When a cancer diagnosis ended Nancy Rodgers’ dreams of parenthood, her best friend, Kathleen, stepped in to give her the most precious gift of all.
Four months before her wedding, while taking a shower, Nancy Rodgers felt a lump in her left armpit. “It felt like a small pea. But it didn’t hurt when I pressed on it,” she recalls. “And I wasn’t frightened. After all, I was only 29.”
She consulted her gynecologist, who didn’t seem alarmed, but sent her for a mammogram, and told her she could see a breast surgeon if she wanted to, just to be sure. The breast surgeon was equally nonchalant, telling Nancy, ‘This small thing? You’re so young. It doesn’t seem like anything.” The doctor didn’t even suggest a biopsy. Caught up in her wedding plans, Nancy didn’t think much more about it.
Later that year, on their honeymoon in Bermuda, Nancy and her new husband, Michael, decided they wanted to start a family immediately. “I was 29 when I got married, and Michael was 36,” explains Nancy, now 37, of Northport, New York. “I knew he would be a great dad; it’s something he’s always wanted. And I come from a large family: five sisters and a brother. I’ve been around kids my whole life.”
When Nancy didn’t become pregnant after 10 months, her gynecologist prescribed the fertility drug, Clomid. “He said it might stimulate my ovaries to produce 2-3 eggs a month, instead of one,” says Nancy. But the Clomid didn’t work for her. The next step, she assumed, would be in vitro fertilization (IVF).
That’s when Nancy started worrying about the breast lump again. “If I was going to be taking powerful fertility drugs, I knew I wanted to have the lump taken out,” she explains. “I’d been keeping an eye on it, and it had never gotten any bigger. But I didn’t want to keep worrying about it.”
Nancy took her mammogram to a different breast surgeon, Lawrence H. Brickman, M.D., of Huntington, New York. “He was very calming,” she says. “But he didn’t let me leave his office without an appointment to have the lump removed.”
