I was a low-risk pregnancy. But when I got to 32 weeks, I stopped being able to breathe properly. My friends and family reassured me that it was probably nothing – I was just heavily pregnant – so I carried on as usual.

I remember I had a client over and I couldn’t catch my breath, so I ended up calling 111. I was called in for a chest X-ray, and at first, they just sent me home. The next day I had loads of missed calls from the cardiology centre asking me to come in. That’s when they found the mass next to my heart. They told me I had a tumour in my chest and would need to be tested for thymoma, lymphoma and teratoma. At the time, I didn’t know these were types of cancer and thought I just needed some tablets.

When you’re pregnant, you’re not allowed any radiation scans, so the diagnostic process was long – it took over 15 weeks from the day they found the mass in my chest to the call telling me the news: I had cancer.

I couldn’t have the proper tests while pregnant, so there was a lot of waiting around and by the time it came round to giving birth, it didn’t go as I’d planned.

The birth was traumatic. I was supposed to be in the birth centre – which basically means you don’t have nurses at your beck and call as they believe you’re going to have a safe pregnancy without complications (my pregnancy was deemed a very low-risk before they discovered the mass).

I ended up having my baby three weeks early via an emergency C-section, which wasn’t what I wanted at all. I’d never considered a C-section, so I panicked the whole way through. It wasn’t the way I wanted my pregnancy to end.

“It took learning I had cancer while I was pregnant for me to finally prioritise self-care"