In honor of all the beautiful women who have survived, are struggling with or who passed on because of Breast Cancer. October, of course, is Breast Cancer Month:
I love Nashville. It is a city with Spirit, Spunk and crammed to overflow with Creativity. In all forms. Take for instance a sparkly redhead named none other than Sunny Becks. She teaches women to hoop at her studio called Hooperama, located in the city's most creatively outrageous region of town–East Nashville. And last year, in our beloved city's annual Country Music Marathon, she led a troop of 70 plucky women–some of them friends of mine–through the route with pink hoops commemorating Breast Cancer Month. Love it. Watch:
On a more serious note, yet still mustering courage, only more so, is the story of Claudia Gilmore, the daughter of my friend novelist Susan Gregg Gilmore–Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove. I've featured this generous, kind and wonderful writer on "The Journey with Grace" several times.
Before I ever met Susan at a fiction writers' conference, where she spoke, I heard her interviewed on NPR about her family's struggle with genetic testing. It is complex and I encourage you to read the story.
One of the results of the family's findings was the choice of Susan's 23-year-old daughter, Claudia, to opt for a preventative double mastectomy with reconstruction because the testing found that she had a BRCA 1 mutation. Once more–their genetic story is complex–layers deep–and I encourage you to read what led up to the family's decisions….
"In other words," as her mother, Susan, writes in her own blog: "[Claudia's] lifetime risk of developing breast cancer is somewhere between 85 and 90 percent. Well, until [the double mastectomy]….[Now] her lifetime risk [is] reduced to less than 5 percent."
Read Claudia Gilmore's blog about her unusual choice. She writes with the clarity and passion passed on from her mother. Her story is bold, brave and beautiful:
Click here– "Previve: don't just survive cancer. previve."
