After months and months of preparation, I can hardly believe the surgery is done and I’m recovering!   I could never conceive of anything after January 11th.  That Tuesday stood out to me as the biggest, most insurmountable day of all time.  Even though the New Year just began, my calendar abruptly ended on January 11th.  It was going to be a very short year. Read more …

I can’t believe it’s here. It’s hard to believe I’ve been planning this day for nearly 10 months. I remember meeting with my friend Ali Weinberg for lunch on March 20th. I remember this day because it was one day before my 23rd birthday, the same Sunday when the Early Act passed.  Ali was my age and had a prophylactic mastectomy done a year before.  She regretted absolutely nothing and loved her new breasts.  After hearing her story and seeing her beautiful new breasts, I was brought to tears at the relief of knowing that a mastectomy was a viable option for a 23-year-old woman with a BRCA-1 mutation, that I didn’t have to wait until 35 to do away with the anxiety and cancer risk associated with this defective gene, and that other 23-year-olds had already paved the way for me.  If Ali could do it then so could I. Read more …