Pregnant Woman Discovers Lump in Breast While Applying Body Butter for Stretch Marks: 'Everything Stopped' (Exclusive)

Nine months pregnant with her first child in January 2024, Marissa Sweitzer was slathering herself in body butter to prevent stretch marks when she felt a lump in her left breast.

“I was freaking out,” says Sweitzer, 33, who lives in Concord, Ohio.

She drew a circle around the walnut-sized lump to monitor its growth, later showing it to her obstetrician at her weekly check-up. Her doctor thought it was likely just her milk coming in. The lump didn't hurt, Sweitzer recalls, and it seemed to get smaller, so they decided to wait until after the baby was born to do an ultrasound.

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On February 3, Sweitzer delivered her 8-lb. daughter, Melody Day Andrade, at 11:17 a.m. at the Cleveland Clinic’s Hillcrest Hospital.

That afternoon, when a lactation consultant visited the hospital room, Sweitzer's boyfriend Austin Andrade asked the consultant to look at the lump, saying it had been there for a while but the couple "didn't like it."

Before Sweitzer was discharged from the hospital, she had an ultrasound, a mammogram and a biopsy. A doctor told her they still had to wait for the pathology report, but in her professional opinion, it did look like cancer.

“When they told me, everything stopped," Sweitzer tells PEOPLE. “My world has not been the same since that moment."

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Driving home from the hospital, her obstetrician called to reassure Sweitzer. “Marissa, we got this," she recalls her doctor saying. "We're going to do this together. We're going to fight through this together. I'm going to be in your corner the whole way. I'm going to get you the best team."

Andrade, 24, also pledged to support her. She remembers him feeding her dinner that first night while she tried to pump from her right breast. “He said, ‘No matter what, I’m here. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to help you.'”

When her OB visited her a few days later to meet the baby, she also brought the pathology results. She wanted to deliver the news in person: The biopsy showed that the new mom did have breast cancer.

“She was crying with us,” she remembers.

Sweitzer was officially diagnosed with stage 2B triple-negative, grade three, invasive, ductal carcinoma in her breast and her lymph nodes. But she also felt lucky. “I was extremely thankful, relieved that it wasn't anywhere else in my body,” she says.

Before starting chemotherapy on March 7, she and Andrade did a round of IVF. They were able to create an embryo in hopes that Melody could one day have a sibling.

Then, it was time to buckle down and fight her disease.

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“She was so focused on, how do we attack this, get rid of this, and get on with her life,” says her medical oncologist Dr. Daniel Siblinger at the Cleveland Clinic. “That is what impressed me so much about Marissa is that she focused on what the end game was: How do we get rid of this breast cancer and how do we keep it from coming back?"

She finished chemo in August and had a double mastectomy in September.

“I actually chose not to do reconstruction," she explains. "I got an aesthetic flat closure because I didn't want to do any more surgeries. I just wanted to be with my daughter."

These days she’s finishing radiation. Siblinger says her body has responded very well to treatment, and at the time of surgery, there was no cancer remaining. He admires her upbeat attitude throughout her cancer battle. “She shines brightly with her positivity," he says.

As Sweitzer nears the end of her journey, she says she feels like a different person. She no longer worries about little arguments, or if someone honks at her in the freeway.

“I feel thankful, grateful. Cancer makes you have a different perspective on life and makes you not get mad at the small things,” she says. “I used to stress the small stuff. Everything had to be perfect, everything had to get done the way it needed to get done. Now it's like, I'd rather enjoy spending time with my daughter and my dog and my boyfriend… I have more grace for myself — and for everyone around me.”

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In fact, every day she tries to do at least one good deed for somebody else.

“I like to spread happiness and positivity,” she says. Of course, she admits, it's not always easy. She sees a psychiatrist who specializes in breast cancer "because there's hard days, there's hard moments, there's hard minutes, there's hard everything," she says. "You just got to get through it."

She also practices mindfulness and recites daily affirmations. She purposely opens doors and windows and appreciates spending time outside: “just enjoying what I can enjoy, when I can enjoy it,” she says.

Melody is now 9 months old. “She has the brightest smile,” her mom says. “She just brings joy. She's everybody's little sunshine.”

She considers her daughter her guardian angel who saved her life.

“She’s my angel baby,” Sweitzer says. “If I didn't get pregnant, my milk wouldn't have come in and pushed the tumor to the surface. I am only 33, so I'm not getting mammograms. So by the time they found it, who knows what it would've looked like.”

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