Guest Post: BRCA2+ – My New and Unwanted Status

Today, I am excited to share with you a guest post by Nancy Stordahl author of the blog www.nancyspoint.com. She shares her experience of being BRCA2+, something that was not part of my diagnosis. I’m so grateful to her for this contribution and her insight.

Some words hold the power to change lives forever. Cancer is one of those words.

On a quiet Thursday afternoon in April 2010, I heard the words, you have cancer.

When you first hear those words, it can be difficult to take ownership of them. You wonder how they can possibly pertain to you.

Even though my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer six years earlier, I never expected to have those words attached to me. Perhaps I should have been more prepared to hear them, but I was not.

On a different afternoon a couple of weeks after my diagnosis, I was forced to take ownership of a few other words I wanted no part of.

That was the day when my oncologist walked through the door with the purple folder in hand and I saw the words positive for deleterious mutation in dark bold type ominously staring up at me from the page.

About two years earlier my family had learned that my mother was BRCA2+. My family history is complicated, so I won’t go into the details, but this information came too late to alter her treatment course.

At the time of my diagnosis, I was still in the thinking about getting tested phase, assuming I had some time to mull things over. I was wrong about that.

After discussing my newly discovered BRCA2+ status, my oncologist recommended a bilateral mastectomy. No other course of action was seriously entertained after learning about my new status and things got rolling quickly after that. A hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo oophorectomy were also advised since a BRCA2+ status elevates a woman’s chance of developing ovarian and possibly uterine cancers as well.

Knowledge is power; I’ve repeated those words to myself more than a few times since that day in May.

Today I sometimes wonder how things might have worked out differently had my family known earlier about this piece to our genetic puzzle. But of course we had no crystal ball to gaze into. I also wonder and yes, worry about my three children who face some unknowns themselves. Each one of them, as does every child with a BRCA+ parent, has a 50/50 chance of carrying the gene mutation as well.

My children will need to continue to arm themselves with knowledge and make decisions based upon that, because again, knowledge is power.

Knowledge is power; I will stick with the power of those words.

Wouldn’t you?

Here is some more information about Nancy:

In 2008 Nancy’s mother died of breast cancer and less than two years later was diagnosed herself. Shortly after her own cancer diagnosis, she started a blog at nancyspoint.com where she writes candidly about her own breast cancer experience, reconstruction, BRCA2 + status, grief/loss, pets and other topics. She’s the author of Getting Past the Fear:  A guide to help you mentally prepare for chemotherapy.