When Afrodita Kamberi’s breasts began growing during her sixth pregnancy she wasn’t too worried. In her five previous pregnancies, she’d gone up from her 34D cup to a size EE, but this time she realised something was wrong when they kept growing – becoming a huge ZZZ cup!

“I couldn’t sleep at night, but I was in so much pain I just had to lie down all the time,” says Afrodita, 29, whose breasts ended up weighing 4 1⁄2st before doctors removed them in a seven-hour mastectomy op.

Afrodita met her husband, Arban, 31, a teacher, when they were students and they got married in 1998.

“I had pretty normal-sized breasts back then – they were a D cup and I was very happy with them,” she recalls. “I became pregnant a couple of months after we got married and obviously my breasts got bigger – but nothing out of the ordinary. The same happened with my next four pregnancies. After breastfeeding, my boobs would always return to normal size.”

But when Afrodita was pregnant with her sixth child, Lavrdim, in 2003, her breasts just kept growing. “They just got bigger and bigger,” says Afrodita, who usually weighs just over 10st. She says: “At first, my husband made
a joke of it, but even he could see it wasn’t funny when they got so big that I couldn’t walk properly!

“I went to see the doctor about it when I was about four months pregnant, but he told me they’d stop growing soon. Looking after the children was becoming impossible and I felt like a freak when I went outside – people stared and pointed at me.”

By the last month of her pregnancy, Afrodita was so uncomfortable, she begged a specialist for help at her local hospital in Skopje, Macedonia. “The doctor diagnosed a condition called gigantomastia. He said it was incredibly rare and potentially very dangerous,” she says.

“He told me it mainly affected pregnant women, and the only option was to operate. “Removing my breasts was risky as there could be severe blood loss. I weighed up the risks, but I knew I couldn’t carry on like that.

“I knew that going under anaesthetic might pose a slight risk to my unborn baby – but I had to have my breasts removed before I gave birth and my milk kicked in, which would make them even bigger.”

“I went into hospital a few weeks before the baby was due. The cost of the operation was covered by health insurance.”

Although Afrodita was left with no breasts and severe scarring, she says she felt nothing but relief. She reveals: “Afterwards I felt so much better even though my chest was a mess. It was horribly scarred, but I don’t regret it. My husband is fine with how I look and we still have a normal love life. We even had another child in 2004. I couldn’t breastfeed her, but at least I could pick her up!”