It's only a breast
I would be worrying all the time and I don't want to be living like that.
It's only a breast," says Kelly Bainbridge, talking of the cancer that at 25 has already cost her one breast, and of her decision to lose the other in her bid to save her life.
Kelly is an amazingly positive young woman whose strength of character is such that she has made this massive decision to lose a healthy breast because she knows "there's a massive, massive chance that the cancer would return because the tumour was so big. I don't want to go through it all again."
And when your life is on the line, she is taking the only course she knows to safeguard it by having her right breast removed after four months of chemotherapy. As she told me: "The doctors have been absolutely brilliant. But they told me that it wasn't a case if the cancer will return, it's when."
A chilling thought for any woman. And for Kelly, who is about to start the gruelling chemotherapy she is handling it all so bravely.
Another friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer at 26, three years ago and had a lumpectomy, told me she has nothing but admiration for Kelly and in her position would do the same.
"I am not saying it's an easy thing to think of having but if you are giving me the choice of having my life and no breasts there's no comparison," she said.
Unlike Kelly no-one has told her that it is only a matter of time before the cancer returns. For all that she lives under a shadow.
And she knows if she were in Kelly's position she wouldn't hesitate to have a mastectomy.
It may seem a shocking decision but for those faced with a life choice it is one that Kelly, from Silksworth, has not shrunk from. She felt fine when the news was broken to her last November that she had cancer while working in Portugal.
"I didn't believe them. I thought they had got my results mixed up with someone else. Even though there is a history of it in the family you never think at 25 you would get it."
Now after having her left breast removed on December 29, at Sunderland Royal, she is all too aware that feeling fit and being young is no protector against this disease.
She is acting with a quiet courage that is humbling and inspirational.
After making the decision of her life, Kelly isn't sitting in a corner consumed with self-pity. She's made of sterner stuff and is now reaching out to other young women so that they have someone they can relate to by setting up a Facebook group – hotbaldies.com.
Kelly has a wonderfully supportive family and one aunt, Trudy Johnson, her guardian angel, has had a lumpectomy.
She says: "I was talking to my auntie and close friends and if it was them they would probably do the same thing. I think it's the right decision for me. My mam was a bit shocked she couldn't understand why I would want to do that if there was nothing wrong with it. But I couldn't go through this again. I want to get my life back on track."
What a shining example she is and given her willpower and vision she is protecting what so many of us take for granted – life itself.
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Friday 10 February 2012
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