Twenty-six-year-old Sarah Boyle says she knew something was wrong when her months-old son Teddy became extremely fussy whenever she tried to breastfeed him from her right breast. "He became very unhappy and even hit out," she told BBC [1]. "For an 8-month-old baby to push his mother away was really heartbreaking."
In 2013, Boyle was diagnosed with a benign cyst in her right breast, so after Teddy's refusal to breast feed from it, she insisted that the doctors rescan the "stacked-disc"-like cyst a second time. "I remember saying to Steven, my husband, I've noticed this little change, it's a different shape," she said, referring to the shape of her right breast. "I said, you know, I'm going to go back to the doctors."
Turns out, she was right to follow up on her suspicions. The doctors discovered Boyle had grade two triple negative breast cancer.
Boyle is currently receiving chemotherapy at Royal Stoke University Hospital and will undergo a double mastectomy and reconstruction surgery. "Nobody can say for certain whether it was Teddy," she said. "But I know that if it wasn't for him, then this time next year it could've been completely different if I'd listened to doctors, but instead I listened to Teddy. [It's] because of him that I'm now being treated."