In 2024, content creator Bridget Bahl was newly married to her husband, Mike, and looking forward to starting a family. Sharing that journey online—where she had attracted 1.7 million followers who had witnessed her dating life and wedding planning—felt inherently right, especially as she was going through multiple rounds of IVF.
It was during her fifth cycle of IVF that she detected a lump. Initially, she brushed it off as a side effect of her medications. “My breasts change so much during treatment that I thought it was related,” recounts the 42-year-old. “I believed if you had cancer, the lump would feel hard and abnormal. This didn’t seem like that at all.”
When she attended her next fertility appointment two weeks later, she asked her doctor for an examination of the lump. The situation escalated rapidly: she had a mammogram, ultrasound, and biopsy all in one day, which led to the discovery of a golf ball-sized mass in her right breast. (“I’m a B-cup at my best,” Bahl quips. “How was I hiding a golf ball-sized something in there?”) The diagnosis revealed invasive ductal carcinoma, HER2+ hormone receptor-negative breast cancer, stage 2—cancer that had progressed to a nearby lymph node.
The American Cancer Society indicates that the average age of diagnosis is 62, yet the last decade has witnessed a significant rise in breast cancer cases among women under 50. Bahl had no prior family history of the illness—no BRCA mutations, no genetic predispositions, and not a single abnormal mammogram among her nine aunts, mother, and grandmother. “My initial thought was that maybe I had caused this myself with the IVF,” Bahl admits.
This is a misconception that is relatively common. “In my nearly 15 years of practice, I can’t say this is the first time a patient has found out about cancer while undergoing IVF, because it isn’t,” explains Dr. Brian Levine, MD, Bahl’s physician in Manhattan, who is double board-certified in reproductive endocrinology, infertility, and obstetrics. In line with findings from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, no evidence links fertility drugs to breast cancer risk. Typically, what occurs is that women undergoing fertility treatments start being more vigilant about their health. “We know that breast cancer impacts approximately one in six to one in eight women in their lifetime,” Dr. Levine notes. “When patients visit fertility clinics, it may often be their first regular medical check-up, making them more likely to discover any anomalies.”
