Vanessa Chapoy had just turned 24 when she felt the lump in her breast. It was “huge,” she remembers, “like the size of a walnut, or a big marble.” She went to the first in a series of doctors that night to have it checked out. Two-and-a-half weeks later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Stage two, she would learn.
“And my whole world flipped upside down,” Chapoy says.
She entered a gauntlet of treatments: a lumpectomy to cut out the tumor and a portion of surrounding breast tissue, fertility treatments so she could freeze her eggs, five months of chemotherapy and then a double mastectomy to remove both of her breasts.
Three years on, she’s still undergoing hormone therapy — an experience she likens to “early menopause” — and occasionally suffering from “chemo brain,” a form of brain fog resulting from chemotherapy that she says makes it more difficult for her to complete tasks or remember certain things.
“I don’t understand how this could happen,” she recalls telling a nurse at the beginning of it all. “I’m so young.”