In 2024, content creator Bridget Bahl was newly married to her husband, Mike, and hoping to start a family. Sharing that process online—where some 1.7 million people had followed along as she dated and then planned her wedding—seemed only natural, especially as she underwent rounds of IVF.
She was on her fifth when she felt the lump. At first, she mistook it for a side effect of her IVF medication. “Your breasts change so much during the cycle, so I thought it had something to do with that,” the 42-year-old says. “In my mind, if you have cancer, it’s going to feel like a marble, something hard and foreign. That’s not how this felt.”
At her next fertility check-in, about two weeks later, she asked the doctor to take a look at the lump. Things moved quickly from there: she underwent a mammogram, an ultrasound, and a biopsy in a single day, all of which revealed that she had a golf ball-sized something in her right breast. (“I’m a B-cup on my best days,” Bahl jokes. “How could I be hiding a golf ball-sized anything in there?”) Next came the diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma, HER2+ hormone receptor-negative breast cancer, stage 2—stage two breast cancer that had spread to a nearby lymph node.
While the American Cancer Society reports that the median age of diagnosis is 62, the last decade has shown a major uptick in women under 50 discovering that they have breast cancer. And Bahl had no history of it in her family: no BRCA, no genetic predisposition, not even a single abnormal mammogram among her nine aunts, mother, and maternal grandmother. “My first thought was that I had done this to myself, maybe with the IVF,” Bahl says.
It’s a fairly common misconception. “I’ve been doing this for nearly 15 years, and I would love to tell you that this is the first time a patient has discovered they have cancer during IVF, but it’s not,” says Dr. Brian Levine, MD, Bahl’s Manhattan-based doctor, who is double board-certified in reproductive endocrinology and infertility and obstetrics and gynecology. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, however, no studies have found a correlation or association between taking fertility drugs and developing breast cancer. Instead, what tends to happen is that as women begin fertility treatment, they suddenly pay especially close attention to their bodies. “We know that breast cancer will affect anywhere between one in six to one in eight women during their lives,” Dr. Levine says. “It just ends up that, when people go to fertility clinics, sometimes it’s the first time that they’re actually going to a doctor regularly. That’s when you’re more likely to discover something.”
