Susan McGahern’s pregnancy after cancer treatment

Susan McGahern’s pregnancy after cancer treatment is a story of new life unfolding alongside unresolved medical danger. The birth of her seventh child, in November 1943, brought joy and a further assertion of Susan’s judgment, but did not mark a recovery: the possibility that pregnancy might hasten a cancer recurrence remained, and her later pain and worsening health exposed the distance between hope and what the family could bear to acknowledge.

Medical uncertainty and the pregnancy

The pregnancy emerged within an illness already serious enough to prompt questions about Susan’s work and prospects. In a letter to a Dublin doctor, Francis (Frank) McGahern asked whether his wife should give up teaching and what her chances of recovery were. He had previously written at the beginning of her illness and received a detailed report. The narrator describes his later approach as defensive and somewhat bullying, while also presenting it as consistent with his character. The correspondence establishes a pattern in which decisions about Susan’s health were discussed through her husband’s inquiries, even as Susan’s own account and choices remained consequential.

During another period of concern, Susan’s letters referred matter-of-factly to her expected visitor not arriving; by Easter she was certain she was pregnant. Francis began a novena and fasting, and contacted her oncologist, Dr Corcoran, at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. The doctor advised that there was probably no point in Susan travelling to Dublin at Easter, but wanted to see her about a month later. He acknowledged that, if a recurrence were possible, the pregnancy could bring about rapid progress. For the time being, however, he said there was nothing to do but wait until he could examine her again, and he urged her not to worry because she was well.

That response offered neither a guarantee of safety nor an immediate intervention. It left Susan and her family between a feared possibility and a period of waiting. Susan told Francis that she felt very well and placed her trust in God, while also observing that doctors were not infallible. She agreed to see Father Ignatius, but intended to write first to arrange an appointment; she would not be rushed or panicked into it. Her faith and her practical insistence on setting the pace of consultation coexisted rather than cancelling each other out.

Preparations, travel, and decision-making

The pregnancy occupied a family life still structured by work, school, and care for the children. While Susan was at home, the garden she had planned was enclosed with a stronger paling fence and high netting to keep out the goats. A path and gate divided the plot; the children helped plant herbs, marigolds, sweet william, lilies, nasturtiums, and roses. These preparations for a growing garden accompanied a pregnancy the children did not yet know about, giving the episode a quiet counterpoint: daily life continued to be tended even as its future was uncertain.

For an appointment with Dr Corcoran, the family arranged for the grandmother to stay with Bridgie while Susan was away. Uncle Pat brought the grandmother to the house and later drove Susan to the train at Dromod. Susan assured her son that she would not be gone for long. He promised to pray, take the girls to school, gather sticks, and avoid causing Bridgie trouble. The departure therefore involved more than a medical journey: it required rearranging care and asking a child to take on particular household responsibilities while his mother was absent.

When Susan later travelled to Dublin to see Dr Corcoran and make arrangements for the birth, she stayed at the small Cumberland Hotel in Westland Row. She remembered that she had been in Dublin at Percy Place, expecting her first child, almost exactly nine years earlier. She feared that the birth might be delayed and that she would have to remain at the hotel into the middle of the month. Francis wanted her to use the Boyle nursing home, where Dympna had been born, because it would cost less; Susan refused. Maggie accompanied her, though Susan took care not to let Francis believe she was relying on advice from Maggie or others rather than his own.

These choices show how medical and family decisions were shaped by money, travel, and marital tension, but they do not reduce Susan to someone acted upon. She accommodated some of Francis’s wishes: earlier, she wrote to Mary Ellen Kilboy to arrange a visit, explaining that she would try to entertain her despite having little in her life beyond children and work. Yet she also held her ground over the place of birth and the child’s name. Her letter-writing could reassure and placate Francis while her decisions still differed from his.

Birth and the child’s name

The family’s son was born at Holles Street on November 4, 1943. Susan had been afraid that labour would be delayed, but he arrived as a healthy child. The narrator had hoped for a boy after so many girls, imagining someone to play football with and help him with the jennet. His anticipation gives the birth a place in the children’s world as well as in the adults’ anxious correspondence: the arrival answered a particular childhood hope, even though the medical uncertainty surrounding Susan remained.

Francis wanted the baby christened Jude, after the patron saint of hopeless cases, linking the name to Susan’s cancer. Susan objected that such an unusual name would set him apart too much from other children. He was christened Frances Jude Anthony and grew up as Frank, although Francis insisted on calling him Jude in his early years. The disagreement makes the naming more than a private preference: Francis attached the child’s name to the threat hanging over his wife, while Susan resisted making that threat the child’s defining mark. Her refusal was one of several points at which she exercised judgment in a period when others were interpreting her illness for her.

The birth’s aftermath and significance

The birth did not settle the question of Susan’s health. Later, after she had been back at school following several days in bed, she wrote that she was improved but still suffering. She wondered whether better weather and sunshine might help, while her closing expression of faith sat beside the plain admission that she must continue to suffer. She suspected that the cancer might have returned. Her stomach pain and recurring constipation and diarrhoea were explained to her as a separate illness from which she could recover if she made the effort. She asked Francis to write to Dr Corcoran, but he was reluctant, having already contacted the doctor secretly.

The gap between symptoms, medical knowledge, and what the family said aloud becomes central to the recollection of the pregnancy’s aftermath. The narrator observes that the dying enter a world the healthy scarcely notice: ordinary work and everyday encounters can come to represent a life that is becoming unreachable. In this account, people around Susan continue with school, household arrangements, and familiar reassurances, while the knowledge of possible recurrence is delayed, softened, or denied. Her faith could sustain her, but it could not remove the pain of losing the people who depended on her; nor could it make that pain easy to communicate after decades in a world where she was loved.

Seen in this light, the pregnancy and birth are neither a simple triumph over illness nor merely a prelude to loss. They preserve the coexistence of care, fear, hope, and disagreement: Dr Corcoran’s cautious uncertainty, Francis’s fasting and concern, Susan’s trust in God and resistance to being hurried, the son’s wish for a brother, and the family’s pleasure in a healthy newborn. The later return of suffering makes the birth more poignant without erasing its reality. Susan’s seventh child arrived, but the question that had accompanied the pregnancy—whether new life could coexist with the danger of recurrence—remained unanswered.