Meet Shannon
“I want to be someone who had breast cancer. I just don't want that to be my whole story.”
Shannon thought, 'This couldn't happen to me,' but was diagnosed in July 2022, at 28
When Shannon felt a large lump in her breast, she assumed it was nothing serious. “I thought it was a cyst. There was no way it could happen to me,” Shannon said. She was 28 and had no family history. Given the size of the lump, however, Shannon did have it checked out, which led to a diagnosis of ER+/HER2- breast cancer.
The hardest part of treatment for Shannon was processing that she had breast cancer. “I only told a small group of people because I didn’t want anyone looking at me differently or treatment me differently,” she said. Shannon’s treatment included a lumpectomy and radiation therapy, which left her exhausted. “At times it was hard to tell where the fatigue was coming from – was I actually tired, was it the cancer, was it because I was depressed or was it all three?”
Next July, Shannon will reach the five-year mark of no evidence of disease. “My diagnosis was a doozy, because we’re not supposed to start mammograms until we’re 40,” said Shannon. “But breast cancer is becoming more common in younger women. I want people to be aware of it and get checked when they can.”
You feel like cancer is never going to happen to you, and then it does. I’m so lucky I’m okay, but it’s still hard to fathom and process because it’s such a scary thing.
