HEATHER

"I’m Heather, a family girl, a nurse, and due to breast cancer, a lingerie model and co-founder of a lingerie brand!

My life is busy and full and I’m grateful for that. I became an ambassador for Prevent Breast Cancer and do all I can to support the charity, and having been a BooBee in the previous two campaigns, this time I’m a Queen Bee, with a hive of women busily and creatively raising money and awareness of breast cancer (whilst having fun and being a great support to each other).

We all understand that there are no guarantees as to how our life will pan out, but we often don’t acknowledge this as it makes us feel vulnerable and uncertain. At 46 I was diagnosed with Triple Negative Breast Cancer (no family history so I thought), no red flags (so I thought), no increased risk (so I thought). I’ll come back to this later.

The summer of 2017, a few weeks after my diagnosis, my oncologist was happy for me to continue with our family holiday to Greece (with 3 other families – a lot of people to let down, and it was only a week), thank goodness! I returned to my chemo which took me to Christmas, a lumpectomy then radiotherapy. Coincidentally, my sister had been through the same 6 months ahead of me – same age.

I was so glad to get back to my role as a proper mum, wife, friend, daughter and nurse; I regained my purpose and it felt so good. It was short lived, 8 months to be exact.

It was like history repeating itself, New Year’s Eve, in the shower, a lump in my scar line. I nearly collapsed. I couldn’t believe it. January 2019 was THE most awful month of my life with all the investigations and worry. Triple negative breast cancer had returned. It seems to be a difficult beast to deal with. It was twice as big as the original lump. It was very painful and behaved completely differently despite being a recurrence of the same TNBC.

I had a mastectomy and more chemo and thankfully, this summer, it will be 5 whole years of none of those C words in my body! And so much has changed…

As I have made my way through; reading, learning, experiencing, talking with others dancing down this same path, I believe there is so much more to preventing and  healing cancer than current screening and treatment. I’m learning more about nutrition, metabolism, meditation and exercise and it’s important to me that I share what I learn to try and help others. 

Remember I said I had no family history or red flags? Well it was discovered my father’s prostate cancer, and his sister’s ovarian cancer ARE linked to my breast cancer. I’d experienced many “benign” breast lumps since my teenage years – well that can increase the risk of developing breast cancer. I’d been found to have dense breast tissue – well that can increase the risk of breast cancer by about 6 times. I was actually a sitting duck. I want different for my daughters and everyone else.

I was below screening age, I’d love that to change. Prevent Breast Cancer have done and continue to do so much work into more intelligent and timely screening, this is why I support them. Boobee is helping to “pollinate” our communities with awareness and education and raising money to help PBC achieve their aims - that’s why I’m proud to be a Boobee.

The BooBee campaign is a fantastic opportunity for me to learn more, meet more incredible people, share what we know and help raise awareness amongst women, whilst having fun along the way.

There are a lot of positive and precious friendships and experiences to have come from this disease I didn’t want, but one thing I didn’t anticipate from breast cancer, was my own lingerie brand! Having had a second “preventative and symmetrizing” mastectomy – I took control, I stayed flat and was so disappointed with the lack of lingerie to adorn a flat chest, that I designed my own with a friend – Skarlette – the bralette for scars.

A very proud moment? When Skarlette was part of the BooBee fashion show in the last campaign – big lump in the throat moment and still makes me tear up now. We will, and we are, making a difference together, and that knowledge will always be my biggest motivator.