A Day in the Life – Stage IV
By: Leah Taylor What you are about to read is my experience from September 25, 2018. It could be quite difficult to read for anyone dealing with breast cancer. It is raw and real. 6:15 a.m. I wake up. The bed leaves me stiff but I am grateful for my son and his family and their extra bed. So, I slept reasonably well considering I wasn’t in my own home. I stopped at my son’s after being released from the hospital last night. After a four day stay, it was too late to make it home without it getting dark on the drive home. I can’t drive safely after dark…
A Glitch
By: Beatrice Compagnon On learning to live with a body you didn’t choose. “Don’t worry, it is just a little bit of cancer. We will get you better in no time.” These weren’t the words I expected to hear on my 37th birthday. Ok, it’s not invasive, stage zero — that should be easy to fix, right? No chemo, no radiation – just a lumpectomy. Oh wait, the margins are not clear so a mastectomy it is. Well, Doc, if we do one side, let’s do both; I don’t want to end up with two different breasts. Nor do I want to be screened every three months for the…
The Future Doesn’t Feel That Bright
Meet Emma. A Sheffield based blogger with a penchant for gin and craft beer, travelling, snowboarding, sailing and slowing doing up her house. She’s aggressively dog friendly, and also had a brush with Breast Cancer. My fear about this cancer recurrence sneaks up on me, between my flippant Instagram posts and jokes with Drs about replacing my Sternum with Bluetooth speakers, it’s sitting there with a hefty weight attached to it. It hits me hard at the strangest moments. When I’m making a 6th birthday cake for Flash. Will I see birthdays 7, 8, 9? Or when I get followed around the internet by snowboard boots ad. Will I be…
Ugliness of the Pink Ribbon
By Lora Harvey As all the air left my lungs, time stood still on June 15, 2017. And I seemingly forgot how to breathe. Only when my respiratory system took over again did I inhale.In that split second, my life began dismantling. Microscopic cracks at first, but those compound and quickly become unnegotiable divides. I was never the girl that was gonna get breast cancer. I was already diabetic; another ailment would be a cruel joke. But here I am. According to some test taken at some point along the way, I had an 11% risk of developing breast cancer over the course of my lifetime. LIFETIME. Neither BRCA1 nor…
We Belong To One Another
Mia’s bilateral mastectomy was in 2007, and mine was in 2010. Numerous times since then, we’ve both had people say to us, “Can’t you just get over it?”, and other similar comments. We know there are women both in treatment and post-treatment that hear these same words every single day. And we also know words like that can cause a woman shame due to her wondering why she isn’t ‘over it’ already. It has to stop. Women (and men) who are faced with the reality of a breast cancer diagnosis already have enough worry and fear on their plates, they don’t need anyone – inner circle or acquaintance – adding…
