My Breast Cancer Survivor Story: The Day I Found the Lump at 35

For breast cancer survivors, Breast Cancer Awareness Month is never just October. My breast cancer survivor story began more than 23 years ago, but the awareness has been a part of my every day live ever since. Once you have heard the words you have cancer, awareness becomes part of your everyday life. It is there every day, every month, every year you are blessed to still be here. There are dates you never forget, moments that become permanently etched into your memory because they mark the exact place where life became before and after.

You remember the room, the time, what you were wearing, what you were doing, and sometimes even the smallest details that should have meant nothing at all. Years later, a smell, a hallway, a doctor’s office, a locker room, or even a glance at a clock can take you right back there. You can move forward, heal, rebuild a beautiful life, raise your family, build businesses, celebrate birthdays, and live through seasons you once wondered if you would ever get to see. But there are pieces of that story that never completely leave you.

For me, one of those moments happened on February 8, 2002, at 8:35 in the morning. It was my son’s 13th birthday, and that morning had started like any other busy birthday morning in our house.

I was a 35-year-old wife, mom, businesswoman, fitness instructor, personal trainer, and medical massage therapist. I was healthy, active, raising two kids, and building a life we loved.

I had no idea that before that morning was over, I would be sitting on a locker-room floor with my hand over a lump in my breast, knowing deep inside that my life had just changed. I did not have a diagnosis yet. I had not had a mammogram or biopsy, and no doctor had told me I had cancer. But I knew.

From that moment on, there would always be the woman I was before breast cancer and the woman I would eventually become because of everything that came after. This October, after 23 years of survivorship, I want to tell you that story. Not all at once, because there is far too much between that locker-room floor and the life I live today to fit into one post.

I want to take you through the diagnosis and treatment, what it took to survive, what cancer and treatment left behind, the years when surviving did not feel anything like thriving, the people who loved me through it, the faith that carried me, and eventually the long journey of rebuilding my health and my life. But before I tell you what cancer took from me, I want you to know who I was before it ever arrived.

I thought I was doing everything right

At 35 years old, I was married, raising two active teenagers and running a very full life centered around health and wellness.

I owned a medical massage therapy practice. I taught fitness classes and worked with personal-training clients. I could spend the day working with local doctors, at local PT/OT rehabilitation center, or with my personal massage patients, change clothes, teach a fitness class and still complete a personal training session in between. Health wasn’t something I casually thought about. It was my profession, my lifestyle , my heart and soul, and a major part of how I was raising my family.

I exercised. I stayed fit. I ate what I sincerely believed was an incredibly healthy diet. I was clean and organic before it was the cool thing to do.

I was the mom making fruit smoothies and homemade foods, limiting the junk that came into our house and trying to give my children the healthiest start I possibly could. I believed fruits and vegetables were going to save the world. I even made some of our own household and cleaning products because I was determined to reduce anything I believed might harm my family’s health.

Some of that probably sounds extreme when I tell it now, but there was a reason I cared so much. A reason why I was so passionate about this health journey.

I knew what was behind me. And more importantly, I new what was in the trajectory for my kids and grandkids, if they walked the path behind me.

Cancer was all over my family tree

My family history of cancer was awful. I was NOT handed a genetic lottery, by no means. In fact, I was dealt a pretty rough genetic history.

Generation after generation had been touched by it. Colon cancer, Breast cancer. Throat cancer. Kidney cancer. Lung cancer. Lymphoma. My mother’s side of the family in particular had seen far too much of it. I had grown up watching people I loved get sick, fight, get sicker, fight some more, until they finally died.  From my great grandmother down, every female on my mother’s side of the family, had some form of cancer.  To this day, with my mom being 1 of 8 siblings, I only have one aunt left surviving, and one uncle on hospice as of this writing.

And somewhere along the way I made a decision.

The pattern was going to stop with me.

I couldn’t change the genes I inherited, but I was hell-bent on doing everything I knew how to do differently for my children. I wanted to change the trajectory of our family’s health before those same odds reached my daughter, my son and someday my grandchildren.

That determination shaped the way I raised my family, the businesses we built, the way we celebrated holidays and special occasions. And how we lived our lives.

And I truly thought I was doing it right. I was laying the foundation for a healthy future for me, and my family.

That’s part of what made the next part so difficult to understand.

Life was busy and hectic, but it was also good. I was married. We had two kids. I had a growing business I loved. My daughter was dancing every chance she got on any stage that would have her. My son was busy being a hockey playing ornery boy. We were having fun traveling, working, raising a family and living a very full life. You could say we were having the time of our lives. Blessed beyond measure.

We were healthy.

We were happy.

We were busy.

And then, in one moment, everything changed.

February 8, 2002, 8:35 AM

It was my son’s 13th birthday.

That morning began the way birthdays often did in our house. I made Grandma Judy pancakes and, naturally, a fruit smoothie because I was still determined to get something healthy into him before he started his day.

I watched him eat breakfast, hurried him along, gave my new teenager one of those long awkward mom hugs, dropped him off at school.  Then I headed to work.

I had a fitness class to teach at 9:00 am.

There wasn’t anything dramatic about that morning. It was a beautiful day centered around getting home to make my son’s favorite chicken and noodles for his birthday dinner.  I wasn’t expecting bad news. I was doing what mothers and businesswomen everywhere do every morning: mentally running through the list of everything that needed to happen before returning home to make dinner and celebrate our Adam.

I walked into the locker room and started getting ready for class.

And then I felt it.

8:35 in the morning

I was doing the fun wrestling match we all do while trying to put on a sports bra when I felt it…

There was a lump.

And my world stopped.

I can still remember the physical sensation of that moment more than two decades later. And I still tear up to write this. It felt as though the air left my lungs. My knees went weak, and I slid down the locker-room wall. One of the most vivid memories in this whirl-wind of emotions, was the peace that came over me when a co-worker stopped and prayed with me, for me.  God is so good, and so are they angels he sends us in the form of friends that pray when we can’t even breath.

No mammogram had been done.

There had been no biopsy.

No doctor had spoken the words breast cancer.

But I swear to you, I knew.

I knew something was very wrong.

I remember sitting against that wall and looking up at the clock.

8:35 AM.

I had about ten minutes before I was supposed to walk into another room, smile at a group of people and teach a fitness class to a room full of women that had no idea what just happened.

For a moment I couldn’t reconcile those two realities.

Ten minutes ago I had been the healthy fitness instructor getting ready to teach and motivate some ladies.

Now I was sitting on a locker-room floor with my hand over a lump in my breast thinking:

No. This cannot be happening.

I had done the right things.

At least, I had done everything I knew to do.

I exercised. I stayed fit. I ate clean. I drank the fruit smoothies. I was the health professional. I was teaching other people how to take care of their bodies.

This wasn’t supposed to happen to me.

But cancer doesn’t ask for your résumé first.

It doesn’t care that you teach fitness classes or work as a personal trainer. It doesn’t check the contents of your refrigerator or count how many vegetables you ate that week.

And it certainly doesn’t care that your little boy turned thirteen that morning.

You can’t unring that bell

Once I felt that lump, I couldn’t unknow it.

You can’t unring that bell.

You can’t simply decide you didn’t feel it. You can’t keep moving fast enough to outrun what your body just told you.

And because of my family history, the fear wasn’t just a general health scare. I had already seen what cancer could do to people I loved.

I remember thinking about all those years I had worked so hard to change the trajectory for my children. I had believed that if I exercised enough, fed my family well enough and created a healthy enough home, maybe I could somehow stay one step ahead of what had followed generations before me.

Sitting on that locker-room floor, I suddenly wasn’t sure any of it had been enough.

I didn’t know exactly what came next.

But I knew life had changed.

The following weeks confirmed what I feared

The appointments, testing and biopsies began, and eventually the words I had feared became real.

Triple-negative breast cancer.

Aggressive breast cancer.

I was 35 years old.

The treatment plan that followed would include a partial mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. My oncologist didn’t sugarcoat the seriousness of what we were facing. He was also my moms oncologist, so he knew my family, history. He determined early on, we were going be aggressive, we were going to fight hard, and my strong, fit body was going to need every bit of that strength to withstand what was ahead.  His quote to me was “I a going to get you as close to death as I can get you and bring you back”, in the hopes if I survived, I would never have to go through this again.  Thank you to my doctor and Jesus, 23 years later, I am still here to share my story.

Suddenly all the labels I had used to describe myself, all the titles I have lived, all the hats I have worn, were all over shadowed by one I never dreamed I would ever be saying.

I was a wife.

A mother.

A daughter.

A businesswoman.

A medical massage therapist.

A fitness instructor.

A personal trainer.

And now I was also a woman with breast cancer.

Life as I knew it was over.

At least that version of life was.

What I couldn’t know from that locker-room floor

I didn’t know what my treatments would eventually take from me. You expect to lose your hair, and even your breast, but thank God you really have NO idea what is really coming down the road for you.  I am probably grateful that you only see cancer treatments from the outside looking in as a child or young adult.  Until you have actually walked this path… you have no idea the depth that your life will be affected.

Even after witnessing numerous family members go through this, and also working on other breast cancer survivors in my medical practice (I am also a certified breast cancer reconstruction/rehabilitation specialist, ironic, I know, long before I was diagnosed), I still truly had no idea what I was in store for.  I often thank God for the blinders he gives us, as I am sometimes not sure many of us would put up the fight if we knew the truth and the extent of what was about to happen.

I didn’t know how profoundly chemotherapy would affect my body, my hormones, my organs, my brain, my nervous system… my entire body.

I didn’t know that some of the hardest parts of my cancer story would happen after people began calling me a survivor.

I didn’t know that surviving and healing would turn out to be two very different things.

And I certainly couldn’t have imagined that more than two decades later I would become a certified health coach, stand on stages telling this story and work with other people whose own diagnoses had left them staring into a mirror wondering where the person they used to be had gone.

I only knew what that 35-year-old woman sitting against a locker-room wall knew.

Something had changed.

My family’s cancer story had reached me.

And now I was going to have to fight.

Why I’m sharing this story during Breast Cancer Awareness Month

There will be plenty of pink ribbons this month, and they matter.

But I also want to talk about what happens behind the ribbon and after ringing the bell.

I want to talk about diagnosis and treatment, but also about survivorship, and losing and finding HOPE!

I want to talk about the physical damage nobody warned me would last for years. The fear that doesn’t magically disappear when treatment ends. The struggle to recognize your own body again. The medications. The neuropathy. The rebuilding. The faith. The family and friends who carry you when you don’t have enough strength of your own.

And eventually, I want to tell you about healing.

Because surviving breast cancer was only the beginning of my story.

Learning how to live again became the next chapter.

Over the rest of October, I’m going to share that journey in pieces.

If you are a breast cancer survivor, love someone going through cancer, or have survived something that left you wondering whether you’ll ever feel like yourself again, I hope you’ll come back for the next chapter.

Our stories may be different. Our treatments may vary.

But 23 years later, there is one thing I know with certainty:

A diagnosis can change your life without getting the final word on what your life becomes. I am living proof.

If you have a date that you remember, please share it with me in the comments. I would love to celebrate you and your journey as well.

With love and hope,

Tammie Laubacher, LMT, PHNC | Breast Cancer Survivor