“How could this really be us? Not in the prime of our lives, not when we’re having these babies, not when we’re talking about family trips and our future,” she recalls thinking. She and Bey were silent with shock when they received the news while driving the family car. But an ultrasound, mammogram and biopsy said otherwise: The diagnosis was triple negative breast cancer, a rare breast cancer subtype. In the spring of 2018, at a postpartum exam six weeks after the birth of Joy, Law told her doctor that her left breast was inflamed and painful-due to an infection from breastfeeding, she figured. To make things work with Law’s busy doctoring schedule, Bey stayed home with the kids. “We were pregnant about a month after being married, so marriage, pregnancy and kids were all wrapped up in one,” she says. In short order, she and Bey had three kids-Josie, 8 Rodney, 6 and Joy, 5. So I thought that’s how life would be for me-you get your job, you work there forever, you retire from there.” “My parents had stayed in the same profession and worked for the same companies for 20-plus years. Law entered the practice, her first job after family medicine residency, “with all of these dreams and hopes of how life would be, now that I was done with my training,” she says. She joined two doctors in a Hueytown practice, taking over for a third retiring physician. In 2014, Law married Rodney Bey, and they settled outside Birmingham, near her hometown.
But her drive and determination helped her realize her childhood dream: After attending Alabama State University, a historically Black university, she earned her medical degree in 2008 from the University of South Alabama College of Medicine and became the first doctor in her extended family-and one of the very few (2.8%) Black female physicians in the United States. She often was the only Black girl or Black kid in the classroom, an isolating and lonely experience. Her parents, the first in their families to complete college, had moved from rural Alabama to pursue careers near Birmingham, where they raised Law and her brother. From the age of 4, Cheryl Law, MD, 41, knew that she wanted to be a doctor.
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