Hannah Stevenson – Lymphoma after pregnancy

During lockdown in 2020 I become unwell. I had a 4/5-month-old so I just kept putting my symptoms down to that.

Following ongoing pain in my c-section scar and infectious ratings that were through the roof I was admitted to hospital for a pelvis infection that I had from giving birth. The symptoms at this stage made sense. The serious symptoms – collapsing, high fevers, night sweats, significant weight loss, itchy skin, irritability, and lethargy continued whilst I healed from this infection.

2 weeks later I contacted the obstetrician to express concerns something else was going on. Deep down I knew something was serious wrong, I could barely walk, but I didn’t even want to think about the ‘c’ word. Straight away I was sent to hospital for a chest x-ray, one of the few tests we didn’t previously do.

The next morning, I received that phone-call with those words you never want to hear on the phone: “You have cancer. Its serious. I’m sorry that this is over the phone but we didn’t have time to book an appointment”.

My hospitalisation to St Vincent’s was almost immediate and we had to seek treatment 3 hours away from home. My daughter had just turned 6 months old the day before diagnosis. Due to covid I didn’t see my son (who was 10) for 3 weeks, and only got to see our daughter because she was breastfeeding upon admission.

Within those two days between being told ‘you have cancer’ and getting to hospital my situation deteriorated significantly. It took over an hour to stop shaking from the strenuousness of walking from the car to the foyer then to the room. My body was wasting away. After days, what felt like weeks after tests, I was formally diagnosed with stage 4B Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I was only 29.

My treatment plan was escalated BEACOPP, a hard and fast treatment. There were so many decisions to make in those earlier days and with limited contact with my husband (that wasn’t focused on feeding our daughter) we had to made fertility, trial and treatment decisions. Thankfully the nurses and staff at St Vincent’s Private helped so much as I processed all this information and what this would mean for my life moving forward.

“You’ve got this” became my motto, and I ensured I communicated what I was thinking and feeling during this time.

I responded well to the treatment and within 2 rounds the PET scan showed no evidence of lymphoma, that only 6 weeks prior had been spread through my chest and signs of in my bone marrow and spleen.

What a surreal feeling this was.

I had a further 2 rounds of chemotherapy to end the treatment.

This story was published with the consent of Lymphoma Australia Association