In celebration of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, here is a tale of one woman’s struggle and double triumph.
Buchanan breast cancer survivor Izabela Daughtery’s first was surviving an aggressive stage III breast cancer. (She’s now cancer-free.) Her second was the birth of daughter Sophia Sheila Grant, who turns 1 on Nov. 3.
Daughtery’s story is rare. According to the National Cancer Institute, if you’re in your 30s, your risk of breast cancer is 1 in 204, or about 0.4 percent. Unfortunately, at age 34, Daughtery joined that group when she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer in 2018.
At Northwell Health’s Phelps Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, she underwent aggressive chemotherapy before having surgery. Prior to that, she was offered fertility preservation, as chemotherapy can affect fertility. The mother of two boys (Michael, now 11, and Nicholas, 10), she decided to forgo fertility preservation and fight her cancer. Daughtery’s priority was to be around for her boys.
After undergoing chemotherapy for five months followed by a bilateral mastectomy with implant reconstruction and years of the cancer drug Tamoxifen, Daughtery knew that the probability of having another child was low. But she did not give up on that dream. Monitored by her oncologist at Phelps, Keyur Bharat Thakar, M.D., M.P.H., Daughtery went off Tamoxifen, became pregnant and had her miracle child – bringing new meaning to the phrase that often greets new arrivals, “mother and baby are doing just fine.”
For more, visit phelps.northwell.edu.
