Doctors said my pregnancy symptom was ‘normal’ – then I gave birth to my baby and was diagnosed with breast cancer and given 12 months to live

A mother was told by doctors she had just 12 months to live after a ‘harmless’ lump she found in her breast during pregnancy turned out to be something much more sinister.

Keely Langshaw, 36, from Canberra, found a small lump the size of a pea seven months into her pregnancy, but with reassurance from doctors she waited to have it checked until after she had her baby.

After undergoing tests, she received the devastating news that she had breast cancer that had spread throughout her body – known as metastatic cancer – giving her just a year to live.

But after grueling chemotherapy and months of uncertainty, Keely received good news.

Not only was her breast cancer killed by the chemo, but the cancerous tumor found elsewhere in her body also turned out to be benign.

Incredibly, they were caused by a rare autoimmune disease that looks like cancer on scans.

Keely now has hope for a long future with her husband Josh, 38, and two daughters, Polly, 4, and Tottie, 10 months – but the experience has changed her life forever.

Keely’s ordeal began in late 2022 when she was seven months pregnant with daughter Tottie and felt a small lump on her breast.

“One night I was just sitting in bed and I felt a little thing under my arm, the size of a pea or a small marble,” she told FEMAIL.

She carries the BRCA1 gene that predisposes her to breast cancer and has had six-monthly screenings.

Because they require the patient to lie on their stomach, testing was virtually impossible with a pregnant belly.

“I contacted my doctor who does my checks and scans and they said it was probably something to do with the pregnancy but we will keep an eye on it,” Keely said.

A few weeks later, Keely went into ‘spontaneous labour’ with Tottie, who then spent a month in hospital, prompting the mother to undergo further examination.

“I don’t know if she thought, ‘There’s something bad going on here.’ I am gone.’ She was five weeks early,” she laughed.

‘During that time the lump grew very quickly. It grew into a golf ball. When they sent my daughter home from the hospital, I thought I had to sort myself out.”

The lump had started out painful when she first discovered it, but was now painful to the point of ‘aching’.

Biopsies eventually showed that Keely had Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC), a type of breast cancer that has none of the three receptors commonly found on breast cancer cells.

During Keely’s first visit to her oncologist, she had the “worst conversation of her life.”

With Josh by her side, she was told the scans showed the cancer had spread throughout her body – with a prognosis of just 12 months to live.

‘I literally screamed, I let out a sound, I don’t know where it came from. I had to lie down and couldn’t control myself for a long time. Josh was hysterical too,” she recalled.

Doctors were confident their diagnosis was correct, but conducted further tests to confirm their suspicions and determine a treatment plan.

‘The next two weeks were terrible. It was the darkest two weeks of our lives. We kept finding each other in the corner crying,” Keely said.

Keely’s test and scans raised more questions than answers, but she still underwent fifteen rounds of chemotherapy, all with a toddler and seven-week-old baby in tow.

“It was a very difficult time because having these little girls, any interaction with them was unbearable in some way,” she said.

‘I thought: what’s going to happen? Who is going to do this to them? That was definitely the worst.”

To prepare for the possibility that Keely wouldn’t be able to see her daughters grow up, she started making notes for Josh to refer to if she lost her battle with cancer.

“My automatic reaction was to spew all this information at Josh. The little details of how I did things. I sent him a shared note in our phones with everything,” she said.

‘Just little things. Make sure you brush their hair every night before bed or they will get knots. The little things I did as a mother that he might not have thought about.”

Luckily, Josh would never need the notes.

After a tough course of chemotherapy and more tests, Keely was told not only that the breast cancer treatment had worked, but that the cancer had never spread anyway.

‘I went to the GP with my daughter to get some vaccinations and my own GP burst in and kicked in the door and shouted, “Oh, my God! Oh my God!”

‘And I was like, “What are you talking about?” She said, ‘the results, the results!'” Keely said.

‘I said, ‘I haven’t seen the bloody results, nobody gave them to me.’

She said, “Oh, my God!”, ran out of the room and came back with this piece of paper.”

Circled on that piece of paper were the words “no evidence of cancer” and a diagnosis of sarcoidosis.

Sarcoidosis causes immune system cells to clump together and form benign lumps all over the body. This is very rare, but in Keely’s case it looks like metastatic cancer.

Eight months after being told she only had a year to live, Keely was now ‘saveable’ and opted for a mastectomy to reduce the chance of the cancer coming back due to her genetics.

After recovering from surgery, Keely met with her oncologist to figure out her next steps.

“She said I had had what’s called a pathological complete response, which is a cancer world that is huge,” she said.

“PCR, it’s called, only happens about 30 percent of the time, but essentially the chemo had completely killed my cancer. There was nothing.’

Keely has a long journey ahead of her to treat sarcoidosis, but her cancer journey has provided more than enough tools to cope.

‘It has given me so much perspective. To first get that really bad diagnosis and then have it change just gives me the momentum to keep going. It could be much worse,” she said.

‘I feel that I am very lucky. That sounds so cliché and I hate it when it comes out of my own mouth, but when I come out the other side, I feel happier than ever before. I appreciate life so much more. It’s crazy.’