Elle Halliwell finds out she's expecting a baby two days after being diagnosed with cancer

When Elle Halliwell discovered she was four weeks pregnant, she was "floating in a haze of Xanax", still coming to terms with the fact that she had been diagnosed with cancer just two days previously.

The 30-year-old fashion journalist, who admits she and her husband were planning on trying for a baby later in the year, before she was diagnosed with leukemia, described the news as "one of the most challenging things you can ever face" in a column she wrote for The Daily Telegraph.

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"Pregnancy is supposed to be one of the most joyous times in a woman’s life," Halliwell said.

"I was floating in a haze of Xanax and shock when the two little blue lines appeared on the pregnancy stick, confirming I was expecting my first child."

Just 48 hours before realising she was expecting a baby, Haliwell was sitting in a doctors office for a very different reason.

She was told she had chronic myeloid leukemia, a disease which she says "before 2001 had a five-year survival rate of fewer than one in three".

While doctors advised Halliwell against going through with the pregnancy, Halliwell and her husband decided to travel to South Africa, where a specialist informed them that with alternative treatments she may be able to deliver the baby before her cancer becomes aggressive.

"He recommended I abort, freeze some eggs and immediately begin a relatively new form of oral chemotherapy called tyrosine kinase inhibitors, or TKIs, which I would have to take for at least five years until I was 35. Only then could I consider stopping treatment and try to conceive," Halliwell said.

However on recommendations from her South African doctor, Elle is now taking a drug called Interferon, which she claims can cause "patients severe side effects, including food aversion, fatigue, depression and flu-like symptoms."

"My life will never be the same, but I’m looking forward to what is in store. And thanks to the support of my family, friends and the generous public donations to organisations such as the Cancer Council and Leukaemia Foundation, I have a very good chance of not only celebrating my son’s first Christmas this year, but also being there for many of his milestones," she said.

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