10/01/2026
First Picture: ATL Airport, headed to Vegas, April 2019. Left to right:
Looking at this picture now, I see so much more than five women standing together at an airport. I see cancer woven through generations of one family. I see strength, fear, treatments, scars, difficult decisions, precious time, and women who kept going even when life asked far too much of them.
Diane, Mama and Aunt Janice’s first cousin. At the time, she was two years post-lumpectomy and radiation and taking Tamoxifen.
Mama, on the walker. She was living with stage 4 colon cancer that had spread throughout her body. She had received a positive breast cancer biopsy about five years earlier but chose not to return for further testing or treatment. By 2019, the cancer was in her colon, liver, kidneys, and bones. Treatment had been stopped, so I took her on her dream trip to Las Vegas. I knew our time was precious, and I wanted her to have that trip. Mama’s war with cancer ended on April 21, 2020, which was also my twins’ birthday.
Jan, my first cousin and Aunt Janice’s daughter. She was cancer-free in this picture. Today, she is six weeks post-unilateral mastectomy and will soon begin Tamoxifen.
Me. I had completed my breast cancer surgeries, including a double mastectomy, and was in year four of Tamoxifen.
Aunt Janice had undergone a lumpectomy, had just finished the grueling treatments of chemotherapy and radiation, and had recently started Tamoxifen. In 2024, she faced cancer again when a rare cancerous lung tumor required the removal of the lower lobe of her lung.
Five women. One family. So many different chapters of cancer, with several more family members not pictured.
Looking back, there is so much more in this photograph than I understood in that moment. Some of us were surviving. Some were still fighting. Some were living with the aftermath of treatment. Mama was taking one last dream trip while we still had the chance.
Cancer has touched this family in ways a photograph could never fully show. The surgeries, medications, fear, scars, grief, and uncertainty become part of the story, but so do the memories we made in spite of it all.
Second picture: We arrived in Vegas
This is part of my why during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Behind every pink ribbon is a real woman, a real family, and a story that often began long before anyone else knew. 🎀
BRCA GENE NEGATIVE!
