*Ciara Jones at her home in Newmarket-on-Fergus. Photograph: Natasha Barton
A CLARE MOTHER of two found out she was pregnant with her third child on the same day she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Irish Cancer Society’s Daffodil Day takes place this Friday (March 24th) and a Clare women currently undergoing treatment is encouraging people to support this in any way possible.
Late last year, Ciara Jones was diagnosed with breast cancer and discovered she was four weeks pregnant, all on the same day. She is now twenty six weeks pregnant and undergoing treatment, she will have one more session of chemotherapy before the baby is induced at 36 weeks and then her chemotherapy will recommence at 4 weeks postpartum.
She explained, “The reason I go off treatment is because I need the strength to have the baby, my immune system is suppressed, my energy levels are shot and to actually give birth I need to have the power behind me, it gives my body the time to rebuild after the session, whether they do it four weeks or six weeks after the baby, I will go back into my last four rounds”.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, Ciara who grew up in Shannon, outlined “The baby is fine, they are monitoring me very closely, it’s not everyday you see pregnant women coming in for treatment, the cases are few and far between but overall it is going well”.
When Ciara went to the hospital last November, cancer and pregnancy were far from her mind. “This was a bolt of the blue. At the moment, my biggest reason for the awareness is early detection, it is so important. I had a lump, I had no other symptoms, there was no mis-shapes, you hear all the different things that could be there but I had none of them, just a lump which was very similar to a cist. When I initially went in, I was thinking it was a cist and then I was going to get it removed and that would be it but it wasn’t, they very quickly told me that I was wrong”.
That day still remains “a blur”, months later, she admitted. Ciara’s medical team advised her to wait until twelve weeks to begin treatment because of her pregnancy. “There are no words for how I felt in those weeks. I had a lot of fear around losing the baby, that was really hard especially because I was told I wouldn’t be able to have any more kids. I couldn’t just try for another, it was a scary thought. But the pregnancy also helped me and gave me a focus. At 10 weeks, the lump had increased so they decided to do the mastectomy then. If it wasn’t for the baby I don’t know where I’d be, it was what powered me on”.
Efforts to get information on cases of women who had cancer and were pregnant were difficult to find, the Newmarket-on-Fergus resident recounted. “Finding out either thing is big news but you feel very alone, you feel you are the only person this is happening to even when you look online and it was hard for me to find anyone in the same situation, there’s so much information about cancer and breast cancer but you don’t really hear about the people who are pregnant with cancer. I stopped looking because I got a bit disheartened by it, I know there would be cancer societies that I could have reached out to but I wasn’t in the head space, I isolated a lot for the first twelve weeks of the pregnancy, I didn’t really talk to friends or family, I tried to deal with what I was going through, if I had seen someone else going through this, I wouldn’t have been as quiet for so long”.
The thirty four year old added, “I had said to myself after a couple of weeks that I’m going to tell my story, I remember making my first reel on Instagram with my story of what happened from the minute I found out and where I was at after surgery, I made it and left it in my drafts for four or five weeks, it was my way of telling the world rather than the world finding out, that was my way of reaching out to not only people who knew me but also to anybody who might be going through it or knew someone going through it. Once that happened, you do notice that the support is there, it’s just having the courage to do it because it is big information, you have to swallow it yourself first before letting other people in”.
Ciara has setup an Instagram page to raise awareness about the importance of early detection. She is encouraging everyone to get involved this Daffodil Day, so that other cancer patients like her have the vital support they need throughout their diagnosis. “I was so quiet because I wanted to be ‘normal’ for as long as possible, it was acceptance and there was a massive weight off my shoulders, I know most people won’t do it as publicly as I did, most people will just tell family and friends which is okay too but that release of letting people know what you’re going through is something I can’t really describe”.
There is more worry attached to this pregnancy, Ciara said. “The biggest difference is I worry with this one, I didn’t have the same level of worry with my other pregnancies, I only saw the doctor when I went to the clinic every three months, with this one since four weeks I’ve been in every week for scans, tests, bloods or something, they’ve been watching me and especially since the treatment started. After my first round, I got an infection and I had a bad reaction to the chemo, I was in ICU for four days but my medical team have been great, they came over to me in the ICU and once they see my name I think I’ve flashing lights over my head because I’m the pregnant one, they’ve been phenomenal, they’ve put my mind completely at ease”.
Through her Instragram page (ciara__jones_) she has discovered more examples of women going through or that have been through the same experience. “Everybody deals with things in their own way, you can’t force people to do things in a loud manner as I did, for me if I can be example for one person to say you’re not on your own that is all that would matter to me, you do get a lot of people saying I never knew that or their mother or sister just found out. I’m telling my story but also documenting day by day so I’m showing the good, the bad and the ugly of everything going on, people going for treatment can relate, when you see it and know somebody is going through it, it’s not easier but it helps with coming to terms with it”.
