Earlier this week, Bridget Bahl had the honor that all cancer patients dream of: Ringing the bell. For those not in the know, there’s a bell in many cancer treatment centers—and when patients reach a major milestone in their treatment, they are invited to ring it, symbolizing both the closing of a chapter and the completion of a difficult phase. “It’s a bad day to be cancer,” Bahl captioned her video of the moment, tears streaming down her face. (She wore the very same vintage Dior suit she wore for the shoot below.) “No version of me leaves this season the same.”
Late last year, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we spoke to Bahl about life a year into her cancer journey. Read on to see how far she’s come.
In 2024, content creator Bridget Bahl was newly married to her husband, Mike, and hoping to start a family. Sharing that process online—where some 1.7 million people followed along as she dated and then planned her wedding—seemed only natural, especially as she underwent IVF.
She was on her sixth round when she felt the lump. At first, she mistook it for a side effect of her IVF medication. “Your breasts change so much during the cycle, so I thought it had something to do with that,” the 42-year-old says. “In my mind, if you have cancer, it’s going to feel like a marble, something hard and foreign. That’s not how this felt.”
At her next fertility check-in, about two weeks later, she asked the doctor to take a look at the lump. Things moved quickly from there: She underwent a mammogram, an ultrasound, and a biopsy in a single day, all of which revealed that she had a golf-ball-size something in her right breast. (“I’m a B cup on my best days,” Bahl jokes. “How could I be hiding a golf-ball-size anything in there?”) Next came the diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma, HER2+ hormone-receptor-negative breast cancer—stage 2 breast cancer that had spread to a nearby lymph node.
While the American Cancer Society reports that the median age for a breast cancer diagnosis is 62, the last decade has shown a major uptick in women under 50 discovering that they have breast cancer. And Bahl had no history of it in her family: No BRCA, no genetic predisposition, not even a single abnormal mammogram among her nine aunts, mother, and maternal grandmother. “My first thought was that I had done this to myself, maybe with the IVF,” Bahl says.
