In 2013, Angelina Jolie made headlines when she revealed that she had a double mastectomy as a preventative measure against breast cancer. While some people felt that this was an drastic way of responding to a disease that she didn’t even have, Jolie’s decision to remove both of her breasts began to seem extremely logical when the public learned that she had a mutation on her BRCA1 gene. Among other things, this mutation increased her risk of getting breast cancer by more than sevenfold, making it less likely for her not to ever get breast cancer than it would be for her to get it.
As humans, when the media chatters about these bizarre, scary health problems, we often like to dismiss them as being “extremely rare,” because it’s much easier to convince ourselves that we’ll never have to encounter them than to actually worry about what they could mean for our lives. For my family, however, this blissful ignorance was simply not an option.
Nearly a century ago, when my great-grandmother was an infant, her mother discovered a mass on her breast while nursing. Soon following, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died four years later at the early age of 33. Later, throughout my great-grandmother’s life, she had two different forms of breast cancer, and although neither bout of cancer killed her, she was forced to have each of her breasts removed.
My mother’s aunt, Adele, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 57, and finally, women in the family were becoming suspicious of the cancer that seemed to plague our family. Adele’s sister, Isabelle, got tested for a genetic mutation upon learning of her sister’s sickness, and for the first time, our family had answers as to the mysterious reoccurrence of female reproductive cancers throughout the generations. Aunt Isabelle was diagnosed with a mutation on her BRCA2 gene, meaning that her risk for contracting breast and ovarian cancer was strikingly higher than that of the normal female population. Isabelle previously had a hysterectomy earlier in her life, but still had her ovaries; as a result, she planned to remove her ovaries the following summer. However, before she ever had the chance to have the surgery, she too was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at age 60.
With the gravity of BRCA2 becoming even more daunting as the days pressed on, Isabelle urged her nieces – my mother and her sister – to get tested for the mutation. They both got tested, and unsurprisingly, both came back positive for the exact same mutation that had been wreaking havoc on our family for generations. It was too late for Aunt Adele, who had recently passed away, and for Aunt Isabelle, who was slowly succumbing to the disease, but my mother was faced with a myriad of options. Although there were endless combinations of treatments and surgeries and surveillances that my mother could do in order to avoid falling victim to the disease that had already claimed so many, she saw only one possibility: she would undergo a full hysterectomy and a double mastectomy, ridding her of essentially every organ in which these wretched diseases would potentially flourish.
Upon learning that she was positive for the BRCA2 mutation, my mother was presented with some horrifying numbers. First, she had an 84% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer – meaning that, more than likely, it was less of a question of if she would develop cancer, and more of a question of when. Second, she had a 27% lifetime risk of developing ovarian cancer – and because ovarian cancer is often not detected until after it has already metastasized, it is typically fatal. Finally, she had a 50% chance of passing her mutation on to each of her daughters – meaning that the likelihood of my sister and I sharing these odds with my mother is the exact same as correctly guessing the flip of a coin or the answer to a true/false question on a test. And as someone who has both correctly guessed the flip of a coin and the answer to a true/false question in my life, this thought can be absolutely sickening.
A few months after my mother finished the last of her surgeries, Aunt Isabelle passed away – but she lived long enough to know that she had saved my mother, my aunt, and the future generations of women in our family, from a similar fate. Aunt Isabelle passed on the invaluable gift of knowledge – as a result of her suffering and her curiosity to discover a genetic link, I am now equipped with the information that I need in order to preserve my health for as long as possible. My mother has provided me with a model of fearlessness that will surely come in handy whenever I begin to investigate my own risks and, for that, I will be eternally thankful. It isn’t fair that it took generations of suffering in order for me to gain this small amount of knowledge, but just as there is a 50% chance of guessing that a coin will be “heads” when flipped, there is a 50% chance that their suffering will one day save my life.
There is an abundance of sickness and anguish in the world, but right now, I am young, I am healthy, and I am alive. And for that, I am thankful.