My mom said no to a mastectomy. A Breast Cancer Awareness Month story and what it taught me about navigating a diagnosis.
The call came in 2018. Eight years ago now. I don't remember the specific words, just a feeling that settled in immediately: here we go again. Our family had already been through cancer more than once. I remember thinking, plainly, that I might lose my mom.
What I remember most from those first weeks isn't fear, though. It's logistics, and how we split them. We took turns driving her to appointments as a family. And some days, she just drove herself. My mom is a badass like that.
When it came time to choose, she said no to a mastectomy. She wanted a lumpectomy, hers to decide, and she made it clear. Her surgeon, Dr. Reschke, was outstanding. We still talk about her. And her oncologist, Dr. Nagpal, gave us the same thing: someone we trusted completely, at a time we needed exactly that. The kind of doctors who make an impossible season feel a little less impossible.
Here's the thing I didn't expect going in: this time, there wasn't really a moment when we didn't know what to do. No scrambling, no dead-end insurance calls. We'd been through cancer enough as a family that we already knew how to move. That's not luck. That's a playbook, built the hard way, over years we didn't ask for.
The one thing I'd do differently, knowing what I know now? I'd have pushed for proactive skin care for her before her radiation began, not after. It's a small detail. It's also exactly the kind of thing nobody tells you until you're already living it.
Not everyone has the playbook yet
That's the part that stays with me. My family had already done this enough times to know how to navigate it. Most families haven't. Most people get the call and have nothing- no sense of what to ask, who to call, what a lumpectomy versus a mastectomy actually means for their life in the next six months.
That gap is exactly what CKC closes. You don't have to have been through it before to walk in prepared. Insurance mapped out before you need it. Appointments coordinated so you're not the one on hold. The right questions, written down, before you walk into that surgeon's office. A binder at the end that holds everything, so if it happens again, to you or someone else in your family, you're not starting from zero.
One bound engagement, three to four weeks, a clear finish line.
Every story is unique. But if you're facing this for the first time, or the third, you don't have to figure yours out alone.