After announcing the birth of their baby boy Noah Rev last June,  Josh Lucas and his wife Jessica Henriquez dropped another bombshell: Jessica has been suffering from cervical cancer.

The couple met randomly at a dog park in January 2011. At that point, Henriquez just returned home to New York after receiving a grim diagnosis that she had Stage 1 cervical cancer.

“It was one of those weird, chance, classic New York meetings,” Henriquez recalled. “I don’t believe in love at first sight at all, but lightening definitely struck. There was something there between both of us and we were both kind of blown away.”

With mixed emotions from the meeting, as well as her bleak doctor’s visit, Henriquez surprised herself by telling Josh about her cancer. “We were at his apartment and I remember thinking, ‘I have to tell him or I have to walk away, because this is something big and this could be a relationship’,” she said. “I just blurted out. ‘I’m sick,’ and he was the first person I told. It was terrifying to say it out loud because it gave it power and made it real, and it meant that I had cancer.”

“Well that’s going to be a problem for me,” Lucas responded. “Because I’m already in this.”

At that point, the couple went through the ordeal together. “I remember being so sick, and trying to hide how exhausted and terrible I felt all the time,” Henriquez said. “But I felt like there was a 100 percent commitment and support during the whole thing. I was falling in love with him while I was starting treatment, which is not romantic or sexy.”

Within a few months, Lucas proposed to Henriquez. At the same time, she also found out that her cancer treatments were unsuccessful, prompting doctors to suggest a hysterectomy. The problem? Henriquez found out she was pregnant.

Without hesitation, she decided to halt any treatments and surgeries to save her pregnancy.

“I hadn’t thought about children. It wasn’t my dream since I was a little girl to have a family. But when a doctor looks you in the eyes and takes that option off the table, it immediately sets something off in you — this motherhood gene,” she said. “I think almost every oncologist would disagree with my decision or parts of my decisions, but I think that things happen in life that you have to pay attention to.”

After giving birth last June to a healthy baby boy, Henriquez also learned that her cancer did not spread, but has unfortunately progressed to a Stage 1B.

“If the cancer has progressed because I did nothing for a year to contain it or treat it,” she said. “I don’t feel any guilt, and I don’t feel like it was a bad decision. I mean every morning that I wake up with Josh and Noah I’m even more assured that it was the right decision for me.”