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 followed along as she dated and then planned her wedding—seemed only natural, especially as she underwent rounds of IVF.

She was on her sixth 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-size something in her right breast. (“I’m a B cup on my best days,” Bahl jokes. “How could I be hiding a golf-ball-size anything in there?”) Next came the diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma, HER2+ hormone-receptor-negative breast cancer—stage 2 breast cancer that had spread to a nearby lymph node.

While the American Cancer Society reports that the median age for a breast cancer 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.

Bahl, with her radiation marks.

Thomas McCarty