My mum is a nurse and I’m one of three girls, so checking our breasts was something we always talked about.
When I was 23, I found a lump in my breast and went to a GP straight away to get it checked. That time it came back as a fibroadenoma (a common benign lump that can occur in younger women). But because of this I added self-checking into my “everything shower” – you know, the long shower where you shave your legs, exfoliate and do all your maintenance stuff – I now made sure I included a self-check of my breasts.
In late 2024 I was waking up randomly with stabbing pain in my left breast but had just gone back to sleep and not thought much of it. Now that I look back, my body seemed to be giving me warning signs.
Then in November, I noticed that my hair felt different – almost straw-like and I felt really tired in the afternoons. I went to see a GP and they told me it might be to do with my endometriosis, so no tests or follow ups were done.
I knew something wasn’t right, so I went back to a GP in December, and they did some blood work and a colonoscopy. I was told I didn’t have bowel cancer, so that ruled that out and that was that.
I had a busy summer as I’d just started my PhD, and in February 2025, I was reading a book and felt my breast was a bit itchy. Realising I hadn’t done a self-check in a while I lifted my arm and my hand went straight onto a lump - “oh no” - I knew from all my other self-checks this was NOT normal. Imagine if I was someone who didn’t regularly self-check and didn’t know what felt normal! It blows my mind – it really scares me to think if I’d not stopped to check that day - how long it would have taken to find it.
I went to the GP who sent me onto breast care straight away. Within a fortnight I was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer – a week before my 35th birthday. The lump was two centimetres long.
I was told that because I had managed to catch it early, it probably saved my life.
I had to decide whether I wanted to freeze my eggs before starting treatment – it wasn’t an option not to. I told myself that the reason that it was these eggs I was freezing, was because they would be the ones that were meant to be my future children and family one day – and reframing the process in this way helped me a lot.
I had to stop work. I had six rounds of chemotherapy and in August had a bilateral mastectomy and breast reconstruction. This was hard as my breasts were a feature of my body I had really liked, and now they were being taken away.
After having the mastectomy, they did a biopsy and my nodes came back clear – I was reassured everything was now fine.
But then in April 2026, something didn’t feel right where my scar from my biopsy was. During my “everything shower” I had a dig around and I found a lump. If I hadn’t checked, I would not have found it.
The cancer had spread to my lymph nodes. I had to have my lymph nodes removed and have radiation therapy.
Two days after my radiation therapy finished, my best friend and I took a trip to Bali, because what I’ve learnt from all this is that I can and should give myself permission to do things and not put them off.
What have I taken away from all this? Rely on your friends and family and let them support you. But also, it’s ok to take yourself away from the noise to figure out what you want. I haven’t let it change my life – it’ a chapter of my life. But it’s certainly changed how I show up in life – I now am more proactive about doing things – because I’m here to be able to do them.
“Just keep checking” that’s the message I want to get across to people like me. Early detection matters – the earlier you catch it the more choices you’ll have, and you can catch it before it spreads. The younger you are when you start checking, the more normal it is and you’ll know your normal.
Now that I’ve had breast cancer, my friends have started to do regular self-checks too. I didn’t realise that one drop in the ocean would have that ripple effect. Even my guy-friends have started to check their prostate once a week now! Before, no one else in my age group was checking, partly because you think you only need to check after you’re 45 which is when the mammograms start.
I was lucky because I knew my normal.
To other young women out there I want to say - Check. Not to find something, check to know your normal. Have that habit built in so that if there is something, you’ll know straight away if its abnormal because you’ve done it so many times.
The fact that self-checking was part of my “everything shower” routine saved my life.
