A breast is just a breast, Karriann Forde says candidly.
It is an unexpected remark coming from the attractive 29-year-old woman who used to enjoy showing off her 34D cleavage and even wore tattoos highlighting her mammarian assets.
Nowadays, when she receives a compliment about her bustline, Karriann simply smiles. She is aware she owes the look to the prosthetic help she has had in making her bustline continue to appear attractive.
“When I get dressed up, nobody can tell the difference.”
She has already lost one breast to cancer and will soon not have any breasts at all.
She was 26, a party girl, liked getting dressed up in low-cut styles, and never gave a thought to the idea of breast cancer, until the day while feeling her breast “just out of curiosity” she discovered a small lump.
At the clinic where she went for investigation, Karriann remembers being told by a doctor: “Young girls get lumps sometimes, it is most likely just fibroadenoma [a benign tumour] which young girls get sometimes. It is nothing to worry about.”
Those last six words continue to reverberate in Karriann’s mind and she cautions other young women to get second opinions when they hear them from doctors. She was forced to do just that three weeks after discovering the first lump, when a second lump developed, followed by a persistent sharp pain in her breast.
This time, on learning a follow-up had not been done on her case by the doctor at the polyclinic, Karriann went to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital one day, found a doctor and “told her the situation”.
This doctor arranged for her to see a surgeon who did a biopsy. The lump in her armpit was growing rapidly. The news changed her life forever.
“I will never forget, it was the first of April. The doctor told me come to the hospital because he wanted to see how the scars were healing from the biopsy . . . . After he examined the scars, he told me have a seat, he wanted to talk to me.
“My mind was far from breast cancer, after everybody had told me young people get lumps.
“I felt I was young; it could not happen to me. He told me they sent the biopsy to the pathologist and unfortunately it came back that it was cancer.
“I just went blank. All I heard was cancer and all going through my mind was that I am going to die . . . my first words were, ‘I want my mum’, and then the tears started to flow.”
Somehow, Karriann took comfort in the doctor’s words “there is still life after breast cancer”.
Presented with the options of lumpectomy or mastectomy, she chose the latter, spending two days in hospital with the surgery, just one month after her 26th birthday.
“The hardest time I took my diagnosis was the day I was diagnosed. After I realized that I could still go on living with breast cancer, I went on the Internet and did research to find things that I could continue to do to improve my quality of life.”
She endured chemotherapy, at first spending nine months at home from her job as a G4S security associate at Grantley Adams International Airport. Bravely, she was back to work by the time the second round of chemo was being administered. But she would have to undergo another two sessions of chemotherapy.
Karriann is an inspiration to her many colleagues who, like her mother and other relatives, rallied around her throughout her ordeal.
It is support she admits she really needed especially when a year following the mastectomy, after an estrogen receptor test, she was advised by doctors to have both ovaries removed since her body was producing too much estrogen.
“That was a really tough decision to make. At 27 years, you don’t have any kids, you have your whole life ahead of you.”
She underwent that surgery exactly one year after the mastectomy.
Karriann was in a relationship when she was first diagnosed and says she ended it because “we had a lot of issues before that . . . . It got complicated and I had to make a hard choice. I could not deal with the issues and deal with my health at the same time, so we decided to make a break”.
She, however, remains grateful for the support which her former boyfriend continues to give, and thanks him for “always being there for me all the time”. In fact, he has promised to accompany her if her mother is unable to, when she enters hospital on November 26 to have the other breast removed.
Karriann has no qualms about the decisions she has made along the way.
“There is always this fear that the cancer will come back in this breast and the quality of life means a lot to me.”
No wonder she is already giving thought to reconstructive surgery next year.
Her steely faith is anchored in her belief in God’s healing power, and is shored up by her worship at the Ellerton Gospel Hall, St?George, a stone’s throw across from her home.
For this brave young woman, life is to be lived and though Karriann has made adjustments to the way she lives it, she is determined not to devoured by a monster called cancer.
“There is a reason why I am still here.”