There is no way to prepare for the moment you hear the words you have breast cancer.
Life keeps spinning around you — lawns are mowed, groceries are bought, people rush through checkout lines — but suddenly your world slams into a wall. Time slows down to a crawl, and yet everything feels too fast, too loud.
I remember thinking, how do you not know? How do people not see that I’ve just been marked by words that will never leave me?
The truth is, most of us don’t talk about that part. We talk about fighting, surviving, healing — but not about the moment when the ground cracks open beneath your feet. That moment when the future you thought you had is ripped out of your hands, and you don’t yet know if there will be a tomorrow.
It’s been 32 years since that day. Thirty-two years of scares, scars, biopsies, and yes — survival. Thirty-two years of finding strength in places I didn’t know existed.
Pink was never my color. But survival? Survival became my only color, my only choice. And that is what I carry into October.
💗 Get your mammogram. Don’t wait.
With fire and grace,
Carole
