A Virginia mom who learned she had cancer after noticing something was off while breastfeeding is on a mission to share a message of hope and positivity.
"Many people think you get a cancer diagnosis [and] that it's a death sentence. It's not," Nicole Hansen told ABC News. "There are more people living with cancer than dying from it, and I'm the perfect example of that."
Hansen, 33, said she was nursing her son Desmond, now 2, back in February when she felt a lump that wouldn't go away.
"While I was breastfeeding him, I felt a lump on my right side, and I thought that it was a clogged milk duct," the mom of three recalled. "I never imagined that it could be cancer but it never really went away, even after I stopped breastfeeding. So that's when I reached out to my doctor, and she recommended that I get a mammogram."
A couple of months earlier, Hansen had started working as the director of executive communications at the VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center in Richmond, Virginia, but she said she never thought she'd soon become a patient there herself.
"I had a couple of falls last year, which I just kind of chalked up to me being clumsy. I was [also] very, very tired all the time. No matter what I did, no matter how much sleep I got, I just felt constantly exhausted -- and again, I just chalked it up to being a full-time working mom with three kids," Hansen said. "But I never thought that it could be a sign that I had cancer."
Doctors at Massey diagnosed Hansen with Stage 2b3a breast cancer, even though she said she had no history of cancer in her family and didn't have the BRCA gene. Hansen also said her doctors told her she had hormone receptor-positive cancer, a type of cancer where hormones like estrogen and progesterone can make cancer cells grow and spread, according to the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.
"It's been a wild year to go from starting a new job to getting a cancer diagnosis and, within weeks, starting chemotherapy," Hansen said.
Hansen isn't alone. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more young women across all races and ethnicities are getting diagnosed with breast cancer, and approximately 10% of all new breast cancer cases in the U.S. are women 45 and younger.
Hansen said she underwent cancer treatment from March to August and endured 16 rounds of chemotherapy. Even though she needed extra support and had to go to appointments weekly over the summer, she said she didn't have to give up everything in her life.
"I didn't have to quit my job. I still worked. I didn't have to completely stop spending time with my kids," she said.
Hansen said she also underwent a tumor removal surgery called a lumpectomy and an axillary lymph node dissection in September.
Today, she said doctors have told her she has "no evidence of disease."
Throughout her "wild" year, Hansen said she has leaned on her family, friends and colleagues. She said she and her husband, Christian Hansen, also decided not to keep her cancer journey hidden from their three kids, daughters Margaret, 7, and Norah, 5, and son Desmond, 2.
"They're curious kids and so we decided that we were going to share this experience with them," Hansen said. "We ended up doing a lot of demonstrations on Barbie, of what a breast is, putting Barbie in an MRI machine, what that looks like, what a port is, what cancer medicine is, chemotherapy, and they were so into it and have been so into it the whole time, just cheering me on."
"Having cancer is hard enough. Trying to hide it, on top of that, to me, it wasn't worth it," Hansen added. "They know that it doesn't have to be so scary. And I think that we're all stronger, so much stronger than we could have ever imagined, because of it."
Hansen said she hopes by sharing her cancer journey publicly, she can help another young woman facing a frightening diagnosis to feel less alone and break some of the stigma behind fighting cancer.
"Don't be afraid to go to the doctor and advocate for yourself. You know your own body, and if you feel like something is wrong, speak up and say something," said Hansen.
"For anyone who's just newly diagnosed, it's OK to be scared, but don't give up," she added. "There is hope. There is another side and you'll get through this."
