Life was good for Dr. Melissa Lieberman-Moses. She had completed a PhD in psychology and was practising in a field she loved. She and her husband, Eric, were the proud parents of 18-month-old Sammy. She was pregnant with twin girls.

And then she found a lump in her left breast.

“I thought it was nothing, just the usual things that go with being pregnant,” she says. At the age of 32, she thought, she was too young to be a likely candidate for breast cancer.

Her obstetrician wasn’t concerned either, but he sent her for an ultrasound, just to be on the safe side. The results shocked everyone: the lump was cancerous. “My obstetrician cried when he told me.”

More than her own health, Melissa worried about the health of her unborn daughters. She was 33 weeks’ pregnant. At 35 weeks, late in 2003, she chose to be induced, and delivered two healthy girls, Aviva and Talia. Two weeks later she had a lumpectomy. And two weeks after that, she started chemotherapy.

“I had a toddler and two newborns,” she says. “I couldn’t hold my girls, I was too tired from chemo to do the night feedings. I felt like I couldn’t bond properly with my babies.”

Still, they got through. Melissa and Eric applied for financial aid from every source they could think of. They hired a nurse to help take care of the children at night. Melissa’s mother took a leave of absence from her job to help support the young family. A religious community group delivered dinner to the house every night.

Melissa tested positive for a genetic mutation called BRCA1, which dramatically increases women’s chances of developing both breast and ovarian cancer, often at a younger age than the general population. Several members of her family were tested as well, and a few, including her younger sister — also the mother of twin girls — were positive. With this genomic information, her relatives can take steps to prevent the likelihood of developing cancer. “I do feel as though I saved their lives,” says Melissa.

Today, Melissa is cancer-free. Her kids, and her career, are thriving. Life is returning to normal.

“My husband and I were talking the other day, and we thought, ‘When did we go from worrying about cancer to actually being able to live life and imagine the future? We’ve made that transition — we’re going on with life.”