A 36-year-old woman beat the odds when she became the first woman to have her third child after receiving surgery for cervical cancer.
Svetkul Baiyshbek was diagnosed with the cancer in 2005 and gave birth to her first son when she was 27. At the time, she was told of the unlikelihood of ever having children again.
But Baiyshbek didn't want a probability to determine her fate. In previous cases, doctors would perform a hysterectomy, where they remove the whole uterus and cervix or part of the cervix.
"We removed only part of the womb," Wiebren Tjalma, associate professor of gynecology at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, told The Daily Mail on Monday. "We wanted to give her a chance to have a second child."
Cervical cancer is occurs rarely during pregnancies, approximately 1 in every 10,000 pregnancies are reported with a woman having the cancer, according to Women's Cancer Network. Regular cancer screening can improve the odds and lower the occurrence of the disease.
Baiyshbek had her operation in 2006 before her son Wiebren was born. She became one in nearly 600 women to give birth after beating the cancer. When she had her second son, Bainur, in 2010 she was one in 150 women in the world.
"I always dreamed of having a big family," she told The Daily Mail. "The cancer was not going to stop me."
The option to have radical hysterectomies for cervical cancer dramatically reduced the chances for women to have children until the technique to preserve the womb developed.
Cervical cancer is caused by human papilloma virus, HPV, contracted through sexual intercourse and begins in cells on the surface of the cervix. It develops slowly as a condition called dysplasia, which is diagnosed with a Pap smear and can be treated. Years pass until it becomes cervical cancer and generally the women who go without a Pap smear test are diagnosed with the disease.
Doctors call Baiyshbek's story unique after she gave birth to her latest child, a daughter named Lavenda.
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