Bianca survived cancer but a year later after feeling nauseous though the cancer had returned, only to find out she was actually pregnant.
Struck by intense nausea and feeling light headed, a breast cancer survivor who believed chemotherapy had left her infertile, thought her disease was back – only to discover she was having a baby.
Given the all clear a year earlier, after a lump in her left breast had been diagnosed as aggressive stage 3 breast cancer, leading to a mastectomy and chemo, when she felt too ill to get out of bed, Bianca Pearl, 32, of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, thought the worst.
Bianca, a former beautician, whose husband, Owen, 29, is a car salesman, said: “I was so ill I couldn’t get out of bed, so when I went to the doctors I was prepared to be told that it was the cancer back again.”
She continued: “Then they said it was a baby – and I just burst into tears.
“I never thought that it would be a baby, it was the last thing on my mind.”
A keen runner with no history of cancer in her family, Bianca was just 27 when, in August 2014, she was told that a lump she had discovered while in the shower in her left breast was cancer.
Told she would need a single mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiotherapy over the course of a year, she told Owen – who she had met a year earlier when he came into her beauty salon for a massage – that she would understand if he chose to move on.
“It was a big commitment, especially as we’d only been together a year – and he was only 25,” she said. “But he said he’d stand by me.”
Then a professional golfer, Owen even gave up his burgeoning sporting career so that he could fully support Bianca, joining her at all her appointments and for her chemotherapy treatments, which began in November 2014, following surgery to remove her left breast in October at Bury St Edmunds’ West Suffolk Hospital.
Doctors also told the couple that the chemotherapy and radiotherapy had a high chance of leaving Bianca infertile, so before having the first round, she harvested some eggs to give her the option of IVF later.
After six rounds of gruelling chemo, she was then given radiotherapy in March and finally in July 2015, doctors gave her the news that she was cancer free.
But a year later, after they returned from a special holiday to the African island of Cape Verde, as a treat after all they had been through, she started being sick and fainting.
She recalled: “I felt absolutely awful, not the sort of illness which you feel you can just brush off.”
She continued: “So I went to the doctors with a feeling of dread in my stomach, thinking they were going to say that the cancer was back.”
Overjoyed when it transpired that her nausea was morning sickness and that she had conceived naturally against the odds, Bianca’s happiness was complete when Owen proposed at Newmarket Races that August.
She continued: “He had already been planning it since the start of the year but then the baby came as a bit of a surprise.”
She continued: “But he wanted to propose to me on the second anniversary of the day I found out I had cancer – 6 August – so I could remember it for something special.”
After a text book pregnancy, by strange coincidence Bianca gave birth to baby Arthur, weighing 6lb 1oz on February 8 2017 in the same operating theatre where she had her mastectomy three years earlier.
She continued: “I had a bit of a panic attack going in to give birth as the memory of the cancer came back.”
Bianca added: “But everything went fine and it was a reminder that life can be both bad and good.
“Owen and I are so overjoyed that we can move on with our lives and have the family we always wanted but didn’t think possible.”
And their miracle baby took centre stage on 18 May 2018, when, then aged one, he was a page boy at their wedding on a beach in Halkidiki, Greece, attended by 20 loved ones.
“It was a really emotional day for all of us, and Owen made a tearful speech talking about how far we’d come together,” said Bianca, now a stay-at-home mum.
“It was the perfect wedding I’d always dreamed of and having Arthur as a page boy was particularly poignant, because having a family was something that seemed a very slim prospect four years ago.”
Bianca is supporting Race for Life in partnership with Tesco. Join your local event at raceforlife.org and make a difference in beating cancer.