancer diagnosis – and it’s even okay if that requires interrupting the planned treatment,” Dr. Moore says.

On October 16, 2023 – the five-year anniversary of Shaw’s cancer diagnosis – she learned she was pregnant with her second son.

Benson was born on June 15 weighing 8 pounds, 2 ounces.

She had an MRI and a mammogram in March. Doctors tell her everything is clear, there is no evidence of disease. She is in remission.

“Everyone always asks me, ‘How did you do it? How did you get through it?’ I honestly don't know how I did. You just put your head down and you do it,” she says. “You do what you’ve got to do for your kids. And I think at the end of the day when there's a will, there's a way, and you’ve got to trust the science."

She also attributes her resilience to staying optimistic. "I've stayed very positive throughout my whole experience; I tried not to ever get into the inside thoughts and the deep dark places," she says. "And I think that helped tremendously.”

Benson is now eight months old, and Grayson is 6.

“They're the best boys in the whole wide world and I love watching them be brothers to each other," she says. "If Grayson walks into a room, Benson lights up and it is just beautiful to watch. And I think when Grayson has a bad day, he finds comfort in his brother, and I just hope that that happens forever."

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