Susan Beausang

By Previve on October 7, 2010 | Category: Previvor Stories | No Comments

I am really excited to have found your website/blog. I too am a previvor. I come from three generations of breast cancer survivors, but I was determined to be my own advocate and create a separate survival story for myself. I would love to share my story with Previvors and those facing the same decision we have faced. Here’s a short version of my story:and join the Previvor Movement.

In 1952, my 54 year old Grandmother woke up from a biopsy of a suspicious breast lump with a super radical mastectomy!  While it wasn’t until I was a woman that I finally understood the source of my grandmother’s altered and concave body shape, I was later to share her experience in a much more personal way, both with my mother’s diagnosis and mastectomies, and upon having my own double mastectomy.

I come from three generations of breast cancer survivors.  That legacy has impacted me in contradicting ways.  For years I could not shake the paranoia, the oppressive and terrifying feeling that my day of diagnosis was coming.  I felt marked and powerless.  After two of my sisters were also diagnosed with breast cancer, I felt surrounded and more powerless than ever. They say knowledge is power, and I wanted some of that power.  I convinced all six of my siblings (3 brothers and 4 sisters) to get the BRCA2 gene test.  Ironically perhaps, it was the knowledge that I had the BRCA2 gene and faced an 85 percent lifetime chance of developing breast cancer that empowered me, empowered me to make a choice that did not exist when my grandmother was diagnosed.