My mother, Colette, (1939 - 1991)	My dad, Franz, & I aged 1

MY STORY AT A GLANCE

"The best way out is always through."
(Robert Frost)

I was six years old when I had my first experience with breast cancer. One day, I found myself alone at home with my dad, while my mother lay in hospital having her right breast removed. I didn't understand much at that age, but knew that only the year before, my aunt had passed away of breast cancer. She was single, happy and only 40 years old. My mother had a small lump, which in those days was treated by mastectomy, high-dose radiation and little else. I grew up witnessing the damage that extensive and uncosmetic surgery did to her self-esteem and to her body. She developed lymphodema in her arm which remained painful and swollen for the rest of her life. I never met my maternal grand-mother, who also died of the same illness before I was born. My mother feared her yearly check-ups and lived in the belief that she would be prematurely plucked from this world, despite remaining in good health until two years before her death in 1991. The cancer returned in her lungs and after a debilitating and harrowing series of chemotherapy courses, she slipped away in August of 1991, aged 52.

It is hard to explain the void which losing one's mother at the age of 21 leaves behind, but it did teach me to look after myself and to become my own guardian. I expected to develop breast cancer at some point but not as soon as it did. Three years after my mother's death, I found a lump on the side of my right breast while taking a shower, and instinctively knew that something was wrong. I had not been for check-ups before and I did not know how to examine my own breasts. This was a coincidence, the first of many to come.

It was cancer, Grade 3, the most aggressive grading. I was offered a lumpectomy, radiation and a choice between having my ovaries removed or trying what was then a new hormone therapy, Tamoxifen. I went along with all of that, only turning down the preventive chemotherapy treatment which I already knew I would never accept. I had suffered from depression for years at that stage and gone through some traumatic times, and my life was to get much worse before it got any better, so I never gave cancer very much thought after that. I took my Tamoxifen and endured the very confusing experience of being artificially menopaused at the age of 24. I considered myself to have had a lucky escape and didn't expect to have to worry about cancer for a long time. But one night in December 1997, as I lay in my bed, I accidentally brushed against my chest and instantly got that sick feeling in my stomach. When I purposely touched the area beneath my collar bone I just knew what I had just come across: cancer number two, another Grade 3.

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