Why Fear Is Keeping the Breast Cancer Community From Coming Together

“You’re lucky you caught it early,” said just about everyone I encountered after I was diagnosed with breast cancer a day before my 28th birthday.

I believed them. I thought they must know something I didn’t know. It was early —stage 1, to be exact — a small tumor, no lymph node involvement, HER2+, ER+.

I was “lucky” I caught my cancer before it “spread,” said other people (they were closer, but still very far away).

我不知道10年前。我不知道。在27岁时，我所知道的只是我在我领先的一切：我的婚礼，我想开始的家人，我成功的职业生涯。我的计划中没有癌症。我们都没有。

My treatment was aggressive, just like my cancer. I had a doublemastectomy;六轮chemotherapy;a year of赫赛汀，针对HER2阳性癌症的靶向治疗;其次是七年半的荷尔蒙抑制剂。虽然我被诊断为“早期”，但我的医疗团队建议我留下互联网，因为我会发现关于HER2阳性癌症的东西会过时。它不会反映对我提供的治疗，但患者早些时候没有患者。那些患者，大多数人都死了。

但是......“我早点抓了。”

What early meant was that I actually做过幸运。我很幸运，我的手腕在我的淋浴间吃草了我的腋下。我很幸运，我最好的朋友，我的小妹妹最近告诉我他们乳房肿块，去看了医生让他们检查。我很幸运，我很快就会退休gynecologistcouldn’t see me when I rescheduled my appointment, which brought me to the new, young, smart nurse practitioner. Iwaslucky.

我现在知道,我当时不知道是,early doesn’t always matter. Actually, much of what we think we know about cancer doesn’t matter. We have cancer, and cancer has a mind of its own. We do our best, but we don’t always win.

每个人都需要知道4阶段的乳腺癌

I am lucky as a 10-year “survivor.” I am now one of the elders in the breast cancer community, which is like a secret society, even though I have not even lived 40 years of life. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to launchAnaOnoand创建包容性内衣after my own cancer experience showed me a world that needed improving.

你知道吗30 percent of early-stage breast cancer "spreads"还这意味着我们三个在我们诊断出患有早期乳腺癌的美国近似metastasizeat some point in our lifetime, and our diagnosis will be terminal. As of today, that diagnosis means 18 to 36 months to live, on average. I didn’t know that until 2017 — seven years after my diagnosis.

Why don’t we know this? Why don’t we talk about it? I think it has a lot to do with fear.

从那以后，我所拥有的是，在早期诊断和阶段诊断的人之间存在乳腺癌群落中存在显着差距。刚刚发生的，我没有寻找有4阶段的乳腺癌的朋友。我们很年轻，我们的癌症更具侵略性，它成为支持群体对话的一部分。

I am lucky to have had the opportunity to meetChampagne Joy, the late founder of#Cancerland，一个阶段4倡导的媒体平台。当香槟喜悦第一次分享那些令人惊叹的4阶段的统计数据时，我害怕和困惑，但我问了很多问题，我做了自己的研究。

在我失去了两个亲爱的朋友之后，我想从屋顶喊我所学到的东西。我失去的两个朋友都是年轻，惊人，聪明，才华横溢和美丽的女人。他们从来没有曾经对我说过，“我的癌症转移了。”他们说它“蔓延”到他们的骨骼或肝脏或肺部。

My dearest and closest friend, Jill Conley, was my muse. After the AnaOno launch party, I posted her bio on my brand-new website and wrote, “diagnosed stage 3 breast cancer and bone cancer.” A woman emailed me: “You have to update what you wrote about Jill. She does not have bone cancer; she has breast cancer in her bones.”What?I literally had no idea what this meant. I knew my best friend had stage 4 breast cancer, and I knew she would be on medication forever, but I didn’t know her breast cancer was in her bones. In less than two years, my muse, Jill, was gone.

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